To promote the new Mr Big album, Billy Sheehan and Eric Martin did a sort of acoustic gig interview press call sorta thing in association with Planet Rock and Yamaha at Ronnie Scott’s. This is a verbatim transcription of their performance and the interview that followed.
As ever, feel free to borrow it, but please cite me … and if you use it to earn some cash, at the very least buy me a beer. Ok?
It’s strangely chilly in my new abode, and as I sit on my bed and type ginger is poking his nose through the gap in the sash window. Longingly.
I am in pain, of various types and in various parts of my anatomy. Not all of this pain is a result of being severally bitten by ginger. Every time I grind to a halt, he takes it as an indication that it is necessary to bite my feet. But stillness is one of the ways that I can dull the other pain.
I am by nature a hard-working and physically fit individual, and yet at this juncture I find myself bereft of gainful employment and broken in several ways. My left shoulder is in almost constant pain, my right shoulder is tweaking, I have tennis elbow, a possibly broken thumb, and either mild groin strain or the beginnings of a hernia.
The perfect time to move house, hump boxes of books up and down stairs and do stuff, stuff, and more stuff. The world shifts, but I feel more and more at sea as my surroundings sift and change along with it. Each time I move, I unpack fewer things, and more boxes stay unopened, undisturbed, contents largely unremembered. Those things I do unpack are not those things that I consider useful, but those things which remind me of who I am, or whom I am meant to be.
I now reside in someone else’s world, even though that someone else now inhabits someone else’s world. Interchangeable worlds. Adjustable worlds.
The move aggravated every part of my body. I am used to feeling physically in control, in command, on top of things. Now I am in constant pain. I have no idea how so many parts of me have broken so quickly. And with injuries I cannot exercise as much as I ought … which aggravates everything.
And as if that were not enough, I am having major communication problems. It’s odd how so much happens all at once. This is the way of it.
Ginger is now curled up at my feet, half laid on my calves, his ear flapping as it just touches me. I cannot move without waking him.
Ginger spends the day poking his nose through the gap at the bottom of the open sash window. He wishes to be set free, and watches the sun all day.
Motion. It takes many, many forms. It is, in many ways, akin to a royal lineage, moving from the singular to the many, or the many to the singular. An individual’s motion can be a complicated thing to analyse, as there are invariably very many individual motions making up an individual’s motion.
For starters, it’s as well to differentiate between the primary and secondary motions, paying attention to the fact that what appears to be the primary motion may turn out to be anything but, merely a catalyst of some sort, or a sort of diversionary motion, distracting the casual observer from what is truly undergoing flux.
Secondly, the motions identified ought to be split into two categories, motions towards, and motions from. Typically, individual motions are more than capable of being motions towards and motions from simultaneously. That and the same motion can appear to be in different directions to different observers.
Take one ginger cat. This move, for him, is a move from a familiar place to one unfamiliar. His resistance with regards the cat basket was minimal, because he knows that not only is is capture inevitable but actually desirable. The sudden lack of furniture tells him that a new patch is imminent. I suspect that he is under the bed as I type. This is his default position in times of trauma.
For me, the motion is simultaneously towards and from, retrograde and progressive. From renovating my own three bed house to rooming in a shared house as a sort of concierge. Every move sees me moving further away from what once I was. Every domicile introduces a layer of insulation from ground zero. And yet I still retain links to my past that irritate me in astonishing measure. The past is not another country. We are pioneer, adventurer, traveller, tourist and tour guide in our own unique destination. And our destination is both where we are and where we aspire to be, while providing our own slide show of where we have been.
We are also our own boarder police, and sometimes are obliged to take us aside and grill us with regards our reason for visiting.
We lie to ourselves as we lie to them.
We spend our time wishing we were anywhere but where we are. Ginger cats concentrate their geographical discomfort into a few short but irritating days. Then they are masters of all they survey.
If only we could say the same for ourselves.
