For those who weren’t there, here is my set:

1. Life In Tokyo by Japan
2. I’m Waiting For The Man by The Velvet Underground & Nico
3. Evolve into Robots by Kraftwerk versus Bill Hicks
4. Ping Pong by Stereolab
5. Rock With You by Michael Jackson
6. Babies by Pulp
7. Woeboegone Wanderers by Wild Beasts
8. A complete history of sexual jealousy (parts 17-24) by Momus
9. We Call Upon The Author by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
10. Say Try by The Karelia
11. What She Came For by Franz Ferdinand
12. Maneater by Hall & Oates
13. Hey Boy…You’re Oh So Sensitive! by The Just Joans
14. Fuckoff Is Not The Only Thing You Have To Show by CSS
15. Lust for life by Iggy Pop
16. Reward by The Teardrop Explodes
17. Revolution by The Beatles

A website is not a shop, though it sometimes tries to sell you things.

A website is not a magazine, though it thrives on image and content.

A website is not a television, though it can display moving images and sound.

A website may share family resemblances with all of the above, but it is an entity in itself. Nevertheless, if I were going to put websites, or at least blogs, into a pre-existing pigeonhole I think would choose the letterhead, which in design terms is virtually identical to the blog. For instance:

• your template must be able to accommodate numerous different types of content
• as well as a prominent logo, you need to include other relevant information
• the letterhead, though it should be well-designed, should never overwhelm the content

The following examples of letterhead design come from Ellen Lupton and Elaine Lustig Cohen’s book Letters from the Avant Garde.

I mentioned to them that I had renounced football gossip and try to avoid the sports pages of news websites to which they seemed nonplussed: without football, what were we going to talk about for three days?

The answer? Old football, specifically the choices made by Graham Taylor in the run up to the 1994 World Cup, for which England failed to qualify.

Reminded of this conversation, I spent about ten minutes the other day putting together an England squad consisting of the worst players picked by Graham Taylor. This is surprisingly easy to do:

1. Chris Woods
2. Gary Charles
3. Earl Barrett
4. Carlton Palmer
5. Keith Curle
6. Geoff Thomas
7. Andy Sinton
8. Mark Walters
9. David Hirst
10. Brian Deane
11. John Salako

When put in the same team and with the passing of the years, they don’t seem quite so bad — they were, after all, star players in their own middling sides. Unfortunately, in the context of a national team that wanted to qualify for a major tournament they were less good.

The conversation turned, as it will these days, to the end of the civilization, via a combination of peak oil and environmental collapse. What amazes me during these conversations is how optimistic everyone is.

“America will come up with something, if they put their minds to it.” He paused. “They put a man on the moon, so I don’t see why they can’t make hydrogen fusion power work.”

I hope so. It would be a shame if greed and selfishness prove stronger than the desire to preserve civilization for our grandchildren. There’s a brilliantly prescient passage in J.G. Ballard’s Hello America (written after the oil hikes of the seventies) which imagines what would happen if we don’t come up with a solution:

All over the world industrial production began to falter. Stock markets slumped, avalanching numerals in Wall Street, the Bourse and the City of London showed all the signs of an even greater recession than the 1929 Crash. By the mid-1990s the automative giants of the United States, Europe and Japan had cut car production by a third. As armies of workers were laid off, hundreds of component manufacturers were forced into bankruptcy, factories closed, dole queues formed in once prosperous suburbs.

It sometimes seems as if the onslaught of modern culture is primarily a means to dilute the impact of any experience you might have. Even if you happened to see something of unparalleled beauty (e.g. Bergman’s sublime Winter Light), its impression fades fast when you turn immediately to a barrage of daily news.

On Saturday we went to see contemporary dance* at Tramway that attempted to translate Nietzsche, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch into dance. It started with a perverse representation of the sadistic intent in Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walking and then one of the male dancers delivered a frenetic monologue listing “suicide, cunnilingus, pain, orgasm, fucking, fellatio, masturbation, torture”. The effect of this on audience was for them to break out in nervous laughter. I’m not sure what the alternative was.

The rest of the performance used more conventioanl contemporary dance tropes — lots of jerking movements, entangled limbs, and passionate stretching — all of which makes this viewer’s spirits soar and his body feel lighter. However violent the dance became, there was always something fragile about the dancers that kept you engaged. The only slightly disappointment was the lack of contrast between violence and silence*: it was all violent.

* CAS Public, a French-Canadian dance group, performing Helene Blackburn’s Suite Cruelles as part of New Moves International’s annual New Territories festival of dance and performance.

