THUDTHUDTHUD

more treadmill. more music. fitness improving but hunks of fat around the midriff proving stubborn. urged to reapply discipline in matter of food intake. I should, I guess. anyway, shuffled today were:

• Eric Burdon & War: Spill the Wine [1970]
• Parov Stelar: Kisskiss [2004]
• CSS: Alala [2005]
• Marva Whitney: It's My Thing (You Can't Tell Me Who to Sock it To) [1969]
• King: Love and Pride [1984]
• The Sahara All Stars: Take Your Soul [1976]

WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY

more running. more lifting. more pushing. more other stuff. musical stylings today were:

• The Magic Disco Machine: Scratchin' [1988]
• James Brown: Funky Drummer [1970]
• The Cecil Holmes Soulful Sounds: 2001 [1973]
• Joe Smooth: Promised Land [1989]
• The Crusaders: The Well's Gone Dry [1974]
• The Knack: My Sharona [1979]
• Smif-N-Wesun: Wreckonize [1995]
• Jean-Jacques Perrey: E.V.A. [1970]
• The Blackbyrds: Rock Creek Park [1975]

RUNNING JUMPING

MORE OF IT. faster. faster. shorter gaps. then, unusually, able to keep my own playlist shuffling at me even when box jumping. accompaniment today =

• Ronnie Laws: Tell Me Something Good [1975]
• Brass Construction: Get Up to Get Down [1979]
• Morgan Heritage: One Bingi Man [1997?]
• Sir Guy: Funky Virginia [1969?]
• The Jam: Going Underground [1982]
• Babyshambles: Delivery [2007]
• Talking Heads: Psycho Killer [1977]
• Ripple: The Beat Goes On & On [1977]
• The Meters: Hey Pocky A-Way [1974]
• Alphonze Mouzon: Funky Snakefoot [1974]

STAYING ALIVE

Closer now to my death than my birth. Preferring not to crumble, crinkle, stiffen and rot at a noticeably alarming rate. PT, then. Jerks, then. Buying, if nothing else, at least a feeling of keeping the doctor, the undertaker and the reaper at bay. So, the treadmill whirs, the feet slam, the weights clank. I suck my gut in and start to think that I now resemble a barrel-chested little fuck rather than a sagging sack of shit. Today's progress was made easier by:

• Tower of Power: Ebony Jam [1975]
• Cameo: Word Up! [1986]
• Sly & The Family Stone: Loose Booty [1974]
• Anita Ward: Ring My Bell [1979]
• Odyssey: Going Back to My Roots [1981]
• Gwen McRae: All This Love That I'm Giving [1979]
• Róisín Murphy: Overpowered [2007]

TUNES/JERKS ETC.

DATELINE TREADMILL: 3km run thereon, followed by bench pressing and assorted jerks. only the bonkers box jumps were done without the jumbo headphones ('cos they wouldn't have stayed in place). musical stylings were:

• Go Lem System: Calle Go Lem [2006]
• Public Image Ltd: This is Not a Love Song [1983]
• The Commodores: I'm Ready [1975]
• Public Image Ltd: Rise [1986]
• Gary Numan: Cars [1979]
• The Brothers Johnson: Stomp! [1980]
• Parliament: Flash Light [1978]
• The Teardrop Explodes: Reward [1981]
• The Undertones: Teenage Kicks [1978]
• MGMT: Time to Pretend [2007]

NAN

a sometime barmaid,
a sometime payroll clerk,
a sometime supermarket cashier,
and once something of a hard-faced and cold-eyed beauty,
my grandmother stuffed the unlovely rooms of her underheated boarding house
with friendless flotsam,
with horrible knick-knacks:

a stuffed, glass-eyed crocodile forever frozen in a hostile pose;
a crude wooden rendering of some cannibal's shrunken head;
a  cigarette lighter contained within a china ornament:
a drunk tramp leaning against a lamppost.

"How Dry I Am"
tinkled metallically into the strained silence of the living room
when the thing was lifted,
the cogs and tines of the mechanism inside plinking
and plonking
the notes
of the dipsomaniac's refrain.

she was a working class Tory,
and she was flattered to be spoken to by the local M.P.,
a louche, saturnine rogue.
"he's so polite," she said,
"so charming,"
"so well spoken,"
"such nice teeth."
I didn't say anything
but I must have looked at her the wrong way
because she glared icily through the tobacco smoke seething
from between
her tightly pursed lips.
"ooh, go away you make me sick," she said.