Blogging is a strange thing to do. With an idea, or more usually an irritation, comes vast quantities of literary histamine, which builds up until the fingers erupt in pustules of words, rancid and stinking as they drip onto the virtual page.
I ought to be out in the sun, topping up my vitamin D levels, balancing my life, inhaling the essence of spring which even the wood pigeons have smelt. Instead, I sit inside, with a sore shoulder, a veritable Job-lot of other aches and pains, and I bludgeon my way through the difficult first chapter of my new work. It is a short story, or possibly a novella, or perhaps even a full-length novel. I simply don’t know. I’m going to let it make up its own mind.
It’s a very strange feeling, writing with only the loosest of plans from which to draw. I simply do not know what the second chapter will bring, though I suspect it already does. My job, it seems, is to simply allow it to be.
As a musician, I was known for my technical ability. To me, it was about headroom and freedom. It was about knowing that when I started to play, I could pretty much let myself go, as it was unlikely that my technique would break down in any serious sense. There might be the odd glitch, but when you hear a player (by which I mean a virtuoso) play something ‘not quite so’ you should be thankful. Assuming they’re neither drunk nor bored, you’re hearing them in the act of reaching for something. They may fail to grasp it, but they have the imagination and the chutzpah to go for it. They are like the sportsman who goes for something special, not because they want to show off, but because they see an opening. In short, we’re all going, but we might as well go trying than retiring. Reach for something.
This, I hasten to add, is not from the same stable as ‘impossible is nothing’, or ‘fight, the unwinnable fight’. People cite these as evidencing the indominability of the human spirit. They are, however, indications of utter stupidity. Impossible is impossible. If you can do it, someone was lying to you. The unwinnable fight is unwinnable. You either run, or find a way of turning it into a winnable one.
So. I write a ‘thing’. I don’t really know what’s happening in it, though as a sort-of science fiction thing I have had to create an entire world-view. This is quite difficult. You can trust me on this one …
So, I have to trust myself, trust in my technique, trust that it will turn these feelings that I have surrounding my characters into the prose I want. I have to have faith in myself.
Now, that’s a difficult thing to do, when my body’s rebelling against the very things which make it worthwhile, and make it what it is. Trusting my brain to come up with the goods when it can’t produce enough of the chemical that allows my brain and body to act in concert. The left hand that controls the cricket bat, the ‘e’s', the fork, the coffee mug … that left hand is flawed. And yet I write a books with sinister overtones.
Perhaps that’s where my dopamine goes – into my prose.
Well, they do say that when one door shuts, another opens. It’s bollocks, of course, but sometimes, just sometimes, these platitudes have a basis in the real world.
One of the things that happens when a nasty, incurable, unsuspected disease pop up its ugly little head is that you become super-sensitive. It’s a little like the syndrome which makes you look at the ads for the car you just bought so that you might convince yourself that you were right, after all.
With something like parkinson’s, there is a movement from the point of diagnosis. The symptoms from which you suffered suddenly become directed, comprehendable, permanent. No longer are they funny little things that just kinda happened, maybe because you were just getting old, maybe because you drank too much on Thursday, maybe because you did something too much, like playing the guitar too much, and just fucked your hand.
What happens is that suddenly it’s a thing. It’s a fucking thing that’s doing things to you. It’s a thing. An actual thing.
It’s not that it sits there, stroking its white cat as it explains how it’s going to make you suffer as it switches off your life support systems one-by-one … ‘sooon you will type with only one hand, Doctorr Langman, yes indeed. That word’s a bugger, eh?’ No. Sadly. It would be so much easier if it were … a real active thing that you could fuck right up, hurling hubris right up its miserable ass.
What happened, however, is that a little part of my brain fucked up. ‘We are delighted to inform you of the results of your DAT scan.’ Delighted? Wankers …
So, impaired dopamine uptake, download, whatever.
