It’s been a long year.

It’s that time of year again. This year I woke up in the morning in my own bed in Oxford, which was slightly disappointing, because I like to think I can do better debauchery than that, and I’d not even been drunk enough the night before to start yelling my new year’s resolutions out in the middle of the party. I was drunk enough to buy disgusting fried chicken from the awful kebab shop by the station – which has led me to make a resolution about not buying fast food from places I know do terrible chips. (I probably owe you lot a post about the best chips in Oxford, but I digress.)

Before getting on to this year’s resolutions, it would probably be sensible to have a look back over last year’s. They were, essentially, a failure on all counts, (except risky dressing, which I feel I did a pretty good job on): I had lots of essay crises, barely maintained this ‘blog, didn’t even attempt to finish my ‘novel’ and can’t remember getting on a bike even once. That said, I’m not particularly bothered about any of them, except maybe the essay crises and ‘blog. So, resolutions time:

1) Keep this thing up. I think a post a week was too ambitious, but when I come across interesting things I really ought to tell you about them here.

2) Get (at least) 68 in Finals.

3) Take care of yourself while trying to.

4) [REDACTED.]

5) Have more fun. Or, go to more parties, whichever the easier.

6) Go for more walks. Try to make some of these walks walks to the Bod.

7) Sleep sensible amounts.

Should be easy enough, right? It may all seem a bit Finals focussed, but that’s because it’s quite hard not to be. I may well publish a list of The Fun I Want To Have After Finals too. I’m not convinced 2011 was one of the better years – everything seemed grim a lot of the time. But, this is a new year. Happy 2012!

Loosen Up

Anyone who’s been reading this ‘blog for a while had probably noticed that I may lack some follow-through. I promised you six posts about music in Sixth Week and very much did not follow through. I just needed something to talk about, and although I will honestly tell you about my interest in drag queens at some point in the near future, I hadn’t felt that. Not until I heard Kevin Paul Hayes’ first solo album. Yes, sure, you were probably expecting me to wax on about Gillian Welch’s latest record, but I’m yet to have that settle enough for me to write on it. On the other hand, I don’t think it takes many listens to get the full measure on the Old Crow Medicine Show‘s guitjo player’s album. And I think Loosen Up is outstanding.

It seems at times like a series of song writing exercises, though I do not think it is any the weaker for that. There are songs on Classic country themes with surprisingly touching lyrics, such as the laments to a mother by a wayward son facing execution (Momma, “I’ve never been anyone’s best friend/or best of anything actually”), a soldier’s lovesong to his Southampton girl (Weston Shore)  and break-ups, in the form of both the putting-a-brave-face-on-it Closed the Door and the embittered, dirty Mended Her Heart (“…and she broke my balls”), a song which could, I feel, have appeared on the album Get Myself Together  by Danny Barnes of the Bad Livers, who I once saw open for Tim O’Brien at an almost empty Borderline, where I’ve also seen Kevin Hayes. Nothing like honest country songwriting for a good time.

Pictures in the Fire, which follows it, is a song about the power with imagination, with such amusing observations as “Out the window a mockingbird with the face of Carl Jung appeared”, which isn’t something I ever thought I’d hear sung. The album also features two songs about keeping going (Reach the Top and Great is the Path, which has a lot in common with songs by Woody Guthrie, being essentially a summary of the Grapes of Wrath with a good gospel-style chorus), and a song which seems to be about military expansionism or a naval disaster, it’s unclear which (One by One). To my mind, though, the greatest song on the record is Yo Nice Hat, which  has lyrics which could have been written by 1980s Bob Dylan – and I mean that as a compliment. It is as sleazy as good Dylan, and also as authentic as that sleaziness might suggest: “I ain’t meaning no disrespect, I be telling the truth, my words are correct.”

The comparisons I’ve made during this review should suggest how much I’ve enjoyed this record. Hayes’ voice may not be very refined but it is affecting, and this is a record of good guitar playing and entertaining song writing by Hayes, who is as likeable a performer on this record as he is live. If you need something to help you loosen up, this is the record. Although that is the quality of the punning you’ll find on it too.

