Whenever I walk up New Oxford Street and branch off onto Bloomsbury Way, my mind wanders more than it usually does during walks about town. Because this particularly dismal stretch of central London is so bland, I invent games to play in my head in order to avoid the dementia that can be induced by an endless stream of Caffe Neros and tourist tchotchke shops. Maybe if I were a French student in 1968 I’d embrace the ennui, but on Thursday night I was content to busy myself with a combination of thoughts that centred around estimating how much of the Haswell/Hecker set I was missing and whether or not the gig would be selling beer (and, if not, where I could buy beer – I like beer).

Arriving at Conway Hall, Haswell/Hecker was already in progress. The auditorium doors were closed as if to prevent a vicious pathogen from escaping and infecting whomever may have been lingering around after work in the mostly empty streets of Holborn. I sorted out my ticket and received a hand stamp marking my paid entry: a magic marker scrawl of the letters “HP” on my right hand. I was happy to publicly express my support of brown sauce.

With no caution whatsoever, I swung open the performance room doors only to be assaulted with a harshly high-end blast of sine wave treble. I was pleased to discover that after all these years listening to noise, I could not only still hear sounds in that range but also feel pain from them. It was pretty horrible, so I knew I was in for a good night.

The room was also filled with green laser beams shooting in every direction. Although not nearly as energy-efficient, I think some Throbbing Gristlesque halogen lamps would have worked better with this sound. My ears were bleeding but my eyes were watching a Pink Floyd night in a 1970s American planetarium.

Haswell/Hecker did scale back from that high octave onslaught to show us some low-end mercy. The more than capable sound system that they packed into Conway Hall vibrated the bones, but I still needed beer to warm the spirit. Now, I know, this makes me a bad music fan, and perhaps an alcoholic as well, but I left after about 15 minutes of their set to find some lager.

On returning from Sainsbury’s with a 4 pack of Kronenberg (which I think I chose subconsciously because of the differently-spelled film director of the same name), it was intermission and most conversations I overheard seemed really impressed with Haswell/Hecker. I felt a bit bad that I had skipped out on so much of it, but I was really impressed with my ability to find beer in Holborn on a weeknight.

Time for Pan Sonic at last came around, providing me with a bit of déjà vu, as their accompanying visuals hadn’t changed as far as I could tell in the few odd years since I’d last seen them. Why bother changing anything that works so well? The black vibrating wave on a grey screen, as minimal as the sound it represented.

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Static fought against the beats, reminiscent of a mix between Autechre’s LP5 and Merzbow’s Merzbeat. Despite the many layers of sound, everything felt like the work of a duo. You could clearly hear the pure elements of synthesizer and rhythm jockey for position. In the end I think it was a draw. If there was a winner it was definitely the machine in the back on the right side of the table: a synthesizer controlled by what appeared to me to be a lever. That thing was badass! If it were a guitar, it would have been V-shaped with 10 necks (and a lever).

From people I talked to after the gig to other reviews that I’ve read in the past week, the consensus appears to be that Haswell/Hecker blew everyone away, whilst Pan Sonic was mildly disappointing. I couldn’t agree less, however, as my favourite part of the night was the Pan Sonic set. Yes, admittedly, I was on a beer run for most of Haswell/Hecker, but from what I saw of their set, it was more extreme and maximal. I quite like extremity, and I love what I heard, but Pan Sonic’s more restrained approach may have been an anti-climax after a display of such sheer sonic force.

Regardless of how the two sets measured up against each other, overall it was an ace night. £12, two artists, one simple room: no nonsense, nice and simple. I can only hope to lose more of my hearing to them in the near future.

Yesterday was Blog Action Day. For those who missed it, which I assume is everyone who doesn’t live in a bloggerati bubble, Blog Action Day was designed to be a day of activism for bloggers. One issue would be chosen for all bloggers to write about and somehow if every blogger in the world wrote about that one issue on the chosen day, everything would sprout a piece of awesome out its head (or its arse).

This year’s chosen cause was The Environment, which is good because global warming troubles me. I feel bad that I failed to write about it, but it looks like everyone else did a good job because it’s a mild 15 degrees outside today. Well done!

The best part about Blog Action Day was that bloggers didn’t have to do anything difficult or even different to what they do every day: they just had to sit on their fat arses and write. There was no imperative for bloggers to lead by example and do even a small thing to help the environment, they just had to sit back and tell everyone else to do it. Wait, why did I miss this again?

