What We Talk About When We Talk About Gloves

One week ago I met Yvette and Dominik in a pub in Wood Green to watch the Klitschko vs. Haye fight. I'd never really watched a boxing match before, but fortunately Yvette was on hand to give some expert opinion. We got there well before the start and bagged a table, which was a good job, as the pub soon filled with aggressive north London blokes.

The fight itself was disappointing as a spectacle, although as it went the full 12 rounds at least no-one could feel they didn't get value for money. It was good to be watching it with someone who knew what they were talking about, but somewhere at the back of the pub there was a guy who kept shouting "JUST FUCKING DO HIM!", so all options were covered. There was some booing in the pub at the points-win being given to Klitschko, but even I could tell that he'd easily had the best of the fight. I'm told there was a small Ukrainian contingent in the pub who seemed to have brought their own vodka, but I don't remember seeing them.

We stayed far too long in the pub afterwards, drinking. During the fight the place had been so crowded and the night so warm that condensation had started forming on all suitable surfaces. This made the men's toilets pretty inadvisable. There was also an Irish guy in there who came very close to accidentally pissing on me rather than into a urinal, and I wasn't sure what the correct etiquette for that situation was.

We were eventually thrown out of the pub at its 2:15 closing time. On the walk back to my sister's flat an urban fox darted across the road some distance ahead of me, so it was all good.

People Ask Me Why I Don't Like Coldplay

'Los Gatos'...was also the last thing The Sleepers ever recorded, as the group lost patience with their out-of-control lead singer. "'Los Gatos' shows the effects of speed," says Michael Belfer. "We had to drive Ricky back to his grandparents every night while we were recording; if he went into the city, he'd disappear. One night we tricked him: we said we'd take him to the speed dealer. All five of us were in a Mustang and as we turned down the ramp onto Highway 101. Ricky freaked. We were holding him down but his legs shot out and he kicked the transmission into reverse. There was an incredible bang and the car just coasted. The band just lost it. They dragged him out and beat him up. He was black and blue. He sang 'Los Gatos' just after that."

- Jon Savage, sleevenotes to Black Hole: Californian Punk 1977-80

No Time To Be 21

With age comes the realization that of all William Gibson's protagonists, the one you resemble most closely is Coretti from "The Belonging Kind".

Write What You (Don't Really) Know

For the first time in a long time I've gotten around to doing a little bit of non-academic writing. It's only a fragment, but unlike everything else I've done before this is - at least nominally - part of something larger. Long time readers may remember me pondering writing a science-fiction novel set in Athens, and this is the first bit of progress I've made with it. The fragment, called "ANTHINT", is up over at N.A.O.W.F.I.T.

Comments are, as ever, welcome.

Interpretations

I was clearly wrong in assuming that the American operations had had little effect on this valley - they had freed up the antique smuggling market.

'And what have you found out about the life of this ruined city?'

'I don't understand. What do you mean?'

I tried again. 'Have you found out roughly what the plan of the city was... where the bazaar was, the religious schools?'

'No'

'The smaller mosques, the gardens, the military barracks?'

'No. You are asking difficult questions. We just dig downwards and find a jumble of things. It can be very frustrating - yesterday we dug a pit ten metres wide and didn't find anything worth anything.'

'What did the ordinary houses look like?'

'Like this house - built from mud, but the rooms were very small and crowded, and many of them were multistoried, perhaps because they were built on such a steep cliff. We can sometimes guess which the better houses were from the state of their foundations. But it doesn't help us find the treasure - many of the houses have nothing in them. Nothing at all.'

Abdullah interrupted, 'I think I've found a bathhouse, there were a lot of pumice stones in it and guttering which brought the water up to the ridge from a spring three kilometres away.'

'That is very interesting. Anything else.'

'No.'

'What do you think about the people who lived here?'

'Gamesters,' said Bushire, and everyone laughed in agreement. 'We find so, so many playing pieces like this bronze dice. This old man,' Bushire said pointing to a toothless villager, 'found a whole set of beautifully carved ivory chessmen a month ago, in one of the smallest houses on the hill. Our ancestors weren't Taliban.' The Taliban banned chess. 'And he's just sold a wonderful carved wooden door, one and a half metres high, with tigers and hunting scenes, to a merchant from Herat for a lot of money.'

'How much do you sell these objects for?'

'This,' replied Bushire, holding up the twelfth-century ewer with its bold wave pattern, 'is worth one or two American dollars - good money.'

- Rory Stewart, The Places In Between (2004)

Warm Leatherette

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to pass my driving test at the second opportunity. Today I completed the Pass Plus course, which covers things like rural driving and city driving. The last bit was motorway driving, which meant I had to drive to Leeds and back. Motorways aren't as difficult as I'd thought they might be, although travelling at high speeds is something I'll have to get used to. And I can't believe that some people drive for the first time on a motorway without having done any instruction.