“It’s not like Elvis”

The day before I went to see the Mountain Goats I saw the Wave Pictures (who’ve recorded with the Mountain Goats) in a not-very-full room above a pub in Oxford. They put on a brilliant show. David Tattersall, their lead singer, looked peculiar, their bassist looked even odder, and their drummer could really sing.

One of the songs that Johnny ‘Huddersfield’ Helm, the drummer, sang was called Now You Are Pregnant. It’s one of the finest songs about the frustrations of unrequited love I have ever heard.

I’m not sure I should quote the song in full, which is what I’d really like to do, but I do want to single in on the last few lines: “And Johnny Cash died today/ And you’d say, ‘It’s not like Elvis’/ ‘It’s not like Elvis’/ And you would be right.”

Those are the lyrics that lingered with me, of all the beautiful phrases in the song (“stacks and stacks of slacks and black platform shoes”, for example), for the days after I saw the band play. One of my formative musical memories is Johnny Cash’s death, and these reflections which the Guardian published a year after it. It’s not like Elvis at all.

Sleep like dead men – wake up like dead men

Two weeks ago, I went to see the Mountain Goats play the KOKO again. They played, as the set list I’m about to reproduce shows, a lot from the new record, which is a good enough excuse to review it several months after it came out.

Sixth week is music week!

Welcome to an experiment here at jubilate agno – a week of posts on a (very) loose theme. Over the past few weeks, I’ve not not been posting because I’ve been off doing other, more important things than shouting into the void about my opinions. I have, for example, been watching lots of Law and Order: SVU and also, sometimes, been writing linguistics essays, seeing friends out of Finals exams, doing ‘work’ for my ‘thesis’, eating a lot of petits filous, and doing my usual OUSU work more than usual. But mostly watching Law and Order. I’m not ashamed.

The plan, then, is to produce six posts (this one doesn’t count) on the subject of Music. You just have to accept that when I say music, I also mean RuPaul. Let’s see if I can force myself into writing down some of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past few months. If I can make myself go for a run, I can probably do anything.

Not as good as it looks

WARNING: this post contains spoilers for The Walking Dead season one.

I have, as you might have noticed, a fairly serious thing for zombies, and so when The Walking Dead first hit US television screens I tried to watch it then. And couldn’t get as far as the credits of the first episode on more than one attempt.

But once it was broadcast on Channel 5, it became apparent that it was less frightening than episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I found terrifying when I was nine). That’s not the say the characters don’t find themselves in peril – the world’s full of the Walking Dead, which means it’s hard to watch without worrying that something’s going to bite someone. There are some very effective scenes, such as when Frank Grimes, the protagonist, a small town Sheriff’s Deputy who, having been shot, wakes up from a coma to find the hospital, realises the “Do not open – Dead inside” sign on a bolted door means RUN and has to make his way down a dark stairwell lighting his way only with a book of matches. The show’s comic book origins were particularly evident in some of the shots in the first episode, and you really can’t find fault with the beautifully, gorily rendered zombies, or “walkers” as the show calls them.

The show is, however, far from perfect, for several reasons. First off, in a show that requires as much suspension of disbelief as one where corpses stagger through the streets, the writers need to keep the characters’ psychology and physiology plausible. Frank wakes up from a coma after about a month. He hasn’t got a catheter in, which seems unlikely, and, judging by the state of the hospital, no one’s been around to change his IV for a while. Frank should not be alive, and it’s quite hard once you’ve realised this to take the series seriously.

Further to this, as my friend Octavian (she’s my chief horror companion, and the person who held my hand through every horror film discussed on this ‘blog) pointed out, all this adultery that Lori, Frank’s wife, and Shane, his partner, are getting up to does not seem like it’d be the highest priority during the end of the world. Certainly, if I were having sex with my husband’s colleague in a forest during the zombie apocalypse, I’d probably not take my clothes off. And even though it is the end of the world, surely they’re moving a bit fast? How the zombies sense is also not yet clear – they have a sense of hearing (like in Zombieland they are attracted to noise), and of smell (as exploited by our band of survivors in “Guts”), but it seems unclear as to whether they have a sense of sight. If I were a survivor, I’d’ve tried to establish that fairly quickly. Also, as Octavian always says, they’re not exactly careful about whether they touch zombie corpses, or indeed where zombie blood gets, which seems reckless even if the infection seems to be spread by bites.