(I've written this before, haven't I?)

FUCK IT

Perhaps I should check my privilege. I live in an affluent part of an affluent country and for years I've managed to make an above-average amount of money by doing nothing harder than speaking words, writing words and pretending to be someone else. My physical health is generally good. Between the four walls of my house, I am coddled with real love. I've not long come back from two expensive weeks of warm sunshine, pleasant idleness and fun activities in the United States. But I am restless, discontented and brittle. I pass from brief, inexplicable highs to longer periods of morbid introspection. I rarely escape the clutches of a mental state which involves feeling like an imposter in one's own skin, always close to palpable paranoia, rattled by the prospect of finally being found out at any moment. I grapple daily with a self-destructive urge to drive away even the closest and most trusted of my few friends. So I turn my gaze away from myself and out towards the squabbling, mediocre cunts cheapening and coarsening public life in this country. It makes me feel sick. So I turn to hobbies or pursuits and I find them pointless, childish and dull. I turn to books and paintings and ideas and they rarely move me. So I wonder if I'm no longer capable of being buoyed up by beauty. So I consider big, complicated changes to how, where and why I live this life. Maybe an answer lies there. But it's not like I understand what kind of question it is that I am seeking to have answered anyway. There are moments of respite, though. Putting one foot in front of the other where the air is a little fresher and where a city full of shit is within sight yet somehow out of mind. Looking, still none the wiser about what (if anything) it might mean, at big piles of Henry Moore. Then it seems as though I might feel alright for a while. But then I have to make a phone call. Or get on a train. Or tie my shoelaces. Or load the dishwasher. Or look at a human being. Or tell a guy that I don't want to buy what he's selling. Or live with the fact that I don't get to walk around in another body. Those two most dangerous words are never far from my lips: "fuck it".  

YET MORE TREADMILL [PLUS JERKS] TUNES

Another set of 7 x the 500m treadmill run, taking the speed back towards the what I was capable of before heading to Florida  (via New York) for two weeks of ballgames, beers, burgers and less effective exercise. Shortening the rests between the runs. Doing further physical jerks immediately thereafter. Musical accompanied included:

• N.W.A.: Express Yourself [1988]
• Del the Funky Homosapien: Mistadobalina [1991]
• Jean Knight: Mr. Big Stuff [1971]
• Ramones: Sheena Is a Punk Rocker [1977]
• The Style Council: Shout to the Top! [1984]
• Goran Bregović: Mesecina [1995?]
• Fat Freddy's Drop: Blackbird [2013]
• Blancmange: Living on the Ceiling [1982]
• Level 42: Lessons in Love [1986]
• Apollo 100: Joy [1972]
• The Clash: London Calling [1979]

INVITING US NOT TO CARE

More stuff from the remaindered books outlet which yielded the tiny Jon Ronson gem praised here last week. Another slimline volume. History this time. A short account of the Vietnam War. Not a subject I usually think about a lot. But it came up here quite recently when considering remarks made by Charles Bukowski in 1973 in response to television coverage of freed POWs returning from Indochina: 

"The POW propaganda plant is still grinding against all sensibilities. We lost the war, got our asses kicked out by starving men and women half our size. We couldn't bomb, con or beg them into submission so we got out and while getting out, somebody had to come up with a smokescreen to make the populace forget we got our asses kicked." 

Bukowski reminds us of how US media outlets focus so sharply on the American casualties of the conflicts into which that great nation so often wades, while saying far less about the vastly more numerous deaths of local civilians caught in the crossfire. These thoughts led me to the discovery of a 2012 article in which John Tirman discusses the question of why US citizens appear inclined to ignore the civilians killed in "American wars". Tirman notes that  "the lack of concern about those who die in U.S. wars is... shown by these civilians' absence, in large part, from our films, novels and documentaries" and that "the entertainment industry portrays these wars... almost always with a focus on Americans."

I don't think it's fair to single out the USA as the only nation where this approach to describing armed conflict is the norm. My sense is that here in the UK, for example, the media and entertainment industries similarly combine to create narratives in which foreign civilians and enemy combatants are pushed towards the margins and the background.

