The trouble with staying in bed because of a feverish cold is that – if you’re me – you get rather accustomed to staying in bed per se. And the negative voice in my head that’s been troubling me for most of my life says, ‘Why bother getting out of bed at all? What’s the use? What’s the point?’ And so on until the grave.

I wonder if the builders of the new Wembley Stadium feel like that.

‘So, why is the stadium so delayed?’
‘Well, what’s the point… when you come down to it…Oh, it’s all so fruitless…’

The blank slate of the day ahead. A world of possibilities, or a frightening abyss. Vote Dickon Edwards.

There’s a long list of things I could do with my waking hours. Indeed, many of them are tasks I’ve promised to do for others, or which others expect me to do. I may not have any money or source of regular income, but goodness knows there’s people of unkinder ages in unkinder climes who’d regard my circumstances as enviable, penury or no.

Just had a chat with Ms O from upstairs. She recommends I loaf around the Muswell Hill Road / Archway Road junction in the rush hour to view the long queues of commuters who have to make their tube to bus connections there. To get a sense of perspective: I could be doing that every day.

I’ve started attempting to get some exercise into my life. I do possess a pair of trainers, but purely for their intended purpose. T-shirt, jersey, M&S jogging bottoms, trainers. I’m not proud, but at least it’s the uniform for the job. Currently I run around Highgate Wood for about 45 mins, plugged into my very small Creative Muvo Slim MP3 walkman, listening to downloaded podcasts of Woman’s Hour. I now realise why many joggers have portable players: to minimise the embarrassment factor of being seen jogging at all. If people are giggling at you as you jog by, it’s okay. Because you can’t hear them.

****

Last Monday: to the Boogaloo with Ms Anna to see Bert Jansch, backed with Bernard Butler. I don’t know much about Mr Jansch, but Ms A is a fan and I’m happy to accompany her. This is the way I’m going out most of the time. I’m not keen on going to events by myself much at the moment. Given the choice between seeing a gig by someone I admire by myself, and meeting a friend or two in the pub or at a dinner party, it’s the latter every time. I’m starting to really crave friendly company when going out.

It’s actually a book launch-cum-gig (which the Boogaloo specialises in), to promote a new non-fiction book by Will Hodgkinson called ‘Guitar Man’. The tome is partly an account of the author’s own experiences in learning to play guitar from scratch in his 30s, and partly a portrait of the noted guitar players he tracks down for tips. Among the big names sharing his jolly guitar-related adventures are Roger McGuinn, Johnny Marr, Mr Jansch, and Mr Les Paul.

Mr H has that kind of curly mop which 2006 fashion smiles upon. If you’re born with curly hair, the trends of the times may persuade you to keep it short, even straightened-out, unless you want to risk being labelled ‘retro’ in some way. Though that’s never bothered ME, of course. Now, you’re allowed to let curly hair grow out with pride in the clubs and bars of Old Street. As long as you look more Marc Bolan than Miriam Margolyes.

Curly is definitely ‘in’, for now. Tick, tick, tick. That’s a Fashion Clock ticking, not a comment on head lice.

So, Mr H opens the event with a reading from his hair, sorry, book, and it does sounds funnier and more entertaining than a book about playing guitar could nominally have a right to be. He rightfully cuts the actual muso stuff down, concentrating on the quirky travel-writing, anecdotal side of his adventures.

I hear he writes for The Idler, and wonder if he’s related to Tom Hodgkinson, the Idler editor and author of the excellent ‘How To Be Idle’. Possibly a brother? There is a facial resemblance, but it could just be a coincidence… I wonder this aloud at the gig and am told that, yes, he IS the brother of Tom H.

Occam’s Razor in action there. Though not used to cut hair.

Despite his documented new guitarist skills, Mr H doesn’t play any music himself at this event. He instead introduces Mr Jansch and Mr Butler and leaves them to it. Their hair is comparatively minimum-risk and sensible: Mr J sports a thinning but entirely present crop – looking pretty good for a sixtysomething. Mr B has his usual floppy but tidy fringe – looking pretty good for a thirtysomething.

