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1) I have a job for the next 6-8 weeks. It’s only four hours a day (9am - 1pm) but the pay rate is good and it’s in Northfield / Longbridge so I can cycle there. In theory this should cover all my bills, give me some stability and a nice start to each day and leave me plenty of time to do other things.

2) Blueyonder finally upgraded the broadband in Birmingham so I’m now cruising at 4mb with uploads at 40kb. This should keep me content for at least six months!

3) It’s a lovely day!

Don’t worry, I’m not going to keep posting these every week. Just until, well, can’t say yet.

Anyway, should you be looking to stand in a darkened room and listen to music that is not crap in the city of Birmingham this weekend, here’s what I’d recommend.

Friday, I’d go for The Motive at the Sunflower Lounge on Smallbrook Queensway for some jangly rock.

Saturday is Johnny Foreigner, KateGoes and Devil and Casey Jones at the Jug of Ale, Moseley. KateGoes is Kate Thompson’s band who I enjoyed a lot in December at their first gig. Devil and Casey Jones are on my “to check out” list of bands I need to check out and Johnny Foreigner seems intriguing.

Sunday, there’s an all-dayer at the Custard Factory orgainised by local zinesters Salvo It starts at 4.30pm, costs £4 (£3 with this flyer) and features nine bands. I hear rumour there’s a BBQ as well.

Monday sees Bearsuit finally playing in Birmingham at the Flapper. I’ve been wanting to see Bearsuit live for ages now so this is something of a no brainer. £5, 8pm.

I may go to all of these, I may go to none of them, but I hope to take in a couple. Maybe I’ll see you there?

Update: Definitely going to the Jug on Saturday.

Trivial Update: This was the 2,000th post I’ve written on this blog since June 2000. I just thought it worth mentioning.

Do you get that thing where your social life putters along like a crippled shrew for ages and then suddenly bursts into relative madness? Saturday there were two gigs running nearly sequentially in different parts of the city and a pub containing friends. It was originally my intention to do all of them. Then, realising I’d perhaps bitten off a bit too much, it became my intention to do a couple of them. In the end, however, I did them all.

First up was that Gigbeth thing, a series of free entry gigs in the Digbeth district of Birmingham spread over three days. Like a lot of these things it just seemed to spring up from nowhere but it was certainly well organised with a lot of the better local bands from most of the main promoters. As such it’s a good focal point for the local scene, tying everything together and, of course, giving those not involved something hefty to kick against, so here’s hoping it’s repeated next year. I might even make a more concerted effort to attend.

As it was I bumbled along to the Sanctuary club at a little after 5pm (the event started at two) to see what was what. The Sanctuary is one of those old theatre / music hall type venues spread over three floors that’s been converted into a nightclub (along with the Barfly gig venue behind it) and even in the afternoon with the daylight creeping through the dirty windows it had that 2am feel about it. Nightclubs are best experienced late at night when pissed and so it all felt a teeny bit wrong to be there in a daytime sober state, especially as many of the punters were acting like it was a club. Or maybe I’m just getting old, I dunno.

I wandered into one of the smaller rooms where a trio were playing some very competent rock-blues but something wasn’t working for me. I was on my own, for a start, which is always odd at gigs and this club vibe kinda amplified that but, to be honest, the music wasn’t really doing much for me. Competent is a fair stretch away from interesting. I checked the listings and the bands I really wanted to see were on at 7pm so I did what any self respecting person would do. I went to the pub where my mates were.

Suitably refreshed I returned as Distophia were starting their set. I’d seen them as part of the Going Deaf For A Fortnight Project and had rated them highly so it was good to see them again. Unfortunately there was something about the main stage at the Sanctuary that wasn’t working for me. It could have been the way the lights, not really set up for a gig, were shining not on the band but in the faces of the audience, it could have been the cavernous size of the room, it could just have been my state of mind but while everything about the band was spot on and perfect I couldn’t quite get into it. Need a smaller, more intimate venue methinks. At least I do.

Next were the headliners (or at least the last band on) Misty’s Big Adventure who, as you’ll know, I’ve seen numerous times before but never outside of the Jug of Ale in Moseley. The last time I saw them at the Jug in December it was utterly rammed leading me to suspect they wouldn’t be able to play there again lest all their fans die of heat exhaustion. They did play there again (I was away…) but this was the first time I’d seen them elsewhere. It was, as you’d expect, somewhat odd.

