Envy, Desires, Feeling Too Old

 I sit here in my room, a little after noon, on what is a relatively June day, feeling frustrated. I have been catching up on the blog while putting off other work. That the sun is shining has me wanting to go out. That I planned on some work, has me wanting to stay. I got an email from KH, a reply to my email about revisions I did this week, and he is gnomic as usual; where I wanted to know if they helped the story, I get nothing. But what has me really frustrated is reading Koushik Banerjea's review, DJ Shadow Meets Cockney Rejects Uptown. I heard The Cockney Rejects back in the day, but not much, only enough to now recognize the name. The reason this review frustrates me is that I hear echoes of my own "Chasing Ashes", which I have not been able to get to, and it sounds better than what I might ever be able to do. If I cannot get at what I once felt overwhelming me, I might as well let myself slip back into depression and nihilism. No longer can we afford to stop making sense. We must make our own sense. Perhaps not to solve what afflicts us, but to make a record for others to improve upon. For some of us, it is in making the effort that we can maintain our sanity; to make amends for days of heedlessness.

If the review is right, John King's London Country (London Books, 2023) is working along these lines:

Linear time and a purely physical topography don’t strictly apply in the mythopoesis proposed here by King. And just as the veteran punk, Joe Martin, now spends his days building shelves, helping in a church restoration project, and collecting sounds, so the author himself delves into the ‘streaks of sadness in this beautiful mind-bending fog… black smudges in the haze, a warning that something terrible is coming.’ The world he conjures is of course a tangible one of ‘terraces, cul-de-sacs and commons and industrial parks the woods and orchards and caravan sites and park homes’, but its true resonance is in the free-thinking eclecticism of the soundtrack Joe is assembling in his head. He’s no longer the callow youth of Human Punk, can see the fundamentalist punk ‘year zero nonsense’ for what it is. In an equally radical departure, jazz-funk may not be the hated enemy anymore and perhaps even has a role to play in the ‘bastard-pop picture of what he hoped to get across’. Armed with a sampler, Joe views the contraption as a divining rod of sorts. He ‘had to get to grips with the machine, make sense of the storm inside his head.’ Driving around the city limits and the London Orbital picking up various people’s vinyl castoffs, he soon realises that there is a lot more than collectibles at stake. Etched into the runout grooves the joys and pains of lives all too often sneered at, lives lived at the margins of that ‘satellite fog’. People selling up and moving on, in need of some quick cash, or needing to be prised from their analogue memories. ‘The memories buried in here were personal, secondhand and third person.’ And if this makes Joe feel that he is a ‘vinyl-loving scrap-metal rag-and-bone man’, then that is a designation he is happy enough to adopt. For what he is assembling, in his own head, is a kind of living London archive made from the remnants of both the living and the dead. Inspired of late by the methodology of DJ Shadow, Joe has begun to develop his own Buddhist/punk sound collage, ‘seeing it as a montage that kept building on itself, mutating and reinventing as it created the new from the old, a mirror of the wider society. Nothing was new, everything recycled.’ And what a collage that turns out to be! Film soundtracks, spoken word albums, Bowie, Dilla, Oi, punk, ska, trip-hop, reggae, classical Indian devotional cassettes, Miles and Mingus. In the manner of all DIY DJ cut-ups, the dubplate acetate forming in Joe’s own head turns out to be a blend of desire and thievery. A wilful corruption of linearity, its temporal arrangements refashioned in the manner of all good dissidents. In Bowie and Dilla especially, the old punk finds succour in sounds forged at the edge of death. The new/old synthesis at its most stark, terrestrial life ebbing away, a cosmology of questions hoving into view. The sounds left behind, of legacy, the ludic, despair, miming the wider contradictions of a society hardly at ease with itself. Sound and fury, though in a heartbeat Joe senses that can just as easily become joy or dissolve altogether into dread. ‘Moods shaped events, altered outcomes.’

Which leaves me envious of one who got the work done, who is doing a better job than I imagined for my own work. But unlike the earlier days of my own misspent life, this is not a reason to retreat, but a spur to get on with it.

sch 4/22