Glancing at 1965 photos from when he was called ‘The British Dylan’, it’s clear Mr Jansch cares as much about his appearance as his guitarist skills. Back then, he had a thick mass of sexy beatnik tousles framed with devilish sideburns. A very cool, very deliberate look. Likewise, when Bernard Butler first appeared in national press photos circa 1992, as the guitarist and tunesmith in Suede, his hairdo was definitely striking. It was floppy and girlishly long, as opposed to long in that rather tacky ponytail way that men who work in guitar shops (or comic shops, or advertising) have. These are men who understand the importance of beautiful hair as much as beautiful guitar playing.

I mention all this Good-Looking Guitarist stuff because the audience for this gig has a notably high female presence. Unusual for what you might presume is a rather blokish, Mojo-reader event. I’m not saying women only listen to records by good-looking, cool-looking men, but the aesthetic side of things must help.

And the two gentlemen do make a gloriously sweet and beautiful sound together. Mr J sings and plays a chiming acoustic, Mr Butler accompanies on electric. The latter employs his trademark indie-glam riffs and pronounced melodic flourishes (ie the Bernard Butler Sound), but carefully adapted in just the right way to suit Mr Jansch’s songs. And that’s about as ‘Guitar Player Monthly’ as I get.

I chat and drink for a while afterwards, with Ms Anna, Ms Shanthi, Ms Leigh, Ms Terri, Ms Lora, Ms Emma J, Ms Anneliese, Ms Red. A nice evening.

In the fading grip of la grippe, or at least a cold with feverish elements if not full-blown flu. The usual hot and cold shivers, like a broken shower. But yesterday seems to have been the worse of it: I could barely leave the bed.

Phone call from a journalist who wants to interview me about the ‘Beautiful And Damned’ club night. He was there and loved it, apparently. It’s been a while since I’ve been interviewed for a proper UK newspaper as opposed to a fanzine or webzine. I pride myself on giving good interview, and am looking forward to it. As soon as I can think clearly.

Official confirmation comes in that I’m definitely on the ballot paper for the May council elections.

One more very Don Loos quote:

Mr Coogan has a very curious accent in this movie. His character Charley is a rather goofy and uptight English gay man who’s lived in the US for the last twenty years. Accordingly, his accent is a mix of slightly-camp Mancunian with a Mid-Atlantic twang. He calls chocolate ‘candy’. It takes some getting used to when you’re familiar with Coogan’s usual voice. We’re also treated to an unlikely scene where an attractive young man pleasures himself to secret closed-circuit TV footage of Mr Coogan sweeping up in his underwear. The other way round would be more believable, but then, much of Mr Loos’s movies involves a certain suspension of disbelief. You just sit back and enjoy the unlikeliness of it all.

But Mr Coogan’s main storyline, involving a fear that his boyfriend’s sperm has been used by their lesbian friends to father their child, suffers the ensemble movie curse of being upstaged by other more engrossing plots. Not least the storyline involving Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character, an older and less rabidly evil version of the Christina Ricci role from “The Opposite Of Sex”. Ms G is a homeless gold-digger who inveigles her way into a wealthy household, bedding first the (gay) son then the father.

She even gets a poolside bikini seduction scene, just like in the other film:

From The Opposite Of Sex:

From Happy Endings:

(to be continued)

Saturated with the inevitable cold that’s going round, I stay in and rent a new movie. I’m rather enamoured of the DVD vidcap function on my computer, where one can pause the movie complete with subtitles, and save the image. It enables you to quote the dialogue and visuals at once, being careful to avoid spoilers.

In fact, I think I can get away with showing stills from late in the movie without blowing the main plot developments, as long as they’re out of context and out of order. Proper trailers do that all the time. This still, for instance could be from the last scene, or the first. Actually, it’s from about 15 mins in. But that’s a one-off detail, don’t fret:

This is from “Happy Endings”, a US title made in 2005, released on UK DVD this week.

