reading (and thinking) about belle and sebastian playing live suddenly reminded me of a puzzling incident from my childhood. back in the days before we got those shiny flat tables with metal legs, my school was equipped with proper slanty desks with inkwells and pencil grooves. and a decade's worth of graffiti. in my day the trend was towards decorating your desk with tippex flowers, but there were plenty of traditional scrawls and gouges in the soft wood. one prominent message on my desk read: 'THE WHO Live at the Hammersmith Odeon'. i thought i knew who had written it - a girl called amber in the year above with a taste for black eyeliner and retro rock music. but i was baffled by the actual meaning - i couldn't work out why anyone would state that a rock band lived at the hammersmith odeon. it was obviously some kind of symbolic assertion that i was too uncool to understand. almost involuntarily, i began to imagine the band living in a cinema, sleeping on the seats, setting up their drums in front of the screen, making cups of tea in the huge echoey space. i thought of it as a protest, an occupation, or perhaps they had nowhere else to live, having spent all their money on loose cars and fast women. it wasn't until about a year later that i noticed the correct syntax of the graffiti, that 'live' was an adjective, NOT a verb. this pretty much sums up what a gauche little idiot i was back then and, perhaps, how my imagination made up for it. this morning i wanted to cast lots of crush votes. just because it's raining, and it would make people feel good, and i don't like to think of them writing wonderful posts into a void. but i didn't. i would feel oddly unfaithful (though i don't seem to feel any compunction about flirting rampantly in #sinister, for some reason.) i'll just spread general 'amae' instead (while knowing full well that my definition of that word wasn't quite accurate, but what the hell, it's a foreign word and we can abuse it to our own ends if we like, pretentious melodramatic teens and post-teens that we are.) as i sit behind my slightly claustrophobic desk, on my slightly uncomfortable chair, bored out of my skull already at 9.45am, i am comforted to think of will porter in another library far far away, having unending non-specific sex in his lime green pants. i went to see a play on wednesday featuring a manic-depressive librarian and her love affair with the dewey decimal system. i was hooked straight away. during the course of the play she explained to a chaotic wannabe comedian that the dewey system was beautiful in its inclusiveness, that there was no conceivable subject that didn't find a home within its walls. and that it helped you to see connections everywhere. luv archel xxx ****************** Visit www.buzzwords.ndo.co.uk for the best new writing on the web. Email submissions to buzzwords@bigfoot.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+