Alasdair Watson

Well, it wasn’t a wake, or even a real party, but I’m listening to The Dropkick Murphys version of that song right now. And I used to like drinking in that pub from time to time in Edinburgh. I’ve got a weakness for Oirish music, you see..

So, I saw Top Of The Pops the other night. Not Friday, you understand. Thursday. In the studio. It was a lot of fun, and an interesting insight into how one of Britain great musical institutions is put together. Apparently, I turned up on the show a disturbing number of times last night. It’s a weird experience, being enthusiatisic on cue, as is required of the audience. (Yes, that wild screaming before and after every song is faked I’m afraid…) Still, taking the term ecstatic experience a bit literally, and tying the whole thing into the secret word “totep” in Invisibles style, I took the opportunity afforded me, and expect weirdness in the next few weeks.

And I’m going back again at the beginning of October, thanks to Ryan, so if it works, I’ve got an opening for a repeat performance. Just got to work out what to do with it…

I’ve been feeling increasingly trapped by the English language lately, on several levels. It’s becoming clear just how inefficient a means of communicating it is. Sure, I can provoke a reaction with words, I can even occaisionally manage to communicate what’s in my head, without it becoming lost in ten thousand other things. My Ninth Art columns are a particular victim of this – most of the most interesting ideas in them (which is to say, the ones that kepe me thinking about them and unable to make up my mind if the notion is clever or bullshit) I lay out there are one sentence as an aside to a larger column. They’re mentioned in passing, and no more, because I can’t actually formulate a coherent opinion on them.

But what I have real trouble doing is conveying a precise feeling, without lapsing into purple prose. I can’t get the precision I want out of my mother tounge. There aren’t words for the concepts I really want to convey, because they’re your/my own experiences, hugely, intensely personal things, and still, they’re the only things that are worth talking about. So I perpetrate god-awful prose, most of it in private, trying to arrive at some kind of technique through which to filter my experience, without sounding like some overblown eejit. Well, no more than I do normally.

Grant Morrison’s Invisibles series had the notion that high-dimensional/more enlightened beings would not talk in words, but instead in “emotional aggregates”, which is exactly what I find myself reaching towards these days. Trying to refine communication down to the point where there’s no barrier between the words and the experiences and emotions they’re conveying.

But in this eternal quest to write something I’m happy with, I think I’ve just hit a stumbling block that I can’t get past. It doesn’t matter if I can conquer my weak prose fiction skills and write a novel, or master the five act drama form, or even set aside my loathing and write poetry, the one form I will never master is songwriting. I just don’t speak music. I can’t sing, I can’t play an instrument, I just don’t understand music on any level beyond enjoying the experience of listening to it. Every single time I’ve tried to do anything musical, I have failed laughably. It’s simply not within the range of my gifts.

This is starting to fuck me off slightly, because I don’t know anything closer to “talking in emotional aggregates” than music. Music has a much more direct key to the emotions than any set of words – why d’you think that there’s no film or TV shown that doesn’t have a sountrack playing near-contastanly, even if it’s almost conpletely concealed in the background? It’s providing subliminal emotional cues. It’s no accident that Joss Whedon just the soundtrack out of that episode of Buffy – it produced a weird numb shock effect, that made the show draining and hard to watch, the perfect effect. The absence of the soundtrack was much more noticeable than any soundtrack ever is.

But try how I might, and despite what the horrorscope I read for laughs on the train yesterday might say, I don’t think I’ll ever manage songwriting.

So it’s back to beating around with a completely different toolset for me.

Well, after I’ve finished tidying up, that is.

Addendum: not five minutes after writing this, I found myself reading Keiron Gillen and Natalie Sandells rather excellent Hit which is in a similar sort of vein to my thoughts, only funny.

In the enternal quest to get people to pay attenion to their shite, spammers resort to ever more devious subject lines. I have just recieved one that reads “Wow, you’re cute.”