On the plus side there was a lot more room to dance and there was plenty of dancing. And there was more room on stage for the band which has got to help. On the downside, well, that venue again. There’s ostensibly nothing wrong with the Sanctuary. It just has a weird kind of vibe, like the gods of clubbing are looking down and shaking their heads at this invasion. Still, Misty’s are nothing if not accomplished at the moment and any doubts about where I was were quickly pushed aside. (At least until Gareth introduced The Wising Up Song as about every bad clubbing experience he’s ever had.)

A new song was premiered, Lots Of Money, a humorous story of a band who buy a bunch of records in a charity shop, copy them, get signed, make lots of money, get copied by 50 other bands, lose their popularity and get ripped off their manager. I don’t think subtext is the right word. In fact it brought home how hard it is to describe Misty’s to someone who’s never heard them. (I went for “Leonard Cohen / Ska Punk / Jazz” in the pub before the gig and Metcalf justifiably declined to join me.) But the fact that they can only be described in terms of other bands who are impossible to describe is a good thing, and this was a good gig leaving me in that usual sweaty positive state. I was thinking I hadn’t seen them for ages yet it had only been three months. That says it all.

(One advantage of the Sanctuary was I did manage at last to get some nice photos of them.)

The day before Jez had emailed saying he was wanting to go to my other planned gig in Kings Heath but due to work-related fragility didn’t want to go alone. Having already bailed out of a gig on Friday I was lowering my expectations so told him it probably wasn’t going to happen, so he went to the aforementioned pub. Misty’s had finished a little earlier than I was expecting so rather than hang about I dashed back to the pub. If we left now we could get there in time for it to be worthwhile, but we had to leave now. Jez thought about it for a minute and suddenly we were in a taxi heading for the Hare and Hounds.

Sequential gigging in the same evening is strange. The ritual of arriving at the venue, getting a drink and going upstairs (it’s usually upstairs) isn’t supposed to be done with a sweaty t-shirt and ringing ears. That’s supposed to happen at the end. “I though you were at another gig tonight” said Andy. Been there, it was great, when are you on? “Five minutes or so.”

We’d missed the first support but, as said, were in time for Una Corda who I’ve now seen an embarrassing number of times. As always they were very good indeed and appear, to my ears, to be pushing their music in new directions. What those directions are I wouldn’t like to say, but this lack of complacency is a good thing. Jez liked them too, which was nice as I’d hoped he would.

Kings Heath is a fairly nondescript area of Birmingham and the upstairs room of the Hare and Hounds is a pretty average sort of place, something between a community centre and school hall, only smaller and darker. It has a glitter ball. It’s not the sort of place you’d expect to see a San Franciscan poet of the Beat variety accompanied by a power-trio of soaring post-rock. Unless, of course, you’ve been to the Hare and Hounds a few times in which case you won’t be surprised at all.

Enablers consist of Pete Simonelli speaking his words accompanied by guitar, bass and drums. The music veered from fiddly syncopated jazzy stuff to full-on hefty rock while Simonelli evoked a cross between William Burroughs and Captain Beefheart in my mind, yet with the craggy intensity of Tom Waites, maybe, and told his stories of, well, I’m not sure exactly as it was all a bit loud, but it was certainly something dirty, decayed and romantic. As the music rose Simonelli transformed into a psychotic preacher and we were no longer in the upstairs of a Midlands pub. We were transported elsewhere to a place of myth, an environment that is universal yet utterly connected that seam of Americana.

In many ways what they were doing was nothing new, but “new” only has so much value. The tools for this sort of thing may be well established but it’s what you do with them that counts. Enablers took the usually disparate mediums of spoken word and post-rock and combined them in a way that made perfect sense, the music giving an intensity to the words which in turn drove the music to new heights. It was, in a word, stunning and I’m surprised more bands don’t do this sort of thing. But then in order to pull it off you’d need someone like Pete Simonelli, the likes of who are few and far between.

There are three mp3s on this page and I highly recommend you listen to this half hour session on WFMU (RealAudio).

Photo by my mum.

Last autumn, at some family gathering or other, my mum was expressing dissatisfaction with her camera, or at least her usage of her camera, and since my photos had recently dramatically improved she asked me for advice. I muttered something about framing and looking for shapes within the image but it didn’t seem to help. The only reason I could think of as to why my photos had improved was because I hadn’t had a job for three months over the summer and my life had slowed right down. Any technical thinking came after as I tried to figure out what it was I’d stumbled upon.

As you’ll know, mum went to New Zealand last month and isn’t doing anything specific with her life while there (you can think of it as a sabbatical). I was just looking through her new Flickr stream and my first thought was “boy has she slowed down!”