The tagline on the Blog Action Day site asks,

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?
One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

I reckon that the same thing would be said in about a few thousand different ways, a bit like a bad cover version of a song that once held a deep meaning for you, but lost it after you heard it limply regurgitated once too many times.

I’m sorry to be so cynical about what could be seen as a great consciousness-raising activity, but I can’t help but think that everyone’s efforts would be better spent actually doing something to help the environment besides writing about it on blogs. Start recycling! Use your car less and walk or bike more! Turn off your computer and save some electricity?

Does it count if I Twitter about the environment, or is the extent to which I saved the environment directly proportional to my word count?

I always new that the Do-It-Yourself punk rock spirit was alive and well in the UK. In the headlines of BBC News as well as CNN, I learned today that the dental situation is so bad in Britain that people are resorting to “DIY dentistry”: pliers and glue at home instead of a trip to a proper dentist.

Why would anyone in their right mind do something so medieval? Poverty and the lack of a reasonable state-provided alternative. Whilst the NHS offers free health care for the rest of your body, it doesn’t look after your mouth much at all. NHS dentists are hard to find and if you do, you could be waiting for quite a while to receive treatment. There are, of course, plenty of private dental practices where you can pay for any service you want and get immediate care, but that requires money.

I’ll be the first to admit that the NHS is fantastic compared to the complete lack of socialised medicine in the United States. I can see how some may think its poor dental offerings are a minor concern, given that Americans don’t have many unpaid medical options at all. The situation in the US is dire, but it doesn’t exempt the UK from working toward the improvement of its own system. It should be the goal of any nation to be able to provide free health care to all of its citizens, and once it can do that, its goal should be to perfect that system. Just because America hasn’t sorted the first part of that out yet doesn’t mean Britain can disregard the importance of the latter.

I have lived in the UK for a year now and haven’t been to a dentist at all in that time. Normally, I’d have been twice for cleanings, but that’s one luxury I no longer have. My previous job offered full medical and dental benefits, but since my current company offers no private coverage, I choose to save that money and just hope for the best.

My wife has been to the dentist once in London. She went to a private practice because everyone we know told us to not even bother trying to find an NHS dentist. She needed a cavity filled, which set her back about £75, plus another £18 for a required consultation that lasted all of five-minutes. She works full-time, luckily, and so this was at least possible, but even still that was a major chunk of her income for the week. If she needed a more advanced prodecure, would I have had to send her down to the hardware store?

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Before I was aware of the Alvin Toffler book, I first heard the phrase “Future Shock” as the title of a song by New Zealand rockers, The Gordons. Featured on their 1980 EP of the same name, it’s a ferocious five minutes of punk repetition, with not much discernible aside from the same chords played over and over whilst the vocalist wails, “Future shock! Future shock!” It’s one of my favourite songs.

As a phrase open to interpretation, “future shock” feels incredibly relevant to modern life, however in its pure Tofflerian meaning, it shows its age. Toffler’s main argument is that the growing levels of anxiety and disconnection felt by people today are directly related to our movement from an industrial to a super-industrial, or at least post-cooperative, society. With our human interactions increasingly mediated by machines, the interactions themselves are becoming less human and more mechanical.

With over 30 years of hindsight, Toffler’s ideas are hard to explain without making them sound luddite. His predictions failed to imagine the rise of the internet and social software and the degree to which these tools could bring people closer together. On the other hand, however, one can’t completely shove it all aside as technophobic hogwash. How many Facebook friends does it take to make you happy?

Regardless of how relevant Future Shock is to me in 2007, I’m finding myself feeling something new lately that has me thinking of it again. It’s not even a new feeling exactly, rather it’s just something I’ve finally been able to put my finger on as a means of explaining the strangeness that I feel sometimes when not computing. It’s not anxiety over the future at all, it’s frustration that it hasn’t arrived completely enough yet.

The virtual environment in which I spend so many of the hours of my days places a convenience at my fingers that no longer exists when I step away from the keyboard. I put the laptop in a physical bag and walk on feet for ten minutes to a train, where I sit for sixteen minutes before arriving in my neighbourhood and walking five minutes to my flat. Ten minutes, sixteen minutes, five minutes and some more minutes spent waiting for the train, possibly the worst minutes of all because I’m not specifically doing something. I read all the advertisements in under one minute. They stay there for weeks. If they were replaced by screens and changed infinitely, perhaps I would buy more.

I’m experiencing a sort of “present shock”, a sense of disconnection resulting from being disconnected. The physical world fails to move as quickly as the virtual world to which I have adapted. Toffler didn’t really give us enough credit to adapt to the rapid changes of the modern world, nor did he place enough value on how compelling a technologically-enhanced life would eventually become.