The show’s (many) attempts at pathos strike me as more telling than showing – when, say, Rick conducted his miniature memorial service for the zombie he was about to use for parts (“he was an organ donor”), this seemed a stupid bit of timewasting, rather than a reminder that he was a human too, once. And yet the show wants to remind us the walkers were humans far too much for my liking. The dead wife in the first episode was enough for us to understand the grief that came along with the epidemic: Rick’s ‘conversation’ with the legless zombie seemed more to reflect on the fact that Rick’s a moron, rather than the enormity of the situation.

In fact, most of the characters seem remarkably unprepared on the apocalypse front (which is fair enough, I suppose) but in these circumstances surely one would spend less time doing laundry (which the women seem to be constantly doing: “I don’t like the division of labour around here”, one of them comments; you’d think less laundry, more looting would be the order of the day) and perhaps more time finding a solid building to hide out in. When Frank, who seems pretty damn slow on the uptake, is destined to be your leader, you’ve probably got some problems.

My major problem with the show is, however, how much it accepts the conventions of the genre, with almost no interest in exploring the framework the generic expectations give it. As soon as the survivors in a show or film don’t call them “zombies”, you can almost always tell where the story’ll be headed. And so far, I’ve seen no sign (from the racial tension in the group (very Night…) to the hanging about in a department store (very Dawn…) to what the mention of the CDC in the opening episode suggests (scientists? very Day…)) that this departs from the conventions of the genre. That’s not necessarily a problem, but combined with the rather heavy handed story telling, it would tend to suggest that this isn’t going to be especially game changing, although it is very pretty to look at. Romero, whose presence looms over zombie films like Homer’s in Epic, is hard to beat, but it would be possible, I think, for a television series, with the scope it has for slower-burn story telling, to use a vision of a zombie infested world to interesting ends, if the approach taken to it was light-handed enough. This does not feel like it has the real resonance of a true classic. Or maybe I’m just annoyed Zombieland was never commissioned as a tv series.

Alternative Vote

A friend and I went out for tea yesterday, and, because it’s a compulsory topic nowadays (places I have discussed it: the pub; Labour Club GMs and Policy Forums ad infinitum; Pizza Hut; my grandparents’ living room), we discussed how we were going to vote in the AV referendum. She is as yet undecided, I’m (obviously, I mean, what do you take me for?) voting no.

We agreed that the thing that probably most annoyed us about the Yes campaign was the anti-politics element in it: the idea that we need to make a change to our politics, and that altering to the voting system is the thing that’ll make our “broken” political system less broken. That it’ll end the cynicism people feel about politics. That it’ll “force complacent politicians to sit up and listen, and reach out to the communities they seek to represent” to quote the Yes To Fairer Votes campaign.

I don’t think it will. A change to AV doesn’t really change anything much, apart from meaning that the least disliked candidate gets in. What would make a real concrete difference to how people regard politics is the introduction of a new candidate to every single ballot paper: RON, or Re-Open Nominations. I have run in both First Past The Post and AV elections myself and voted in both, and there have been times when I felt RON was lacking from ballot papers.

RON allows, in elections, the chance for the electorate to indicate their dissatisfaction with the candidates on offer to them. Having a method by which one would be able to properly indicate a protest vote, rather than spoiling a ballot paper, would almost certainly be a check to elected representatives, even those in safe seats. Especially under AV, where candidates are ranked in order, it is a useful way to indicate distaste for a candidate, preferring that no one be elected to them. It might, as a change, along with the right to recall, really allow people to feel that they are able to engage in the electoral process. Although RON campaigns are often utterly unpleasant (and so often campaigning for RON is banned in elections in which he runs), it is a potentially useful way to really change Britain’s political culture, or at least its voter turn-out.

Rule #32: Enjoy the little things

Some weekends ago (apologies for the hiatus in ‘blogging – think of this as one of your favourite US shows, disappearing mid-season for no discernible reason), I watched Zombieland for the first time. I should, probably, at this point declare that my interest in the zombie apocalypse has perhaps now exceeded normal levels. I am the sort of person who has been working on her plan for the end of the world for quite some time (I did The Road for English Literature A-level), although the friend I watched the film with did give me some excellent new tips, such as cutting off all your hair so it can’t be grabbed by undead hands.