* The first contemporary dance I ever saw was Saburo Teshigawara’s Absolute Zero in 2000, where the contrast between the tiniest movement of a finger tip and a sweeping gesture of the whole body was sublime.

• All the members of Pappy’s Fun Club are endearingly geeky. There is nothing threatening or confrontational about them. It is nice to have comedy with a bit of humility, if only to negate the arrogance of people like Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr.
• The skits and sketches are really lo-fi and kooky, which means that they are “cool” and independent.
• The adlibs are as funny as the scripted material.
• There is great dynamic between the four of them — they are like Hot Chip or the Spice Girls, with each Pappy fulfilling a different role.
• Like Flight of the Conchords, they make great use of amusing rhymes in their musical numbers.
• Recurring motifs don’t feel crowbarred in.
• Matthew Crosby looks a lot like a young Woody Allen — his devious little grin is funny in itself.

Hopefully if they go to Edinburgh this year they will find a way of expanding the scope of their show. A musical would be nice.

I saw Robin Ince at the Tron Theatre on Thursday evening and found his warped lecture on being a liberal relatively amusing, but not quite enough to laugh. Trouble is, if you don’t laugh or at least smile broadly, the comedian marks the joke down as a failure, loses confidence, and becomes more desperate.

Really, they shouldn’t worry: funny ha-ha jokes are so passé, far better to be funny peculiar.

Robin Ince, who I knew previously through his Book Club, has always struck me as a rather endearing character who likes books. For this tour, however, he has developed a manic (”I think I’m a bit bipolar!”) persona, a scatty, scattered delivery full of asides and asides of asides. It reminded me a little of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine where footnotes have footnotes, but without the lucidity.

From what I could gather, Ince has been touring this material since last year’s Edinburgh Festival, which makes you wonder how much it changes from month to month. Surely by now he is bored of delivering the same self-consciously self-questioning lines as if he had just thought of them?

Where it worked best was when he stopped trying to make people laugh and just allowed his material speak for itself. The bits of Stephen Green of Christian voice being shat on by a seagull and his great impressions of Richard Dawkins — these bits could have cohered into something elegant and intriguing about atheism. Unfortunately, Ince went to great lengths to establish that he wasn’t anti-Christian in any sense, which rather undermined the message.

Overall, it was good, three-star kind of night. The absence of Philip Jeays was incredibly annoying (it was the main reason I went!) and I would have quite liked one of Robin Ince’s brilliant John Peel impressions, but what can you do?

I have a good deal of sympathy for Taoism and love tea, so it was a perfect fit. Here are some choice quotes:

[Tea] has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.

The world is groping in the shadow of egotism and vulgarity. [. . .] Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.

The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous!

The nineteenth century, pregnant with the theory of evolution, has moreover created in us the habit of losing sight of the individual in the species. A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school. We classify too much and enjoy too little. The sacrifice of the aesthetic to the so-called scientific method of exhibition has been the bane of many museums.

The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of the useless.

It has been said that a man at ten is an animal, at twenty a lunatic, at thirty a failure, at forty a fraud, and at fifty a criminal. Perhaps he becomes a criminal because he has never ceased to be an animal. Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires.

Thus they sought to regulate their daily life by the high standard of refinement which obtained in the tea-room. In all circumstances serenity of mind should be maintained, and conversation should be conducted as never to mar the
harmony of the surroundings. The cut and color of the dress, the poise of the body, and the manner of walking could all be made expressions of artistic personality. These were matters not to be lightly ignored, for until one has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty. Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist,– art itself.

I can smell the slightly fruity musty odour of my jumper. A jumper that lives, for the most part, amongst the raisins, teas and oatcakes in my drawer at work.

I hear the continual whirr of the servers, the occasional beep of a computer or a phone, a patter of voices, people talking quietly about work and lives, outside there is a rumble of HGVs.

I touch the keys of the keyboard, my back and bottom sit in the chair comfortably, I’m not slouching or crossing my legs. My wrists rest on the laptop.

I see the electric lights, the computer screen, Monday morning faces, the dirty rain lashing against the windows.

I taste death, a claggy feeling. I am dehydrated, my Iron Buddha tea hasn’t satiated my thirst.

My sense of balance is wayward due to tiredness.

The temperature is slightly cold, but only slightly — a tiny chill across my back.

I am not hungry but will eat an apple in ten minutes to get a sugar boost.

You’ll notice that I included other senses beyond the usual five, because the usual five seem quite restrictive and don’t acknowledge all of the sensual irritants we have to face. Once I have done this, I can then focus — that is the idea, anyway. In reality, it is Monday morning and my brain is all over the place.