Just like Toffler, though, I’m not giving myself, or any of us, enough credit. My present shock is fleeting and almost as soon as I realise that I am feeling it, it slips away. I like the downtime, the slowness, the lack of teleportation choices from Transport For London. Most times I just play Nintendo.

In all seriousness, however, it fades and I love it. When I go away somewhere on holiday, I’m not one of these freaks that has to bring a fucking Blackberry or an iPhone or whatever the latest connection-maintaining device is. Our adaptability defines us as much as fast evaporation defines present shock. It’s a perception of extreme slowness experienced during the in-between moments of transition from a technologically-enhanced, high speed realm down to one that is chiefly physical and acutely real-time.

Although I may live mostly in a highly excited state of overstimulation, after passing through momentary present shock I’m pleasantly back where I started. I’m not sure where that is even, but it feels real.

The Gordons – “Future Shock”

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If the street I work on has a dominant smell, without a doubt it’s rubbish. Stale, rotten rubbish. A friend of mine pointed it out the other day noting, “It smells like a decomposing body. Like death.” I said I thought that was a bit harsh. I always assumed it was just the delicious stench of broken dreams.

One would think that given what they say about smoke and fire, there would be a rubbish lorry to be found parked nearby, or at least some bin bags. Unfortunately there’s no easy explanation like this for it. It’s not even me, I bathe almost daily.

Now what I’m about to propose may shock you, but before you start thinking about having me sectioned, hear me out: I think it could be ghosts. That’s why it smells like dead people. Think about it.

Loads of people over the centuries have seen as well as heard ghosts, which we all know from having watched television, where they talk about this kinda stuff all the time. Some have even captured these otherworldly entities having a chat on tape, which sounds totally dope when you mix it in under a trippy ambient track. This got me thinking that maybe you could smell ghosts.

According to the Ghosts of Chicago website:

Q) Can I smell a ghost?

A) Our olfactory system is often triggered by our unseen friends. There have been many times when people have noted smelling things when they should not have. Roses seem to be very popular among these smells. The scents that an entity might have been known for when there were alive can commonly be smelled when these ghosts try to indicate their presence: at times, without reason, there may be an odor of perfume, a whiff of a cigar or an aroma of food. As mentioned above, roses are popular; this usually occurs after death, and is always a good message.

Lafone Street may smell like a lot of things, but it certainly doesn’t smell like fucking roses. It smells like rubbish, so obviously this isn’t a good message.

Rather than any being attributable to any physical or even supernatural culprit, I think the odor emanates from the road itself. Deep under the cobbles, something unpleasant from old London bubbles up into the present. Or maybe something unpleasant from the present spills out from another dimension, the hidden parallel world where we keep all our hate, rage and Twix wrappers – the sordid realm of our dirty schemes, our evil inclinations and our melted Kit Kats. Someone probably left the fish out there, too.

When I first bought tickets to see Sonic Youth perform Daydream Nation in its entirety, I assumed it was going to be a one-off gig. Six months later and the band has just finished a three day residency at The Roundhouse, which itself was only a portion of a small world tour based on this record. On first learning about their plans to turn one gig into a full tour, I was disappointed. Somehow it made the event that I’d purchased tickets for so far in advance a bit less special. After seeing Friday night’s performance, however, and witnessing the energy in that room and the smiles on so many faces, I wish they could bring it to every city that has even a few people interested in seeing it.

I must have heard this record at least one or two hundred times since I bought its CD reissue in the early 90s. Most likely I have listened to it more than any other record in my collection, which is something I hadn’t thought about until Friday night. I probably own tens of thousands of records.

Strictly speaking numbers, yeah, it’s a bona fide classic: Pitchfork handed it top honours in their list of the best 100 albums of the 1980s while similar lists in Spin and Rolling Stone placed it quite high as well. This is odd for me. Most of what comprises critic’s canon can be found somewhere in the disorganised mess of albums on my shelves, but I don’t find myself listening to White Light/White Heat every other month, discovering new personal meaning each time.

With this record such a fundamental part of my musical DNA, I couldn’t miss this gig, yet a part of me dreaded it. It’s hard to sidestep the notion that All Tomorrow’s Parties’ Don’t Look Back series represents the museumification of pop music, something that could be performed perhaps by Kraftwerk’s robots. While that element is there on paper, the reality of the evening was much more alive than the rock-without-surprises of following a known track listing would imply.