Anyway, I have an actual thing, so anytime I hear of anyone else sharing my thing, I am all ears. I don’t search it out, but it comes to me. Sometimes the things which find me out are interesting, while some things are anything but.
I stumbled into a website today, whose author ‘believes in the body’s natural ability to heal itself.’ and he has a PhD. So he has some authority, right?
Yes, the body is s self-healing organism, though as yet it has failed to work out how to re-grow limbs, how to recover from having major organs removed … how to regenerate the basal ganglia. Bugger.
But what really interested me was that the ‘about me’ section mentioned the author’s PhD, but not what it was in. Obviously a medic, right? Or possibly Human Relations and resource Management.
I had to do some work to find that out.
The fact is, the author is wilfully misrepresenting.
The disease wilfully misrepresents. It misrepresents you. It makes you something that you’re not, that you weren’t. There’s a sort of obsession, a mutually supporting way of life. You suffer from it, it allows you to broadcast it to the world. To tell everyone.
I know I’m doing it now …
But we enter into a relationship with our (you see, I was about to write that insidious word, ‘condition’) disease. It becomes part of us. It’s a parasitic relationship, and yet a saprophytic one simultaneously. It becomes part of our very identity.
And it does so by right royally fucking us up.
The very definition of an abusive relationship. One which one simply cannot leave. And so one which one must embrace. Because what does not kill us makes us stronger. And we all know that there are two ways to survive in a dangerous situation. The first is to escape, run. If one cannot run, one must embrace the attacker, because otherwise they get room to swing.
PD, no matter what that PhD says, cannot be outrun. If you try to keep your distance, you have no control. You must embrace it. That way you might just be able to exercise some sort of control. Some.
But the fight is one you will lose. You may just be able to decide when, however. Under what conditions. With what outcome.
It’s counter-intuitive, perhaps, but when someone or something imposes themselves on you, they bless you with the gift of choice. The evil genius gives with one hand as they take with the other. They are the bastards who give you life.
Ah, the great pension, er, awkwardness.
Pensions are, as we all know, something of a problem. Over the last few years the state pension has become less, well, valid, while private pensions have dipped and, in some cases, simply vanished. If you’re unmarried (or unciviled), your partner’s pension has long been out of reach on their death, and we still have to buy an annuity with our funds, even though annuity rates are crap, and skewed towards those who have lived less than abstemiously.
The whole system is so iniquitous as to be risible. The richer you are, the more the taxman gives you when you save. Wealth breeds wealth. Naturally. It was ever thus.
Now public pensions are to be squished.
But pensions take many forms. My father, while he was dying of cancer, moaned at me during one of the few lucid conversations we ever had. (the following is made up, but utterly the spirit of our conversation. It is a poetic translation).
It’s not fair, he said. I put aside all this wine so I could drink good claret in my dotage, and now I’ve got six months if I’m lucky.
Get drinking, I said.
Well, I would, but this bloody disease means I can’t stand the taste.
Now that’s really unfair. It does, however, evidence the different sorts of pensions we can create for ourselves. He wanted, alongside cash and a house and all that shit, to lay down luxury for his old age. Like a cash pension, the wine he laid down accrued value over the years – both financial and gustatory. I have four bottles left. I could have sold my share, but that seemed mealy mouthed. One particular case, for example, would have netted me one hundred and forty bottles of Jacob’s Creek. But by god, it was fine.
Pensions take many forms. We all ought to lay down all manner of stuff for our dotage, as we find possible. In today’s ‘Me! Now! More!’ world, however, many find it hard. My pension provision is pitiful, but then, I’ll never enjoy it anyway, as barring a miracle cure for Parkinson’s, I’ll be a drooling, shuffling idiot long before I would start to receive it. And that’s ignoring the possibility of a one-way ticket to Switzerland …
But there’s one other thing that is astonishingly iniquitous. That is that what we receive in our dotage from the state and from private pensions merely reflects the money we have produced. And there’s no need to point out that those who make the most money contribute the least to our culture. They do balance sheets. cf. Oscar Wilde and accountancy.
