petescully - @ 20six.co.uk

happy feckin saint paddy's day, ya feckin feckers

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh... or 'Happy St Patrick's Day to y'all'.

America is in love with its Irish heritage, and you really get to see that on St Patrick's Day. Card shops have been stocked up on shamrocks and leprechauns for months, and today the world and his brother are wearing green, even those with no Celtic ancestry whatsoever. In other parts of the US (particularly New York and Boston), parades are taking place to celebrate not just the snake-banishing saint but just the merriment of Irish blood in general. The Irish are seen as a proud, free-drinking, free-speaking (and often free-fighting) people, and culturally I think Americans respect that. "Everyone is Irish today," they say. "Why are they all speaking to each other then?" I reply, drawing on years of experience in an Irish family.

I'm wearing my Ireland football shirt today. It was brought over from England, and has been in my suitcase ever since; I had to give it an airing, it smelled a bit musty. I remember the first time I wore this particular version of the unseemly green polyester shirt - the day Ireland qualified for the 2002 World Cup. I went out that evening to celebrate with three Germans, wearing my shirt proudly. Of course, we happened to be celebrating on the night that England beat Germany 5-1, so my companions and I slunk away to a pub less populated by beery xenophobic Saxons. I was happy England won, don't get me wrong, but didn't want my head to get kicked in. Ireland always comes first.

So, St Patrick, he was from England, wasn't he? Well, pre-English England. Supposedly a Roman/Briton from the north somewhere, supposedly brought to Ireland by Irish pirates. What people don't realise is that he was actually a parselmouth, which is how he managed to get all those snakes to bugger off. Now that's got me thinking - if I can persuade all the spiders to leave California, maybe I'll become a saint! How am I going to do this, I hear you ask?

A big hammer. It's still the best idea there is.

17.3.06 20:59

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three years too many

It is three years since the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq by the 'coalition of the Willing'. Three years since government figures of many nations were hoodwinked into illegal war by false claims of weapons of mass-destruction and unproven (nay, disproven) links between the Iraqi leadership and the perpetuators of 9-11. Three years since the French were vilified by the Americans for daring to use their democratic right and veto an attack on a sovereign nation that had not threatened the West and had offered no haven for those that have. Three years since Blair went before the US Congress and decared that 'history would forgive us,' forgetting that the future might not. Three years since millions around the world protested at this act of oil-soaked imperialism, their marching banners falling on blind eyes. Three years since thousands of young men and women were sent into what they hoped would be a quick and bloodless victory, in a place they were told would welcome them as heroes and liberaters, only to find themselves stuck in a nightmare of death and civil war, in a country that is falling apart because they and their weaponry helped rip it apart. Three years since the Iraqis were given the best hope yet that they would be free of the tyranny of Saddam, only to find themselves occupied indefinitely by foreign forces, overtaken by foreign corporations and overrun by foreign terrorists. Soon, it will be three years since the war officially ended, when the Pres prematurely declared that 'major combat operations have ended.'

One thing is certain. It is not three years since the Bush crime family decided to invade Iraq and 'get Saddam' (and his oil). That decision was made years ago.

20.3.06 06:01

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there's no reason for staying in, there's nothing on the television

Tonight we are going down to San Francisco to watch Art Brut play the Bay Area for the first time. I just wish they could have brought David Devant and his Spirit Wife with them. The Devantistas are playing the 100 Club in London next month - bugger. Great venue, best band ever, and I'm gonna miss it. At least I get some Argos fun tonight. I'll do me some relaxin'. Don't feel great though; got a bit sunburnt yesterday, feel a bit drousy from it.

Still, there is apparently some old Devant stuff to look forward to, as well as some new Vessel/Mister Solo stuff soon to be revealed.



20.3.06 20:36

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Week Twenty-Five: It’s a Funny Old Game

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Boy, do I have a red face. Well, half a red face. We went to a college softball match on Sunday, and the midday sun beating down on my left side left me looking like a Feyenoord shirt. To top it off, my Harry Potter-esque scar now glows an ominous purple. After a week of rain, the clouds have finally parted, and it took me by surprise. Either that or Lord Voldemort has moved to ffice:smarttags" />Sacramento.

The softball was fun; it was women’s college softball, Princeton vs Nevada. It’s a bit like baseball, except the ball is different (and it ain’t soft, as anyone who ever encountered one at school has ever found out). We sat right behind the batting area, behind the high fence where I thought we would be safe from errant balls. I thought wrong; never mind a sun-hat, I could have done with a helmet, the amount of slices that came our way. All in all though, it was good, wholesome American fun. Princeton absolutely trashed Nevada, despite Nevada’s best efforts to put them off with some bizarre, possibly sectarian team chanting. I half expected them to be standing around a cauldron.

