what a week

I spent a lot of this week fretting over my latest attempt to get a promotion to Level E. Only because Es are good. Who knows how it will go this time (I tried last year, but no luck/ability)? All I know is if I just keep going, I'll do it eventually, or alternatively, won't. No huge shame in being Level D (some colleagues I respect have, I assume without actually asking them because it seems a bit rude, decided to never try for promotion) and I kind of like the level of responsibility where I am, so I won't cry if I don't get there, though I will squirm at the kindness I imagine I'll be shown by other colleagues who have seen the 17page application I wrote saying how fantastorific I am, which failed to impress a committee.

Anyway, I submitted a few hours ago (and a few hours before deadline, which always feels simultaneously like a mistake and a triumph). We'll see. It ate into valuable lecture prep time...  

But even that's OK. We all know it's a lot of blather. I hope. 

severance

Late-ish to the party I have been watching Severance sporadically over the last few weeks. I am about 3/4 through the first season. I am blogging about this in large part because I've noticed, looking back occasionally through old posts as I do, that certain shows and films have loomed incredibly large in my life at certain times when I really thought that taking them on linked me to the zeitgeist, and then later that zeitgeist was so dead I didn't even remember the show or the film, let alone being so into it. I suppose this is not different, it's just a show, though it's a good one particularly in the sense that it has a tremendous design ethic and so much of it is people walking down nondescript corridors and delivering dialogue to each other in sparse rooms. That gives the concept room to breathe.

There are similarly no weak characters or actors in the series although I feel that in one sense Patricia Arquette, Christopher Walken and John Turturro are kind of wasted, insofar as while they do good competent work here we didn't need famous people to do this work, only to sell the show. But that's OK, it's not my money, it's Apple's, a part of which comes from money I give to Apple to make tv shows for me. 

It is not a difficult show to follow, I assume, though I do also find that every time I finish an ep, and then read the wikipedia summary, there are things I didn't realise that surprise me. I don't have this problem with Homicide by the way. But then there are no wikipedia summaries on Homicide. 

A lot of people talk about Severance being of-the-moment in its exploration of the value of a complete disconnect between work and home life. But seriously, is that an aspiration? Most people, I thought, were more concerned these days with the blurring of the boundaries between the two. Anyway, I am not watching it as though it were social commentary. 

pintandwefall - your stories, baby

I mean just in case I was in any doubt that I was in some kind of shitty matrix where my own brain was being used to create its own 'favourite band' here is the second most recent Pintandwefall album, Your Stories Baby, from 2020. It has their most absolutely commercial (?) song on it. It also has an opener called 'Titanic' which is brilliant not just for the mental lyrics 'sometimes we do quote the odd Titanic line back and forth' and more, but also the best worst / worst best guitar solo ever... 

I don't feel comparisons do them (or anyone usually) justice, but they do remind me very much of the Undertones, not only in the remarkable pop tunes and very funny lyrics which are wry without being overly intellectual or referential to anything (except I suppose Titanic), and just seem to look at pop a whole new way. Lovingly, but at arm's length. 

I don't know how far back I want to go into their catalogue because while I really love the third most recent, Red and Blue Baby, the older records seem a lot more sort of grungy? Or maybe I should go there and let it work magic on me, which it might. I have purchased a copy of the 2011 Time is Right for Romans, Baby so I guess we'll see. 

(Or I could buy a CD copy of their second album for a mere euro! What could go wrong)

it's just weird though

For the last few weeks that song 'Constant Craving' has been in my head at very odd times. No, I don't have a constant craving for anything, so that's not the reason. It's one of the songs that I guess come under the category of earworm for me but it's so everyday and shrug-offable that I am used to it. In truth there are umpteen such songs attending me every day, just hummable pop, which I ignore or confront. It's really strange to be honest but I deal with it. 

But actually at the moment I have a complete 100% obsession with this album:

This band has all the core elements that I have always wanted from music - very catchy songs, variety, and oodles of humour. I'll get this out of the way right now too - they have great taste themselves, as evidenced by throwing a Magazine album (and the first and also best Madonna album - maybe someone's an alphabetiser like me?) into their Sgt-Pepper-lite album cover. 