Although almost fifty years old, Thurston’s still the eternal teenager. He probably always will be, too: tender and violent in unpredictable turns. The next day was Kim and his daughter’s thirteenth birthday. Sonic Youth has a teenager! I wonder when she’ll join the band.

Lee seemed genuinely exuberant throughout. Adding verses to his songs and improvising more than any of them, I think it might have been the first time I saw anyone smile whilst screaming. Steve’s drumming pounded through what is certainly some of the group’s most frenzied work, as Kim swayed and twirled at the centre of it all.

The final encore of “Schizophrenia”, the first song off Sister, made me want to shout for “Catholic Block” in the hopes they’d just play that record all the way through as well. If Sonic Youth had chosen to play a different complete album of theirs every night this week, I would have bankrupted myself buying tickets to each one.

Daydream Nation is like a photo-negative White Album. It is clearly the separate work of each artist but just as obviously a cohesive group effort. Maybe that’s just what it means to be a band at its peak: each individual voice can make itself heard whilst simultaneously playing off each other as part of one unified organism.

My experience of this album, of any album, is so rooted in intimate listens that you’d think it might be awkward sharing it with a large crowd, but that was the secret to the strength of the gig. The public experience didn’t ruin it, rather it was like the venue became everyone’s teenage bedroom complete with a cheap stereo and punk posters on the walls. Had we turned it up loud enough, a few decibels more would have sent salvation, or at least deliverance.

Image of Sonic Youth from the original Daydream Nation tour at Whisky-A-Go-Go, Los Angeles, California, 1989 taken from spiralstares’ Flickr photostream.

Knowing all too well about my recent obsession with Giorgio Moroder because I’ve covered most of our office with my Giorgio Moo-roder stickers, a colleague of mine was kind enough to send me this video:

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Not only is it great because we get to see Moroder in his studio near the height of his career, but we also have a demonstration of him singing through his lovely vocoder. With his awesome mustache in full effect and classic early 80s nerdy newscaster narration, I wish I had this on VHS instead of simply courtesy of YouTube.

I just learned about the death of Tony Wilson and so I’m going through a range of emotions. One of these led me to look for some of his old television clips on YouTube. I found this one of him interviewing Sonic Youth, and although the date is not given, one can easily assume that it’s from the mid-to-late 80s:

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The highlight is Kim Gordon on hiphop, “We like it because it isn’t disco, because it comes from the streets, you know, it came from the streets and was brought into the clubs, whereas disco… it was made for the club, whereas rap wasn’t.”

I would try to point out the logical holes in this, but there are so many that I think it would give us all aneurysms. I hope she was high when she said this.

Meanwhile, feminist Thurston Moore adds, “The American disco was a 70s white bitch kind of cocaine thing.” This, of course, is not cool because 70s white bitches are not street. Cocaine, however…

I’m still searching for Tony Wilson television appearances, most specifically old episodes of “So It Goes” (and not, like, the weather from 15 May 1978). If you know where I can watch these punk treasures, please let me know. Alternatively, I’ll also accept videos of Kim Gordon pulling half-baked commentary out of her arse as a worthy substitute.

When I first was introduced to Moo MiniCards, I fell in love with them instantly. At last there was a way to give someone my contact information after meeting them without having to resort to a boring corporate business card that says nothing about me and my life. Well, that, and my company doesn’t let me have business cards because I’d probably get jam all over them anyway, and then they’d be sticky in a bad way, unlike sticky in a good way, which is what…

…Moo StickerBooks are!

For only £5 you get 90 high-quality glossy stickers, all bound in a protective book so that they don’t get all fucked up in your bag when you’re toting them about town. In typical Moo fashion, you can either upload photos directly to their web site or have Moo pull them from your Flickr account. Turnaround time for an order is about 10 days, which is really just splendid, but for geeks like me it can start to feel like centuries of waiting. I highly suggest placing an order for several books, because once they arrive, you’ll be so happy that the wait is over you’ll blow through 90 stickers in no time.

So what did I make stickers of for my first batch of books? First up, we have MooTube:

These same 6 stickers repeat for all 15 pages of this book and are taken from my photos of London Underground seat cushion upholstery patterns. Moving left to right on the top row we have the District Line, Circle Line and Northern Line, while on the bottom row there’s the Victoria Line, District Line and Metropolitan Line. Some of these patterns make appearances on other lines, but these are the locations where I snapped them.