Speaking of sport, local NBA team Sacramento Kings are having an exciting run of form. I managed to watch their televised game against the LA Lakers last week, which despite the clash of purple polyester was a pretty great showdown. The Kings eventually won fairly comfortably, with Ron Artest winning a battle of wits against Kobe Bryant, and Mike Bibby scoring some cheeky three-pointers. Are you impressed I remember all the names? Well, I had to look them up.

And I have decided that I will watch as much of this summer’s World Cup Deutschland 2006 on Mexican TV. I caught a match on Saturday between, um, two Mexican teams (one of them was called ‘Tigres’, I caught that) and I was reminded of how much more fun it is listening to Latin American commentators when somebody scores. Motson, Pearce, Gubba, Davies… you guys just cannot pull off the famous cry of…

GOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

21.3.06 22:30

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what is it good for?

"I didn't want to go to war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong... No president wants war." (George W Bush, March 21 2006)

and yet...

"I'm a war president!" (George W Bush, February 08, 2004)

He's got a point, though. He certainly didn't want to go to the Vietnam War, not when there were so many other people there getting killed instead.

22.3.06 00:32

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Art! Brut! Bottom of the Hill!

There’s not much glamour about the Northern Californian weather. We drove through a storm and a rainbow to get down to ffice:smarttags" />San Francisco, to find a little club in the reportedly trendy Mission district called Bottom of the Hill. A little piece of my five-and-a-half-thousand-miles-away home were in town, and I wasn’t going to miss that for Pop Tarts. Art Brut, who I’d first encountered two years ago in the echoing halls of Tate Britain, have got themselves a little following in the US, though nobody here knows what ‘Top of the Pops’ is, or why Eddie Argos wants so badly to be on it.fficeffice" />

The Bottom of the Hill is a nice little club, a crossover of grunge and colour, like a shotgun marriage between Ikea and the set of Doctor Caligari. The first band up were a Seattle four-piece called Crystal Skulls, who, had they been British, I might have detested. Their tight rhythms gave their dreaming chords freedom to drive sheep across the river; that at least is how the singer of the second band, Gil Mantera’s Party Dream, might have put it. They weren’t really a band – they were two very inventive and very bizarre performers who largely danced in tight leather pants (which gradually fell down) to a heavy brew of drum machine, reverb guitar and infectious vocals. While eating a hickory-smoked sausage, and complaining about leaving hearts and cats with broken feet in San Francisco. I had no idea how a tour-tired, jet-lagged Art Brut could follow them.

But you see, Americans love a British accent, especially one with as much cheeky schoolboy as Eddie Argos. Perhaps it’s the floppy hair; it can’t be the moustache. They launched with ‘Formed a Band’, before Eddie foolishly asked the audience for requests (I responded with a strategic ‘Aunty Mabel’; though he was perhaps the only one in the club to get that David Devant reference, he wasn’t even going to try). Mister Argos performs like a preacher, imploring with his flock to go home and form bands while they still can. While his lyrical themes bring Jarvis Cocker and Pete Shelley to the pulpit, I can’t help thinking Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey was in the gene pool too, but that’s just me.

Art Brut means ‘outsider art’, but what I’ve always liked about this band is that they are as normal as the next bloke (oh, except that the next blokes were Gil Mantera’s Party Dream). Heir to the Buzzcocks’ fortune, Eddie sings about normal, everyday things such as remembering being in love at fifteen, sending text messages to your girlfriend, getting wound up in the pub and, um, getting turned on in modern art galleries. In “Rusted Guns of Milan” we find the earnestness of being impotent, a kind of 21^st Century answer to “Orgasm Addict”. To be closer to his audience, Eddie goes on a little mid-song walkabout, while frustrated stagehands desperately cling on to his microphone lead, pulling him back like a paddleboat on the Serpentine. There’s nothing ‘outsider’ about this band.

During the encore, Eddie jokes about “Good Weekend” being number 1 in Narnia. They are almost there. I enjoyed watching them at small London venues, while word of mouth (and NME appearances) made breathing space ever more infrequent at their gigs. Now they have spread their message to this end of the globe, picking up faithful followings, and it is still fun to be at an Art Brut gig. The new tracks show promise, if only of ‘more of the same’. Which sometimes, when we are five and a half thousand miles from the places and faces that have always been home, is just what we want.

art brut - gil mantera's party dream - crystal skulls - bottom of the hill

23.3.06 00:50

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alumnus, alumni, let's call the whole thing off

Oh no... I am in danger of turning into my nemesis, Lynne Truss. I have allowed a teeny tiny little grammatical error to actually annoy rather than amuse me. I see it everywhere, here at UC Davis, and I cannot understand how it has been allowed to proliferate. I don't know if I can count it as an example of language change, or just a local peculiarity, or what - perhaps it is because this particular error is being perpetuated by a frigging university, and not by the everyday speech of the common road-ragin' folk.

