troubled diva  
 

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Thursday, July 13, 2006

17:00

Mood: Jaded. Ready to go home, but I should really stay here another hour or so.

Physical state: The body is wearying, despite the post-5pm mental upswing that almost invariably occurs at this time of day. (For some reason, I do a lot of my best work between 5pm and 6pm.)

Other observations: It feels weird to be blogging about trivia at a time when K and his family are still grieving - in fact, I'd say that they are all probably hitting the worst of it right now - but I've sort of decided that I want to keep blogging about trivia, and I don't want to blog about private sorrows. So if you'll excuse the elephant in the room, then we can proceed.

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16:00

Mood: Considerably less enamoured of fiddly repetitive tasks than I was an hour ago. They got even fiddlier, and so stopped being pleasantly mindless bung-some-music-on-and-let-your-fingers-fly chewing gum for the brain. In fact, I had to turn the music off altogether.

Physical state: Well, the tea was nice. (Christ, he spends FIVE MONTHS doing INTERESTING THINGS in London, and tells us NEXT TO NOTHING about them because he CAN'T BE ARSED, and then expects us to be interested in CUPS OF CHUFFING TEA, honestly, this blog stretches patience to the LIMITS.) But I reckon I'm about two hours away from crashing and burning. And, er, about three hours away from entertaining a house-guest whom we haven't seen for several months. Oh dear.

Other observations: Doing multiple copy/pastes without the aid of ALT-TAB is a right old pain. It's a Remote Terminal Access via Java thing, the details of which I shan't presume to trouble you with. Hark at me and my tech talk!

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15:00

Mood: Pleased with myself, as I've just had my most productive hour of the day work-wise: fiddly repetitive tasks, which needed sustained concentration.

Physical state: Ready for a cup of tea. Last night's hangover has yet to strike in earnest, but that normally comes later in the day.

(Alan, K and one of K's work associates, sitting outside The Social on Pelham Street, yakking into the small hours. It's not often that K partakes in midweek social activities, so we were in no hurry to cut the evening short.)

Other observations: In order to maintain concentration upon aforesaid fiddly repetitive task, have just been using shiny new 60gb black iPod for the second time ever, the first time being on the walk to work. Did I mention that I have spent the last couple of months more or less living without music? The combination of broken laptop, broken iPod, broken Discman, living in a hotel during the week, and only being able to play gentle, soothing, K-friendly world/jazz/folk at weekends (and frankly, there is only so much tasteful Ali Farka Toure strumming that a man can reasonably take) meant that I could go for days on end without listening to anything remotely challenging. Hell, I left London still thinking that Infernal's "From Paris To Berlin" was a hip new dance track, just beginning to break through in the clubs... and as for your Raconteurs, your Kooks, your Dirty Pretty Things, your Lostprophets and your Automatics, I can't even begin to form an educated position (although I can certainly form an educated guess, sneer sneer).

(And the really weird thing? After a while, I more or less stopped missing music altogether. Who knew?)

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14:00

Mood: Awkward. That 13:00 update was posted somewhat after the event, and it seems far too soon to be resuming the exercise.

Physical state: More comfortable than I have been all day, as the al fresco lunchtime over-heating effect meets the aircon-chillbox effect halfway. No post-prandial mental dips here!

Other observations: I left a comment at little.red.boat, on the etiquette of saying "I love you". Which reminds me of the answer which I intend to give when Guardian Weekend finally gets round to featuring me in their Questionnaire section. (It's OK, I'm in no hurry.)

Q: Have you ever said "I love you" without meaning it?
A: No, but I have sung it many times without meaning it.

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13:00

Mood: Atypically sociable for this hour of the day, as it is my usual custom to lunch alone: just around the corner from the office, at Cast Deli, which is attached to Nottingham Playhouse. However, a chance meeting with two friends and former colleagues (Hi F! Hi Lathbud!) leads to a pleasant catch-up session in the baking sunshine.

Physical state: Baking. All these extremes of temperature can't be good for a man.

Other observations (1): Was it really necessary for Lathbud and I to get quite so breathlessly excited over the fact that one of our nearby market towns in Derbyshire has a new supermarket? (F: "Just listen to yourselves!") This time ten years ago, at the very apex of my Trade phase, I would have reserved such levels of enthusiasm for blow-by-blow accounts of weekend debauchery ("And I was just coming up on my second pill when Tony De Vit dropped his remix of Libido's "The Second Coming", and I'm telling you, the whole place went MENTAL...") - now, it's all "BUXTON HAS A NEW WAITROSE!" "GET AWAY!" "I KNOW! ISN'T IT GREAT!"