Summary: “The Opposite Of Sex” director Don Loos does more of the same in his unique style of self-aware black comedy. His favourite themes are all present and correct (blackmail, definitions of parenthood, abortion, adoption, gay relationships, family secrets) but this time they’re played out as a multi-plot ensemble piece. Lisa Kudrow is fantastic, Steve Coogan acts straight as a gay man (Cashback Mountain, anyone?), Maggie Gyllenhaal steals the film. Not as striking as “The Opposite Of Sex”, with which it’s inevitably compared, but worth watching for the performances, Coogan novelty factor, and Mr Loos’s unique meta-narrative title boards that punctuate the action. They’re in the same vein as Christina Ricci’s waspish voice-overs from that previous film:

In fact, this very night (Weds) also marks the “Happy Endings” UK cinema premiere as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Opening Gala night. While Ms Kudrow and Mr Loos are a few miles away at the Leicester Square Odeon, presenting the movie on a huge screen to a sold-out crowd, I’m watching it here at home on DVD. So it’s technically not quite “straight-to-video”, as the painful euphemism goes.

Things are changing in that respect, as it is. I’ve read a number of recent articles about the cinema versus DVD schedules now being on a par with hardback books versus paperbacks. Big screen distribution costs so much money, that in terms of recouping finance, a cinema release can often be just an expensive, luxurious, limited-edition advert for the later DVD version, where a profit margin is more likely.

(to be continued)

This only applies to those who use the LiveJournal Friends Page system to keep up with this diary.

I’ve just realised that the syndicated Atom feed includes all the diary entry’s text in one’s LJ Friends page, not just an excerpt and link like its RSS counterpart.

So if you’d like to follow this diary on your LJ Friends page with fuller entries, click here to add “dickon_atom” as a Friend. And make sure you de-Friend “dickon_rss”.

If, however, you’re worried about me posting long entries that rudely dominate your Friends Page (the next entry is full of DVD vidcaps), stick with the RSS feed, which acts as a kind of ‘cut tag’.

Sunday: to Rooz in Old Street for the first Fosca rehearsal of 2006. Kate plays my guitar on the bouncy “It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters”. So I can, well, bounce around the stage with just the microphone.

We also start work on “We See The World As Our Stunt Doubles”, “Come Down From The Cross, Someone Else Needs The Wood”, and new versions of “Confused And Proud” and Kate’s song “Evening Dress At 3PM”.

I dust off my sky-blue Cocteau Twins-esque chorus pedal, in the new Fosca spirit of attempting something dreamy but wordy. Rachel says we still sound like Orange Juice, though.

I like to think my vocals on “Cross” are quite Dean Wareham-y circa Galaxie 500’s ‘Strange’. That means nothing to many, everything to me. Mr Wareham’s voice on that song is a kind of existential boyish squawk, breaking up – cracking up – as it battles with a melody that’s clearly too high for him. I far prefer it to his later, lower & safer vocal performances. I remember how upset I was when the first Luna album came out (Luna being the band he fronted after Galaxie 500). He’d started singing within his range; perfectly in tune, but less exciting to my ears. I prefer the Icarus hysteria of his early singing style. It just has to sound confident enough, that’s the trick. Deliberate rather than a sheepish mistake. Like Mr Samuel Beckett said, ‘fail better’.

The hands that build Fosca:

Tom Edwards:

Kate Dornan:

Saturday is a traditional day for protest marches in London. I’ve been sitting here at my PC for some hours, shielded from the Highgate rain, engaged in a quiet sit-down protest of my own.

The Internet photo-hosting company Flickr recently deleted author Dennis Cooper’s account. They did so in such a coldly destructive and blanket manner that I feel a small boycott is in order on my own part. I have a paid Flickr account myself, so I’ve been carefully removing every single image in my account and re-hosting them elsewhere. It’s taken a while to sort through my old diary entries and change the image links, but I’ve done it all now. No more Flickr-hosted photos in my diary from now on, not if I can help it.

It’s a shame, as the service is otherwise very handy and user-friendly, which is why I happily bought a year’s paid account. Suffice it to say that I won’t be renewing the subscription. It’s like a stationer selling you a scrapbook, then suddenly taking it back after eight months of regular use and tearing up all the pages, purely because they didn’t like what you put in it.

I’ve stopped at deleting my own Flickr account altogether just in case I require it at some point. It’s like rebelling against Rupert Murdoch’s control of things: you’d be silly to boycott watching The Simpsons if you enjoyed it, just because it’s an essential part of the Murdoch empire. I try to use independent bookshops over Waterstones, Amazon and Borders, but it’s hard to ignore a franchise’s 50% discount of an indie bookshop price when you’re living on a limited income. You do what you can according to your own conscience and needs. Living entirely on principles is often a luxury lifestyle choice for those that can afford it.