So there you have it. You want to improve your photography? Slow the fuck down.

It’s funny, I stay up through the night more often than anyone I know but I very rarely get night shift jobs. I had one last night for the first time in ages, back at the courier depot unloading the incoming parcels so they can be delivered all over Brum, and after nine hours of lugging I’m somewhat pooped.

What was really weird was how different the morning felt. When I’ve pulled an all-nighter at home it’s all perfectly normal, but walking through an industrial estate at dawn (and it was a lovely dawn today - shame I don’t feel comfortable taking my camera to work…) and getting the number 11 bus just as the commuters and school kids were kicking in was very odd (and really annoying what with the absurd amount of traffic on the Birmingham side streets. I’m so glad I don’t have a “normal” job). I guess when I set my own schedule I’m quite segregated from society but in this case the juxtaposition is quite stark. Not in a bad way - I do like night shifts. They seem to go by much faster than day shifts for some reason.

And so I’m off to bed. Enjoy the day.

If you skim read this and intend to leave a comment, bear in mind I’m not talking about you. Probably.

I’ve been checking out the Guardian’s new Comment is Free blog-portal-thing and generally speaking I’m impressed. While it’s good to see the traditional Comment sections of paper reproduced as blog content it’s also nice to see the regular contributors to the paper writing in what I suppose we could call a “blogging voice”, slightly more informal and off the cuff.

The name of the blog comes from a quote by C. P. Scott, editor of the paper from 1872 to 1929. “Comment is free but facts are sacred”, which is a nice piece of brain food if ever there was one and quite pertinant to our modern era of blogging.

In newspapers “Comment” is an important area of the publication, putting the day’s news into context and laying out the paper’s point of view. In blogging, however, comments are what follow on from the main content, are open to pretty much everyone don’t represent the blogger’s opinions. If you like, Blogging is giving a speech or telling a story and comments are opening things up to the floor afterwards.

There’s a reason why most blogs with large readerships turn off comments. People who comment on widely read blogs are inherently fucking stupid jerks who should be shot. On smaller blogs this is not such a problem as they’ll invariably have some kind of relationship with the blogger, even if it’s as tenuous as having followed a link from another blog, but even here it can go wrong. I find myself doing it - skim reading a blog post and coming up with some stupid opinion about it which, when I go back and re-read the thing I’m supposed to be responding to, turns out to be completely irrelevant. This is the main reason I very rarely leave comments.

Comment is Free has comments enabled and will eventually expand to allow commenting on every relevant article in the paper. This is a brave and noble experiment but, by the gods, have you ever read through a popular comment thread on their blogs?

One of the most mind-warping things is that some commenters think they have rights. As someone’s who’s managed a comment-enabled blog for a few years, even at my meagre level, this is a patently absurd idea. Rights? Ha! You’re a guest in my house. Certainly, I invite you in and welcome your company, but if you start pissing up the walls and pouring tea on my cat then you’re out, matey. One of the amusing aspects of that time the band I slagged off found the post was the fact that none of them realised I could delete their rantings and close down the comments. That I left them there meant I felt I’d won. This blog is not the public sphere. It’s mine. I control it in every way. You have no rights.

Over on the Guardian blogs (and countless other places like it) I wonder, do those muppets who rant and rave really think that their comments really hold any weight? Why on earth do they do it?

I don’t think enabling comments is a bad thing, per se. I have them here and enjoy the conversations that happen, because they are conversations between myself and a manageable number of people who come here often. This is a good thing and I’m dead chuffed I’ve been able to nurture it over the years. It’s like you’ve come over and we’re having a nice chat in the kitchen.

Comments on the big sites, though, is like someone talking from a balcony and asking for feedback from a crowd of thousands. If there is anyone out there with something pertinent to say they’re going to be drowned out. It’s probably the potential audience that makes them do it. Sure, they can go to Blogger and respond to the articles on their own blog but no-one will read them, at least not at first. If you’re writing about current events building up an audience is fucking hard so it’s easier to try your luck in the comment sections along with everyone else. But the nature of people who can’t be arsed to do things the hard way or accept that their opinions are nothing new is they very rarely write anything of worth.

There are many lessons here, I think. One of them is that a large audience isn’t conducive to a conversation. It’s actually the antithesis of a conversation, and blogs, the majority of blogs, are a form of conversation. You can’t have a conversation with a major national newspaper.