(2): I'm used to having songs going round in my head, but today I've had a person going round in my head as well: the wind-driven phenomenon that is Jayne from Big Brother. How has this appalling woman managed to invade my headspace? As Grace Dent has observed in her superb (no, really) daily Big Brother blog for the Radio Times:
Jayne is the sort of woman who sits down beside you in a Virgin train Quiet Zone carriage, gets out her mobile phone and shouts, "Hiya, Lizanne! Lizaaaaannne! Is that you?! Can you hear me? Ooh, I might get cut off but I'll call you back! Can you hear me? Is Tricia there? Oooooh, shut up! Shut up, you cheeky cow! Put Tricia on, I've got three hours to kill here so I thought I'd go through the sales reports!"
I couldn't have put it better.

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12:00.

Mood: As baffled as I was at 11:00, since a representative from the planet Venus has yet to contact me. In the meantime, I received an e-mail casually asking "Can you just quickly go into Yadda Yadda and check the status of Blurgle Blurgle", which presented a bit of a challenge as I had NEVER knowingly been to Yadda Yadda before, and had no idea how to check the status of Blurgle Blurgle. Now feeling rather pleased with myself, as I managed to work the whole thing out with no assistance, thanks to my amazing detective powers, and so was able to fire back an equally casual reply. ("Yup, Blurgle Blurgle doing just fine.")

Physical state: Better, because after my Yadda Yadda/Blurgle Blurgle triumph I treated myself to a celebratory poo (I'm usually a 3pm poo person, but it was a special occasion), which I enlivened with a quick round of Nokia Snake (Spiral maze setting). I've had a shiny new replacement handset for exactly a week, but can't be arsed to transfer all the phone numbers, and besides, the shiny new handset doesn't have Snake on it. SUCH a Luddite.

Other observations: This time an hour ago, and rather to my surprise, there was no tune on my internal jukebox - but since then, "Telephone Line" by the Electric Light Orchestra has installed itself on auto-repeat. I've been listening to quite a lot of ELO lately, having recently purchased their latest Greatest Hits thingy - which is RUBBISH, as it doesn't have "Last Train To London" on it, and there's a re-recorded version of "Xanadu" with no Olivia Newton-John on it - but it was the only CD in the shop, and my need was an urgent one.

Incidentally, I had to make two doctor's appointments on two consecutive mornings this week, both at the same time, and on both occasions they were piping ELO's "Mister Blue Sky" into the waiting room. Do you suppose they play the same music in the same order, at the same times of day, every day? How grim would that be?

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11:00.

Mood: gently baffled by strange new work assignment, which appears to be written in Venusian. The key sentence contains four pieces of terminology which I've never come across before. They must have got me confused with someone who knows what they're doing.

Physical state: chilly - I'm working at a faster machine at a different end of the office (with TWO SCREENS, I LOVE IT!), and the aircon down here is a bit on the vicious side.

Other observations: Can I keep these hourly updates going for the rest of the day? Yes, of course I can...

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Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Yes, it's another link to a gig review.

Greg Dulli & The Twilight Singers, Nottingham Rescue Rooms.

Some gig reviews, I can rattle off within 40 minutes of getting home - but they tend to be the duller, flatter ones. ("The current single xxxxx got a rousing reception from the capacity crowd." Gee, you don't say.)

Other gig reviews - the ones where I feel like making more of an effort, and the ones where I credit my perceived audience with a little more intelligence - can take up to an hour and a half. Particularly when I'm so congested with hay fever that two pints of cooking lager end up feeling like four.

(Hay fever? I almost never get that, and certainly never before to this degree, and so have been quite ill-prepared. Thank the Lord for Benadryl Plus, and thanks to JP for recommending it this morning.)

200 words really shouldn't take 90 minutes - but these ones did. However, it must have been worth it, as in an unprecedented fit of generosity, the sub-editors have only removed ONE word from my original copy. See if you can fill in the word which they chopped out. I spotted it immediately.

(Clue: it's an adverb, I think. Well, I'm not entirely certain - but, you know, process of elimination.)

(And BONUS POINTS if you can spot the one glaring piece of lazy hack bullshit. Hey, it was LATE...)

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Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Greg Dulli & The Twilight Singers - Rescue Rooms, Tuesday July 11.

(An edited version of this review originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.)

Dressed in regulation black but radiating a surprising bonhomie, former Afghan Whigs front man Greg Dulli has the look of someone who has conquered his demons and come back smiling.

(Well, perhaps not all of his demons: with his microphone stand niftily customised to hold an ashtray, Dulli's constant chain smoking puts even champion chuffer Ryan Adams in the shade.)

Although his songs mostly deal with the dark, dysfunctional side of human relationships, you sense that Dulli has, at last, found some measure of peace in life. Despite this useful new distance from his subject matter, his performance remains as riveting and galvanising as ever - and yet the assertively rasping vocal delivery ("I'm too tough to die!") of this bulky, imposing man is balanced with an incongruous femininity that can sometimes border on camp.

The band's classic rock stylings are emphasised by quotes from artists as diverse as The Beatles and Prince, Steve Miller and Outkast. An extraordinary encore starts by paying tribute to the late Syd Barrett, with a timely cover of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", before drifting into an equally spell-binding cover of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy". Perhaps Dulli's personal triumph has been to step back from the craziness which both songs describe.

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