"I am an alumni." I read this earlier on in an email. I have seen "UC Davis Alumni" on car registration plate holders, wondering why only people with more than one UCD graduate per vehicle are allowed them. Nobody seems to know that the singular form is 'alumnus' (or 'alumna' in the feminine, though women can use 'alumnus') whereas 'alumni' (or even, yes, 'alumnae' if you are being a Truss). Alumnus - Alumni. It ain't rocket science.

I wondered if it was becoming like the word 'data'. Someone said to me that we should be saying 'datum' and 'data', not just 'data'. I disagree, because 'data' is a concept much like 'water' - we say 'some data', not 'a data'. An alumnus, however, is a person. Alumni are people. Person, people. Singular, plural. Oh hells bells (I mean, Hell's bells).

I am a great champion for linguistic change, an observer not a preserver, I understand more than most that language is written in sand not carved in stone (incidentally, does anybody remember that great South London musical, the Sand of Music? "The Eels are alive..."). Yet this really bugs me, because it is being done by a university, one of those places that lives and dies by linguistic conformity.

24.3.06 17:00

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snow angles

Up in the mountains, up in the snow...

27.3.06 05:43

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Week Twenty-Six: Snow Business

So I’ve been here six months. Six months since I last saw my family, six months since I rode the Tube, six months since I watched Match of the Day, six months since I heard the terms ‘Asbo’, ‘Happy Slapping’ and ‘Crazy Frog’ (now there’s something I don’t miss). Now it’s all ‘Roseville Auto-Mall’, ‘Ask your Doctor’ and ‘Triple Doppler Radar’. And despite the recent rainstorms and floods (and, um, tornadoes), the weather is still much better than in ffice:smarttags" />Britain, though there is one thing I will always miss – snow. Yes it’s freezing cold and causes pipes to burst and cars to slide all over the place, but there’s something magical about a blanket of snow. So on Sunday we decided to drive a couple of hours east of snow-free Davis into the Sierra Nevada mountains to see some of the white stuff close up – and we were not disappointed.fficeffice" />

I have never seen so much snow in my life!! The sky was blue, and it wasn’t particularly cold, but I can’t imagine the blizzards that must have raged through those valleys. We stopped at a gas station on the way, and the snow was so deep that we could not read the road signs. Snow over a metre thick was piled up on the roof, bringing to mind ominous echoes of Bad Reichenhall, while small white hillocks were only revealed to be buried vehicles when their aerials poked out of the frozen mush like pathetic grave-markers. Yet with a blue sky and a well-ploughed freeway gliding through the chocolate box landscape, it’s easy to forget the lethal side of snow.

We passed by Donner Lake, a place synonymous with icy death. It was there that the Donner Party, a group of California-bound settlers, met their fate during a ferocious winter storm in the 1840s, resorting to cannibalism. With that in mind, when we reached the town of Truckee for lunch, we both ordered vegetarian dishes. Truckee is a nice little place, whose history lies in the westward expansion of the railroads that united the nineteenth century States. It kind of reminded us of one of those model towns that accessorise Hornby model railway kits.

From Truckee we drove to Squaw Valley, the small but world-renowned ski resort that audaciously staged the 1960 Winter Olympics, fending off Alpine bids from Innsbruck, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and St. Moritz. Nestled comfortably in a valley around a frozen lake, the only thing missing was the White Witch’s castle. Skiers big and small were pouring down the mountains like tiny black raindrops on a window. I have never wanted to ski, ever – lots of danger of injury, freezing cold weather and ridiculous outfits – if I’d wanted that I would have been an X-Man (actually, that would be cool). But after actually visiting a ski resort, even after getting ripped off with an over-priced and under-sized beer, I’m starting to see the attraction of skiing. At least there are no spiders up there.

So after six months I have finally seen a new side to California, the snowy side. We are just as far from the beach here as the breathtaking mountains, and whatever else London might have to offer such as newsagents, Match of the Day and decent news channels, it doesn’t have that. Score one for Arnie’s state.

29.3.06 09:32

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what is it good for? "I didn't want to go to war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong... No president wants war." (George W Bush, March 21 2006) and yet... "I'm a war president!" (George W Bush, February 08, 2004) He's got a point, though. He certainly didn't want to go to the Vietnam War, not when there were so many other people there getting killed instead.
22.3.06 00:32	Permalink / 3 Comment(s) / Comment

snow angles Up in the mountains, up in the snow...
27.3.06 05:43	Permalink / 2 Comment(s) / Comment