The truth of the matter is that the great breadth of culture which supports this country, and provides pleasures for all of us, including the daftly rich, is a product of a lot of people doing stuff for love.
I once taught a man guitar for the princely sum of £500 per day. Nice work. I got it. Sounds great. But that was after years of dedication to my particular art – and much of it was unpaid.
The musicians who play at the weddings of bankers work extremely hard without the rewards of those who hire them.
The poems they read are written by people whose income is often pitiful.
The people who teach their children earn a fraction of those who bleat at them because their spoilt shit of a child can’t be bothered, and they think it’s the teacher’s fault.
Our value to society bears little relationship to our income. And the way we are treated in old age also bears little relationship to the contribution we made during our lives.
Pensions are iniquitous.
They encourage greed, not generosity.
I think I’m going to cash mine in. I’ll use it to fund my trip to Switzerland.
A little like WMD, these three little letters seem to be causing more division than they are solidarity.
International Women’s Day.
If you tweet, you’ll have noticed a preponderance of twits based on this very subject. Here are some:
Men annoyed by #iwd are no different to white people opposing Black History Month. See that position in society? Yeah, you’re occupying it.
So, International women’s day falls on pancake day, and during british pie week … I sense a conspiracy
RT @annielennox women perform 66% of the world’s work, earn 10% of world’s income and own 1% of the world’s property <-anyone got stats?
What exactly is the definition of an “international woman” anyway? #lexicalambiguity
Int Women’s Day, huh? (so, Er, what are we supposed to be doing? Sighing with a Yank? Knitting with a Brazilian? Masturbating with a Pole?)
fuck off with blahday this blahday that, stop naming every fucking day after some stupid campaign or quest you utter cuntoids.
Please stop naming days after things, I get there are issues in the world but I don’t need a revamped calender to feel empathy. I guess hallmark will have cards and chocolates to follow shortly?
Nice. RT @thisiswhistles: 10% off at all Whistles stores today to celebrate Womens day.
I particularly like the last one – let’s support gender equality by … [what does Whistles sell?]. It’s like Women’s Hour … a long, intelligent discussion rounded up by ‘but we can’t resist a lovely psair of shoes *titter*’ … I despair.
It seems that we have something of a Bushitis happening – that is, the if you’re not with us, you’re against us.
It is possible, surely, to wonder at the use of such a day without necessarily criticising those for whom the day is directed? And this really is the crux of the biscuit, surely – by and large, women in the good old west have pretty easy life … because everyone has a pretty easy life. Even those who have crappy lives have it relatively easy compared to [insert third world country which is notoriously crappy to live in here].
It’s the same as time. Students often, when studying Shakespeare, or the Early Modern period in general, are hyper-quick to leap on the ‘women were downtrodden and had a crappy life’ bandwagon. Well, yes, they did. But then, pretty much everyone who wasn’t wealthy had a shitty time of it. Life was hard. Nasty, brutish and short.
Yes, gender makes a difference, and yes, it can lead to specific types of discrimination, and various levels of crap being hurled at you.
Yes, being female in many countries leads to a whole raft of specific unpleasantries, all of which would be better off dealt with, and which we would not put up with here.
But let’s get one thing reasonably straight. Over here it really ain’t that bad.
So – International Women’s Day. What is its purpose? It seems like no-one is quite sure. Personally, I find this obsession with named Days and design a candle for another disease (oh, and keep myself firmly in the public eye) and so on quite pointless. I simply don’t think they raise awareness so much as salve consciences. They are symptoms of western guilt.
And on that note, I’m off to teach special needs kids how to play cricket.