I deleted it unread, then collapsed laughing. I really don’t quite get why…

Haven’t listened to this in ages. Got the music on random shuffle, the laundry done, time to relax. I should be working, but I’m shattered after the weekend, and all I want to do is crash out, especailly since tonight and tomorrow are the only quiet nights in I’ve got this week – I’m seeing Fin again on Wednesday, and going to a gig at Gossips, then I’m out for Thursday night with the comics mob, Friday in Carshalton, probably, and then Antony and Marcia’s drinks on Saturday. I kinda feel like I haven’t seen enough of the WEF crowd lately anyway, and I haven’t seen some of the folk that’ll be attending this in ages, so I’m really looking forward to it.

But I kinda feel like lately I’m lurching from one weekend to the next, with scarely enough time to gather my thoughts in between. Not the weekends are bad, far from it. They’re the bit that I endure the rest of the week to get to. But I still haven’t settled into Woodford. I don’t think I will – it’s not my place on this edge of London. I head South at the weekends, and the pavement comes alive under my feet, a crackle of memory and story in the tarmac, and things work properly again. And it’s not that there aren’t stories here on the edge of this primeval forest – this was Churchill’s seat, the Pankhursts are from nearby, and fuck, there’s Iron Age ruins and Big Dead Bones nearby – the place ought to hum with ghosts.

But they’re not talking to me. They know where my head is – in the centre, and worse, South, with Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, with the Saxons and the Romans. Out West with Dee and Elizabeth. Anywhere but here in this weird melange of concrete and grass that won’t make sense from any angle.

As you’ve probably twigged, this is just an excercise in kicking the dust out of my head, trying to get the words started for the evening. It seems to have worked, so I’ll see you later.

And I’m going to use Big Dead Bones as a title for something one day, I promise.

I’m not really a fan of small children. I’m just not suited to dealing with them. But I’m not totally heartless, and the news of any small child dying always makes me think that we still haven’t got things sorted out properly. But in this case, it’s just such a shame on so many levels. I cannot believe that a five year old can have sense of humour like that…

I’m sick of computers. I’m sure I had a life away from mine at some point, but in the last few days, I think the longest time I have been awake and not staring at a computer screen has been the 40-odd minutes I take for lunch each day. I had things I was going to say here, but my need to get away from the screen and do something else must take precedence.

I was going to write and post some short fiction this evening, but I can’t get it come together, which will at least teach me that ideas had under the influence of Kate Bush lyrics are probably less clever than they first appear. And I seem to have accidentally spent all evening writing e-mails and posting to message boards.

I have been trying to explain the more transcendental aspects of The Invisibles to some of my friends, who are probably about to give up on me either as hopelessly mad or a complete poseur. I think, on balance, I’d rather be the former. So long as I could be the latter in my spare time.

I’d like you all to do me a favour, and take a walk with me, in your minds eye. It’s a bit tricky, but have a go. Think of London, seen from the air – a straight-down, satellite view. Now, lay the tube map across it. Don’t worry about mapping the lines to their correct geographical points – the stylised map is fine. Hold them both together in your head – reality, and the version of London that exists only in concept, but is travelled by millions every day.

Fade reality out. Step through, into this real and concrete plane of concept. Look around. Somwhere around here, there’s a woman called Augusta. You can call her August, though. She doesn’t stand on ceremony, and it’s been a long time since most people thought of her as Augusta. I’m not going to tell you what she looks like. You have to make up your own mind about that. She’s older than empires, but still fresh and new. She’s been though hardships and seen great glories, and she’s bigger than any of us. She’s London, given flesh and form in your mind.

Now do something for me.

Tell her I said “Thank you.”

I feel like something shat in me. This is not good, because I appear to be extremely busy for the next while, and therefore do not have time to be unwell. Work tomorrow, then pub, then 24-hour comics thing on Saturday/Sunday, environmental fair on Monday, and all in all, this would be bad.