Just to reiterate, I like Comment is Free a lot. It looks like becoming one of the few sites I’ll bookmark and dip into for a bite of thought and opinion. But the comments? Yeurch!

Apologies for the short notice. I meant to inform of these earlier and forgot, but there are some rather keen gigs happening in Birmingham this weekend. At least I’ll be attending them so if you like what I like you’ll probably like them.

Friday my chums An Untitled Musical Project are playing at the Flapper along with Kid Captain and Sabotage Left. From what I know of the latter two it should be a nice shouty punky indie night. Kicks off at 8.30, £4.00 in (£3.00 if you print off the flyer.)

Then Saturday is fucking packed. First up is the free, as in FREE, gig at the Barfly Sanctury Club, part of the Gigbeth festival from 2pm to 9pm. The lineup is Misty’s Big Adventure, Distophia, The Big Bang, Envy & Other Sins, The High Society and The Twang. Of these I can highly recommend Misty’s, Distophia and The Twang. The others I intend to find out about on the day but “eclectic mix of local talent” would be a good tagline.

Then, if you fancy a quick dart up to the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath you can catch some post-rock action in the form of Enablers, Una Corda and Mills & Boon. The ‘Corda are expected to be on about nine-ish and Enablers are, by all accounts, very good indeed. This one is £6.00 in and is a DIY-type event organised by Miss Lisa should you be the sort of person who likes to support DIY events.

See you there?

There’s an old adage that you know when you’re an real X-er when you can’t help but do X and for some reason I’ve been coming across it a lot recently. A real writer can’t help but write, a real cartoonist can’t help but draw, a real musician can’t help but make music, that sort of thing.

As I was procrastinating this morning by checking out the first episode of David Mamet’s TV show The Unit (not bad but not brilliant) and cleaning our incredibly dirty living room windows when I should have been writing or taking photos or setting up weblogs or doing something else creative I wondered if there was anything I can’t help but do and nothing specific came to mind.

Is this something I should be worried about? Or is it that a real dilettante can’t help but do an infinite number of creative endeavors at a superficial level?

Apparently some guy has successfully sued some woman for libeling him on an internet message board. After disagreeing about Iraq she called him a “nonce”, said he was racist and declared his wife to be a prostitute. He was awarded £10,000 in damages.

Obviously the details of this are not to hand. It may well be that Mr Smith was genuinely harassed and that these accusations seriously affected his ability to function in society. But I doubt it. I mean, if everyone who’s ever been defamed online were to sue for libel we’d need a new planet just for the courts, and yet society seems to function fairly well.

There’s something I don’t understand about libel law. Surely the importance of the accuser is relevant? Obviously, if a national newspaper prints that your wife is a prostitute when in actuality she isn’t then you have good grounds to claim libel. Should the same apply to someone cloaked by the anonymity of a message board?

If someone in authority, who is regarded as telling the truth on matters of importance, tells fibs about you then it’s reasonable to assume that anyone hearing said fibs will take them to be true. If, however, said slander is a result of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory then surely it should be seen as such.

(Let me, as I’m apt to do, hark back to the old comics fanzine days in search of an analogy. According to legend someone who ran a zine got successfully sued by some paranoid jerk because he printed a letter from some other jerk who said nasty things about him. This led to a whole bunch of other paranoid jerks (there were a lot of them in 70s/80s comics fandom…) screaming “I’ll sue” whenever someone had the temerity to point out in print they were a paranoid jerk and everyone just wished the jerks would fuck off, except they tended to run all the zines, comic shops and other things somewhat central to the scene. Once again, fanzines laid the groundwork for the modern internet as we know it.)

It all comes down to reputation, I think, which means the libel laws are a little out of date. Back in the day, in order to effectively libel someone you needed a platform from which to do it. A newspaper or a book. Everyone else was just someone in the street. Now everyone has the potential to have some kind of reputation and a potential audience who will listen to them and take them seriously, except these reputations exist in degrees. I have a higher reputation than some moron who posts “U R gay” in my comments (this happens a lot - I delete it because it’s idiotic, not because I’m concerned anyone will think I’m gay or something) but I have a lower reputation than, say, Kottke who in turn is lower than a journalist for the New York Times. Maybe, when dealing with paranoid jerks who want to sue other jerks for calling their wives dirty whores, Judges should look at the reputation of the libeler. Maybe they do already, although I suspect such a thing would be really hard to quantify.

In the meantime, if someone tells lies about you online, please remember that you’re on the internet. This stuff is normal and no-one takes any notice of it, especially on message boards and forums. Get a grip, dude!