One would hope, though, that history books authored in the countries on one side of a conflict would pay more attention to the civilian casualties sustained by the other side, as well as attempting to explore the perspectives of the people living on that other side. I'd like to keep nursing that hope, notwithstanding old warnings about there being no such thing as a truly neutral, objective or even-handed historian. At first sight, though, this recently acquired book about the Vietnam War seemed to suggest that its account of the conflict would be in keeping with John Tirman's observations about a lack of concern for the civilian victims of wars contested by the USA: the cover is illustrated with a photo of an American soldier's helmet; the blurb on the back of the book speaks of 58,220 American dead and 300,000 American wounded, without mentioning equivalent figures for the Vietnamese population. True, the middle paragraph of that blurb does suggest that the author has attempted to tell the story of the war from the Vietnamese perspective, noting that for "the people of North Vietnam is was just another in a long line of foreign invaders" and observing that "for two thousand years they had struggled for self-determination". But that insistence on citing the numbers of American casualties only does create the impression that this book is yet another predominantly US-centric account of the conflict. It is a pity that the publisher's people felt the need to take this approach, and they have done the Scottish author of the book a disservice, I feel, because the opening chapters do say rather more about the Vietnamese perspective than the blurb and the cover image had led me to expect. I feel, then, that the publisher's marketing people decided that they needed to sideline Indochinese civilians, combatants, history and politics in order to package a palatable product for an audience endlessly invited not to care about dead foreigners. The disservice done by this approach, then, is done not only to the author but also to those of us with the capacity to feel for the fallen on both sides of a conflict.

TUNEAGE: MORE RUNNING AND THAT

Dateline BLOODY BLIGHTY: As the twisted ankle recovers and as the physical condition begins to pick up after the blissful blunting of incautious eating and reduced exercise in now much-missed NYC and now yearned-for Florida, more poundingpounding of treadmill and further jerkyjerk-phyzikal jerx. Today: reintroduction of bastard bench-pressing and blooming box jumps, the latter causing prickling stings of familiarness, such is the affection for this particular form of movement. All movements not unconducive to the wearing of big-ass headphones (i.e. just those box jumps, really), were bounced onwards by musical accompaniment thus:

• Delegation: You and I [1979]
• Bad Manners: Ne Ne Na Na Na Na Nu Nu [1980]
• Audio Deluxe: 60 Seconds [1992]
• The Stranglers: No More Heroes [1979]
• Elvis Costello & The Attractions: Pump It Up [1978]
• Talking Heads: Once In a Lifetime [1981]
• Sex Pistols: Pretty Vacant [1977]
• Baby Huey: Hard Times [1971]
• Symarip: Skinhead Moon Stomp [1970]
• The Rakes: The World Was a Mess But His Hair Was Perfect [2007]*
• Gary Toms Empire: 7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (Blow Your Whistle) [1975]
• George Benson: Give Me the Night [1980]
• Chicken y Sus Comandos: Caminando Despacito [1969?]
• Azymuth: Jazz Carnival [1979]

--------

*note:

As my current preference is, demonstrably, for music recorded, for the most part, in the 1970s and 1980s, this tune by defunct UK indie-rockers The Rakes stands out like a sore thumb: a rare example of young(er) people's music entering the radar screen of this ageing, dessicated husk. It's a song which 95% satisfies me but which contains a single irritating flaw, to my mind. Music, musicianship, craft, whatever: fine; lyrics: MOSTLY fine, being an unpretentious take on the worries of an imperfect night out in the 21st Century (ten new messages on my phone; danger of eye contact with male stranger leading to fighting and disturbance of carefully crafted hairstyle...). But there is a seriously dud pair of lines:

You slag off America in the pub
Saying the war was shite
The in the club drink some Buds
And smoke some Marlboro Lights

I'm not sure whether the narrative voice is addressing itself (himself) or a third party. Either way, a critical observation is made, namely that it is hypocritical to speak negatively about American foreign policy while consuming products made by American companies. This seems an entirely juvenile and fatuous position, reminding me of the time when Louise Mensch thought it was terribly clever to suggest that protesters who oppose some iniquitous elements of capitalist societies cannot use mobile phones or drink coffee without undermining their arguments. But this is a minor gripe, I guess. The song is pretty good otherwise.