Zombieland stands up as a zombie film, even though it is a comedy, and I say that as a fairly serious fan of zombie films. The zombies are far, far stupider than Romero’s zombies, as fast as one would expect people who weren’t actually dead (these zombies bleed. A lot.) and everywhere. The protagonist (played by Jesse Eisenberg), on the film’s opening, envisages a world aflame. We have little reason to doubt him from all the wreckage we see as he starts to make his way back from Austin, Texas, to Columbus, Ohio. He is the sort of person – a nervy, weedy-looking college student with obsessive compulsive disorder – who would not have made it the months he seems to have done in a normal film. In fact, his obsessive attention to detail and compliance with his list of rules is what has kept him alive until he meets Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee (he and Columbus, the protagonist, do not use names to keep themselves emotionally distant enough to survive).

Tallahassee takes great joy in his work. He is, in fact, the kind of madman one would expect to find at the end of the world – the sort of madman who goes zombie hunting with a pair of shears for fun, whilst on the doomed quest to find the last twinkie bar in America. During a jaunt to a supermarket, they find a young woman and her twelve year old sister, and it’s there that things really set off.

The film is comic,  fairly darkly so, but it is also probably the film in which the characters are most likely to survive a Zombie apocalypse, because of Columbus’ rules, Tallahassee’s joy in killing and the relationships the group build with each other. Together, it seems possible they might still enjoy the little things while also double-tapping any zombie they might see. But the film has made me really quite frightened of bathrooms.

Narrative and explanation

So, this blogging once a week thing is quite hard. Particularly hard when this week I’ve had a crisis of faith about Greats papers, to which the answer is obviously a thesis in Literature, right? So probably narrative and Caesar’s Gallic Wars here I come. Prepare for a lot of mentions of kneeless elk for light relief.

Vergil says this on the subject: Aeneid 10.315f : “Inde Lichan ferit, exsectum iam matre perempta/ et tibi, Phoebe, sacrum: casus evadere ferri/quo licuit parvo?”  (“Then smote he Lichas, from his mother’s womb/ ripped in her dying hour, and unto thee, / O Phoebus, vowed, because his infant days / escaped the fatal steel.”)

Happy Eleanor Day!

You may be interested to know for identity theft/more benign purposes that today is my birthday, my 21^st birthday to be more specific. It is also Valentine’s Day, in case you’d not noticed that today was Valentine’s Day, although I’m not sure exactly how you’d’ve managed that. When I was a peculiar small child, I thought the benefits of the date (heart shaped birthday cakes, primarily) did not outweigh the fact that everyone wasn’t paying attention to me, which is what I felt birthdays meant for everyone else, and I once cried at a shoe shop assistant because of this.

Since then, although the drawbacks have become greater (can you go to a restaurant for a meal with friends on your birthday? Do friends complain if you plan a party for your birthday because they want to go out with their partners instead?), I’ve invented a game which helps me feel far better about having my birthday overshadowed by demonstrative couples, when I’m not a massive fan of demonstrative couples at any time: I pretend that everyone’s making the massive fuss for me. I’m not saying I’m like Jesus, that’s for other people to say, Stew, but I do think that the fact that people give each other presents, often themed in such a way that they do not immediately obviously relate to me (I get pink hearts, Jesus gets a sort of winter thing), might say something about our similarities. The chocolates, the flowers, the special meals with candle-light and all the kissing in public, all of it is some perverse way of saying how grateful the world is to have me, Eleanor Brown, in it.

It is true that I found this intellectual exercise helpful especially when I was single on my birthday: it can’t matter that one person’s not making a fuss over me when almost all the shops are. This year is the first time I’ve not been single on my birthday and it has to be said, I do not see this changing my attitude to what is essentially quite an exciting festival: all the heart shapes and the revolting cards to laugh at, all for my benefit. Having someone take me out for birthday lunch is, I feel, overshadowed by the fuss being made the world over. Being depressed on my birthday seems silly when you can consider that you do indeed have something to be grateful for: my birth.