In a couple of weeks I'll get the Pass Plus certificate, which will let me sort out a deal on insurance. Then I'll be loose on the roads, so some people may be more likely to get a visit.

Today will also be the last time I ever see my driving instructor, probably, which will be a bit weird, as I've seen him for two hours a week for the last eight months.

Germ Free Adolescents

I woke up this morning and found Twitter telling me that Poly Styrene, singer with the under-rated punk band X-Ray Spex, had died of cancer at 53. Here's their appearance on Top of the Pops in 1978, doing the single "Germ Free Adolescents":

A Blast from the Past

You don't expect to hear about people being arrested for possessing Semtex anymore: up-to-the-minute British terrorism seems to involve explosives made in your kitchen, which I suppose shows that the drugs trade is better funded than Islamic fundamentalism. Semtex, like the phrase "Christmas bombing campaign", belongs to a bygone era. It's only a matter of time before Peter Kay does a "Do you remember the Provos?" routine.

Thinking about it, I'm also amazed that Luke Haines has never formed a band called "Christmas Bombing Campaign", but that's another matter.

The Dustbin of History

I've deliberately not been commenting on Libya here, for fear that I'll end up issuing orders to General Steiner, but a turn of phrase in one of Gaddafi's speeches this week conjured something up from memory:

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on - into the dustbin of history!

- Trotsky to the Mensheviks, at the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, 25 October 1917

"The dustbin of history" is one of our terms for finality, for putting history behind us, where it seems to belong. There it was as Trotsky spoke on the stage of world history, our present-day ironies curling around him like an invisible snake. There it was in Hanover, New Hampshire, materializing right before your eyes if you were reading a certain story in a certain moment: no thing of the past or even for it, but a trap, a death sentence, or maybe a goal, a promised land, that can be found at any time. It can suck you in; perhaps it can be escaped. Leon Trotsky consigned the Mensheviks to the dustbin of history in 1917, and there they remain, with his shade now keeping their company.

- Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (1995)

Census

Inspired by this post:

1981 - Living at home in Stockport with my parents and sister.

1991 - Living at home in Stockport with my parents and sister.

2001 - Living in a student house in Nottingham.

2011 - Living at home in Stockport with my parents.

Hmm.

You Could Leave Your Door Open

The menace of the blackout gangs reached the headlines with the Skipton Street murder of seventeen-year-old James Bolitho Harvey, on Saturday 21 March 1942. Harvey and his younger brother had come out of the Elephant and Castle station at midnight on their way home from a West End show. They went to the coffee stall and then towards the stop for the Brixton tram. Almost at once, they were set upon in the dark by a gang seeming to consist of seven men, though only three were caught. Both boys were robbed, Harvey was beaten to death with a lead-weighted cosh, his fifteen-year-old brother kicked into semi-consciousness. Witnesses at the coffee stall heard their screams but assumed that it was yet another 'drunken squabble such as we often hear around here'. 'I'll never forgive myself for not going,' said one of the men at the stall.

- Donald Thomas, An Underworld At War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War (2003)

My dad's mother, living in London during the Blitz, used to wander around the streets during air-raids rather than use the public air-raid shelters, which she believed to be wretched hives of scum and villainy*. The book suggests that she wasn't all that wrong.

* Not a direct quote.

Revolutionary Research Methodology

I've been refraining from commenting on Egypt here, on the basis that I don't know anything about Egypt, and that my main opinion - that an Egyptian democracy would be better than an Egyptian dictatorship - doesn't add much to the discourse.

Yesterday, watching the BBC's piece about the role of the internet in the protests, I was struck by how vast and diffuse the body of data is. Anyone who wants to write a history of the 25th January movement is going to have to get to grips with Facebook pages, Twitter posts, mobile-phone videos spread across a number of different sites. And that's without even factoring the ephemerality of those sources in. Somewhere in academia, someone must surely have begun working on research methodologies for the online age: I'd be really interested to see them.

My Eyes Never Sleep

Sheffield, January 2011.

An Idiosyncratic History of the Music Video, Part 3

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

One for panto season this, but there's also the fact that the video to Adam & the Ants' Prince Charming (1981) is, from about 1.40 in, one of the finest music videos ever made.

The video serves to illustrate something that I think is missing from chart music at the moment. At some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s, pop music lost its ability to be as gloriously, brilliantly strange as this. It's probably to do with the increasing development of manufactured acts. Acts have always been manufactured to some extent, of course, but up until the 1980s it was a question of management finding a subcultural scene which developed from below and developing acts from it. The New Romantics are an excellent case in point. In the era of The X Factor the programme is its own scene, allowing things to be controlled almost completely from above.

If You Know Your History

University College London, December 2010.

Dreamers

On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. Most of the field was a public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn't suppose they would want to.

- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)