Words and Music

Walking through the shopping presinct, a young man with a 'Help the Aged' badge and a clipboard spotted me. In every shopping centre in every city there are these people trying to waylay passers by into setting up direct debit donations to this or that charity. They're sometimes called Chuggers - Charity Muggers.

The name of the charity varies, but the chuggers are all identically young, cheerful, friendly and enthusiastic - because they're all trained exactly the same way. One day, the charities will notice that saccharine exuberance generally just irritates, and maybe work out that's why their cunning plan doesn't work.

This particular chugger saw me at 30 paces, pointed and called out. This was our exchange:

Chug: You! You look like a winner!
Kap: No!
Chug: What do you mean "No"?
Kap: I'm not persuaded by your sales pitch.
Chug: But you haven't heard my saled pitch yet.
Kap: You're very sweet and very cute, but it's still "No".
Chug: Haha! Okay, cheers mate. Take care.

(Years ago, I deflated the spirits of people collected for Oxfam by telling them about the charity's finances, and how most of the money goes on admin or in the bank accounts of the board of directors. Now I just use negativity and mild sexual harassment.)

Then I stopped by at the library and borrowed some books.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. One of those books I always meant to get around to reading.

The Complete Short Stories of JG Ballard. A real find.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self. A collection of interrelated surreal short stories that I read years ago and greatly enjoyed.

One story, The Secret of the Ur-bororo, concerns an anthropologist studying an amazonian tribe who don't have all the quirky kinship structures, animistic spiritual beliefs and rites of passage that anthropologists love to document. They have a vague, noncommittal religion, a kind of shruggingly uninterested moral code, and their entire 'cultural discourse' is composed of endless, repitious small talk.

Which is why they integrate so well when migrated to London suburbs.

Reading it, I had a thought. I spent a decade studying Cultural Theory - a discipline which abuts both Sociology and Anthropology - which mainly meant studying ideology. Ideology is the study of the stories a society tells itself to justify its forms and practices at any given time - from the division of domestic labour to the forms of popular entertainment to fighting a war.

Ideology might justify the keeping of slaves by creating racism, and the freeing of slaves by notions of universal brotherhood. Doing nothing about slums is excused by blaming the fecklessness of the poor, and doing something about slums by fear of disease. A story may or may not be true - that isn't what matters.

But do psychologists meticulously document the sophisms of their patients? Do criminologists obsess over the half-baked mystifications that some lawbreakers errect to exonerate themselves? No. So what is the point of studying a society's lame excuses for its own conduct if that doesn't tell you what the real motives and structures are?
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In the evening, there was Strict Machines playing another gig in another pub with another lousy sound system and more horrible acoustics. Actually it was a great little gig, with a few dozen pubgoers - half of who didn't know the band members personally - cheering for two encores.

I took the opportunity to do my thing - getting drunk and hitting on straight boys, two of who turned out to be interesting.

Matt works in a reptile house, caring for scaly creatures that I'm actually phobic of. We spent a good half hour discussing evolutionary links between fish, lizards and birds. It seems odd to me that there are no venomous birds. Matt is comfortably bisexual...and lives with a women. Who he loves. Gah!

Benjamin is a sound engineer - a proper one with kit costing thousands instead of hundreds. He told me about a few tricks with Reason 3.0 that I hadn't thought of - such as mixing a pad with flanged and distorted versions of itself at a low level, giving a subtle 'subliminal' unpredictability and denseness to the sound. Ben is comfortably bisexual...and lives with a woman. Who he loves. Gah!
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All this happened yesterday, but I was too busy/drunk/hungover to blog it. Now I should try to get some recording done.
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Update: Playing back 4 vocal takes simultainiously, I think I've invented a new genre. The techno barbershop quartet.