Right now my favourite song on Seventh Baby is the second song on side 1, it's improbably catchy (improbable because the music is pretty pedestrian in the verse but the chorus has this crazy one-note bass and a particularly exceptional guitar solo towards the end) and it's called 'Annabella'. Musically the ultimate effect is tremendous and quite dynamic but the best thing is that lyrically it's ludicrously meta - so it's not about anyone called Annabella, it's one of the band members (they all write songs and they all sing I think, but they credit all songs to the group, so there's no clue whether it's Crazy Pint, Cute Pint, Dumb Pint or Tough Pint who's singing/narrating*) telling the other three about a dream she had: 'I saw a silly dream / about us in the middle of a gig/ we were playing/ a song I didn't know/and you guys rolled around/on the stage and I tried/ to do the same/ and you yelled: "Play Annabella!"'

Anyway since my new music portal closed in about 1985 (later in my life than most people's) I have only rarely latched onto new groups (this group has been going for 16 years but only became known to me by complete accident a couple of months ago) with a proselytising vigour - it happens about once a decade so We Ragazzi at the turn of the century, then the Go! Team I can't quite remember when but that's been ongoing for a long time - they put out their first album in 2004 and that's when I probably saw a few of their videos on Rage and couldn't get them out of my head - now this. Obviously this could be a flash in the pan and in a few months I might be Pintandwewho? particularly when it comes out that they are all fascists or something. But at the moment I am absolutely delighted to still be getting great pleasure out of a new record/band. I have the album before this coming to me in the mail and I'm trying not to listen to it too much on spotifuck beforehand. 

*Actually there is a clue. The lyrics on the sleeve are written in four different hands, so 'Annabella' for instance is written by the same person who wrote 'Hard Work' and I think also, relevantly, 'Clues'. 

everything must be recorded

If you told me some stat like that there were more photos taken in 2022 so far than were ever taken in the history of the world before 2000 I wouldn't be at all surprised (though I would ask you how you knew that, and also whether you meant photos taken and developed, or photos taken). Anyway. I have just spent a drab half hour looking through photos on my phone from when photos on my phone 'started', i.e. 2017, and I've been trying to figure out what to do with them, about half of them are photos of Nancy, who is a very photogenic cat but what do you do with a photo of a cat? You don't show them to the cat, and it's not like Nancy has any children or anything who will want nice photos of things in her life e.g. when she slept on the couch etc. The fact that Nancy probably has another decade of life to go (I hope!) only means there are just going to be tens of thousands more pictures of Nancy. She is beloved, that's for sure. 

I deleted about three of the photos when they were obviously mistakes (but none of Nancy). It was kind of surprising I will say to see pictures of people in some instances who I thought were recent acquaintances but who were actually people I knew five years ago, and contrasting that with people from five years ago who I now not only no longer speak to (their choice) but who I haven't spoken to for a long, long time. I know that sounds maudlin but I don't care about those people or miss them, I'm just commenting on the weird tectonic plates of memory. 

What is most important really in looking at that old stuff from 2017 (random date, I'm not that interested in 2017 per se) is how disparate my experiences were, and unfocused. I was certainly doing a lot of random travelling around the western suburbs, primarily on my own, which now seems odd. Anyway, it's breakfast time. 

This post is a lot about what I'm not feeling or doing which I realise seems like projection but it's actually just me going into battle with my old self I think. Nothing wrong with that. Don't want to be a sad old dog who can't change. My life is presently extremely good, and it was on reflection very shit in 2017. 

may 1952 flook

The 24/5 strip has another example of that interesting decision so often made in the US about non-US English and in the rest of the world about US English; it's already been established (sometime last month I think) that they are not only in England but also 'back in England'. But in a comic strip with an average of under four words per frame, who needs that kind of backgrounding exposition? N.o.b.o.d.y. So it's 'you aint paid yer quarter!!'

Also note that very strangely the word 'magic' has been flown in by another hand, I cannot imagine why. After a 'knobbly knees' competition and everything. I wonder what kind of phenomenon knobbly knees is, by the way, and was it really a thing before it became a comedy trope, after which, no doubt, it became a thing? I should look it up. Probably has something to do with a rickets outbreak. 

rabbit rabbit