A little backstory for the uninitiated. Dennis Cooper is an internationally renowned cult author of some decades’ standing. His novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, etc) are often visceral, explicit and darkly funny punk-rock tales of beautiful boys engaged in all kinds of masochistic sex-and-murder situations. Often the stories venture into impossible and surreal dream-like scenarios, continuing in the tradition of De Sade, Octave Mirabeau, William Burroughs, and so on.

His online blog is quite unique: stimulating, intriguing, personal, sometimes shocking, often inspirational. It tends to be illustrated with images of his selection. His readers are curious to know what goes on in his mind and what inspires him, so he obliges us. Some blog illustrations are found images, some are DVD vidcaps, some are from his own camera. At times he uses images which are what the Internet tellingly terms ‘Not Safe For Work’. (Who is this Mr Work person, and why must we care what he thinks, anyway?). It’s the use of others’ images rather than what they depict that is the Flickr reason for deleting Mr Cooper’s entire account, it seems.

In blogs, the use of images which technically belong to others is something that is generally not jumped upon, due to the free-for-all nature of the Web. Everyone does it, usually in the spirit of what magazines call ‘review purposes’. If the copyright holder minds, they should contact the blog author, not the host. The image is not the point – it’s the selection and juxtaposition that matters. Like DJ-ing or making a compilation CD to show the world who you are yourself, or the way you’re feeling, or discussing what interests you. DJs in small clubs don’t tend to pay PRS royalties to the artists whose work they’re spinning, but proper radio DJs do. Likewise Internet blogs versus published books. It’s all quoting and pointing, to make a point.

To put images into their online blog, many people use a third party image-hosting service like Flickr, because it’s terribly easy to use and organize. It now transpires that Flickr take their guidelines for content seriously enough to abruptly terminate Mr Cooper’s entire account without question. It’s so much not their stringent rules that offend me, but the thoughtless manner with which they applied them in this case, deleting everything regardless, including his own personally-taken photos. As the images had become an integral part of Mr Cooper’s blog, it’s difficult not to equate this act with at best nannyish ignorance, at worse vandalisation and book-burning.

Mr Cooper in his blog:
“I tried to reason with Flickr, saying they were destroying eight months of my blog, and that I would delete any offending images if they would just restore my account. But they refused. Honestly, I’m crushed by this. I started this blog casually, but it’s been my central artistic work for months, and now it’s all empty, a ghost, ruins. I’m pretty devastated by it. Silly as it may be, I’ve put a lot of time and energy and ideas into this blog, and to have all those months of work ruined is hard, very hard.”

Mr Cooper’s status as an internationally award-winning novelist, poet and cultural critic means nothing to Flickr. Thankfully, Flickr is not the world. DC DOES mean something to his many readers, students and admirers. The happy ending to this sorry incident is that many DC fans have been clever and kind enough to help restore his blog by pooling their own computer skills and resources.

To my friends out there who use Flickr I say: take heed.

Postscript: I learn later that today’s march in central London was for free speech; calling for freedom, tolerance and that particular quality lacking in Flickr on this occasion: reason.

At an arty event in a Kings Cross sex shop basement the other day, I noticed someone was handing round flyers for a one-off club night that plays Talulah Gosh, McCarthy and 1000 Violins.

BIG PINK CAKE: “A celebration of C86 with its befores and afters.”
Saturday April 8th, 8pm to 1am.
Free entry.
Venue: The Royal George, Goslett Yard, off Charing Cross Rd. Tottenham Ct Rd tube.

I receive an email from the Tate Gallery shop people. They’ve seen my earlier diary entry moaning about the lack of available postcards relating to the Gothic Nightmares show, and are happy to inform me that Fuseli’s Nightmare is now back in stock in postcard form. They even offer to send me a free card in the post, which is terribly kind.

Also, they point out that people can order ‘custom ‘prints’ of Tate Collection works that aren’t available as postcards, like the Blake ‘Satan’ I was keen on. Only thing is, prices start at £28.

It’s great when you get an email out of the blue like this from someone stumbling upon your diary.

According to the website statistics, this diary now receives 111,000 ‘hits’ a month, which boils down to 12,000 ‘visits’.