PS. this just appeared in my twitter feed. Sums it up, really:
RT @theQuietus: “Leona Lewis has been named by Metro readers as the most influential woman to live or work in London in the past century”
I was pootling around in a bookshop this afternoon, while my prescription was turned from being two boxes of pills into … two boxes of pills with stickers on … and heard a young girl ask her father what ambidextrous means.
Quick as a flash, he answered neatly and calmly, saying something like ‘Being neither right nor left-handed, but being equally skilled with both hands’. Good job, I thought, but then thought some more.
It doesn’t mean quite what he said, but contains an odd bias.
Ambi means something like ‘on both sides’ while dextrous means ‘like the right hand’, seeing as dexter is the right hand (sinister being the left).
Ambidextrous therefore, if one translates it literally, means ‘on both sides like the right hand’, or, more simply and poetically, ‘having two right hands’.
It is therefore the antithesis of being a bad dancer.
Now, I found it interesting that a word which relates to the equality of two parties can only express it in terms of the party considered superior.
Or, in the words of Rex Harrisson, ‘why can’t a woman, be more like a man?’
This either indicates an intrinsic dualism in language, a dualism which supports if not impels discriminatory behaviour, or suggests that equality is neither desirable or, in fact, possible.
Vive la différence?
It’s been a strange few weeks, as they say. Interesting in a chinese sense but, I think, ultimately rewarding.
I say I think because no-one can ever predict what will occur, but the signs are positive. All manner of self-destructive, self-distracting behaviour ceases now. Has already ceased. The energy I have been dissipating, squandering, casting onto the rocky ground, will now be directed, focused, efficient. There is much to be done. New decisions to be made. New journeys to undertake,
I write this on the train, as I journey towards lunch, towards minutiae such as a new library card – a statement of intent, perhaps? It’s hard to know what path unfolds before me, which direction of the several which shall be on offer I shall take. But it’s not direction that counts, it’s the manner in which you take each step. And I choose firmly forward.
There are several things which demand my attention, but where their variety once was a hindrance, it now serves as a filip, a bolster, an incentive to organisation.
This, I concur, is neither the most interesting nor the most poetic of pieces I have written, but that’s ok by me. Validation, after all, is internal.
There is an interesting adjunct to all this, however. It all revolves around one issue, one person, one relationship. I truly have no idea whether this time around, for it is a second chance, we can make it work. There are many problems which we, in the strange euphoria which surrounds a re-uniting of two individuals who fractured massively and comprehensively, are conveniently forgetting. They will be discussed, and they will be problems again, no doubt … but ultimately the approach will this time different. On this we are both adamant.
Second times around are fraught with danger, but also present opportunities, not least for the bond that is repaired being stronger than before, the desire to succeed stronger than before, and the very presence of the obstacles which will be presented by all and sundry … incentives.
But first we must negotiate some particularly tricky minefields. Carefully. Slowly. Deliberately. savouring every pitfall exposed and device defused along the way.
And yet it must never be forgotten that new beginnings necessarily follow on from, or in certain circumstances overlap with, endings, that they can be voluntary and involuntary, welcome and unwelcome. This is perhaps more than usually pertinent seeing as the train journey mentioned above happened a week before. That is to say that I write now with a sense of hindsight which I could not have mustered then.
But what to say? What to write?
Yesterday’s three-post blogarama notwithstanding, I am strangely subdued in terms of wordsmithery. I wouldn’t exactly say I am suffering from writer’s block, more lexical laziness, and as I try to tap this into my screen (I can barely call the manner in which I insert words into this document typing at the best of times, and this is not exactly the best of times, as I feel as if I am trying to swim through molasses … the world of words is dark, turgid and restricting) I find I’m having trouble putting one word after the other.
I have no posts to rival Release the inner slut, or even Cartesian, moi … but how ought I respond? How does this relate to the world outside words? When in a lull, does one try to write one’s way out of it, try to force the words out, squeeze the prose until the pips squeak, so to speak?
Or does one simply shut the notebook?