My favourite must be the Circle Line. I love its 80s splashes of vibrant neon, which are strangely fashionable again. It’s a shame this pattern is restricted to one of my least frequented lines. I quite like the Northern Line pattern as well, which is partly due to familiarity and partly because it resembles a sawtooth wave. I’d love to feed that fabric through a synthesizer and hear the crazy noise it belches out.

Speaking of synthesizers, the other StickerBook I ordered is a homogeneous pack of 90 that pays homage to one of the greatest electronic innovators of all time. His use of the vocoder on the “From Here to Eternity” album shames Kraftwerk. Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present…

…Giorgio Moo-roder!!!

The power of his moustache compels you. You will dance and feel good and sexy, from here to eternity, baby.

Overly practical people will ask, “What business use does this all this have?”, because the MiniCards work so nicely as business cards. Thankfully, I think this may have no business use whatsoever and very likely is a 100% life-based fun-increasing tool (sorry, just trying to word it in a way that makes sense to these sad pathological pragmatists).

With three products on offer now, where to for Moo next? I vote for button badges or postcards, but mainly button badges. I’d love to pin Giorgio and my tube patterns to my laptop bag so that I can rock the discothèque during my commute and represent for the Northern Line when I’m up in the club. Please don’t make us wait too long for this wish to come true, Moo!

Regardless of the topic, I hate sensationalism. Living in London, the Evening Standard headlines give me all the sensationalism I need each day, so generally I try to avoid it. When I do stumble upon blog post titles like Three Hidden Dangers of Twitter, I try to remain optimistic and give the author the benefit of the doubt. For all I know, Twitter shags sheep, causes cancer and eats babies for breakfast. So in the interest of being an informed citizen ready to protect the world from having its soul swallowed via SMS, I read on.

Figure 1.1: Dangerously hilarious post from my friend Rik on Twitter. Sage advice, too. I now completely avoid sleeping in houses with Portuguese people on acid, though I do still have a bad habit of kipping on coaches full of English people on ether binges.

It turns out that the hidden dangers are only dangerous if you’re writing yet another linkbaiting list-based post and need that crucial attention-grabbing headline. True that the author’s technique worked because I linked to his post, but it was good in the sense that it helped me coalesce the ideas I’ve been having about Twitter ever since I started using the service a few months ago. By no means is this a comprehensive collection of every Twitter-related thought I’ve had, nor is it an annoyingly quantified list like “The Top 27 Ways To Be A Dick” or “The Leading 73 Reasons To Drop More Acid”. It’s just a few ideas that crossed my brain whilst eating a sandwich and reading about undangerous dangers.

• Frequently Twitter’s detractors complain that it doesn’t have a business use. Meanwhile, others suggest exploiting it for its business use. So the question remains: does Twitter have a business use? First, I don’t care if it has a business use. Too many things have a business use. Maybe it just has a life use. That’s fine by me. Second, articles like Monster.com’s How Twitter Can Help Your Career tell you how to fine-tune your use of the service in order to boost your reputation in your professional field. How Twitter Can Help Your Career… and lead to more incredibly boring, self-serving tweets from overly ambitious twats.
• Don Steinberg sees the fun and the business potential in Hacking Twittter For Fun and Profit. Most of his business-related points aren’t about the bottom line, despite the title, rather they highlight ways to engage your customers. Yes, this may lead to a profit eventually, but that’s the point of business. There’s nothing wrong with making a little money, but there’s also nothing wrong with having fun acquiring it and finding ways to make people happy along the way. I completely disagree, however, with his suggestion that anyone should use Twitter to monitor a group project at the office. That’s a sure fire way to bore the living shit out of anyone that’s not sitting in the same room as you between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. His suggestions to “compose classic Twitterature”, “get some answers” and “be a very mini-blogger” are brilliant ways to see the service as more than it claims to be itself when it asks you to simply tell us what you’re doing right now. If you blog, try as a writing exercise to use Twitter as your mini-blog. For thoughts that need no more than one or two sentences, this service is perfect. There’s no need, nor room, for filler. Tweets can be the pure pop brilliance of the single instead of the bloated album that only has one good song.
• Updates from faraway friends, especially the minutiae, make these friends feel closer. I recently moved country and when it’s 3 p.m. for me and I see an old friend of mine post about eating breakfast, in a small way it takes me there. It may be irrelevant to you, but you don’t have to follow my friend, you can follow your own friends and if you’re lucky get taken into the quiet moments of their days.
• Oscar Wilde would have loved Twitter. Some of his best aphorisms would have worked marvellously as tweets. Some ideas only need 140 characters to be expressed. Shakespeare famously wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit” and had 114 characters left to spare.