Sinister: the course of the empire - desolation

[Kieran Devaney]

dear sinister,

i think we're growing apart. all you ever seem to talk about these days are 
gigs you know i couldn't go to and videos you know i haven't seen. or smut 
(prurience doesn't pay you know). i've never claimed to be the bands biggest 
fan (and wasn't it mark e. smith who said that the fall were a band for 
people who don't have a favourite band? - well i don't have a favourite 
band) but... what am i trying to say here? that i feel left out and that 
it's my own fault? probably. but as i type man utd have just gone 3-2 up 
against aston villa, and i'm no football fan but my brother is - a man utd 
fan as it goes. and since most of his mates are villa fans he's 
understandably euphoric; united hadn't been looking themselves for most of 
the game, villa scored two in two minutes, ferguson brought on van nistelroy 
(sp?) and suddenly the tide has turned. but can i feel any of that joy? nah. 
"but thats not the same thing is it?" i hear you cry "you're a fan of belle 
and sebastian aren't you?" which is true, but it's better if anecdotes are 
fallible, they make better talking points then.

it seems customary to remark on how long it has been since you last posted 
somewhere near the top of your post (bless me father, it has been seven and 
a half years since my last confession and these are my sins...) but i 
honestly can't remember - the churlish amongst our readers will be thinking 
i could just check the archives, but then i could give you the exact date 
and even tell you what i was on about that day and such is the realm of the 
pedant. if i were to do that then small children would point at me on the 
street and shout "PEDANT!" at me, and be well within their rights to do so.

well, what have i been up to since whenever it was that i last posted? have 
i been poised, cat like, notepad in hand, collating my experiences ready to 
type them in here for your delictation? at which point does experience lose 
its lustre twixt mind and paper, between keyboard and computer screen? will 
anything i tell you register in the way i want it? how can i possibly let 
you know everything? do i even want to? what may i already have lost 
throught the holes in my recollection or throught my multitudinous 
delusions? if only there was something you could experience as i did... but 
wait! such a thing exists thanks, in part, to the magic of computers. i 
downloaded an mp3 quite by chance from audiogalaxy (in wishing to further 
broaden my horizons i had decided to try some of their recommended 
avant-garde flavour artists), a song called 'nipples' by peter brotzmann and 
it is utterly fantastic. one of the most startling things i have ever heard. 
depending on your standpoint i suppose it's as good or as bad as free jazz 
gets. perhaps i sound doe-eyed and naiive - free jazz not being something 
i'm particularly au fait with, but there was a lot of free jazz amongst the 
shedload of songs i downloaded and that was the choice cut, so give it a go.

there were other things i wanted to tell you. i wanted to tell you about 
working at the glebe farm library the day after boxing day, with barely ten 
people visiting the library all day, and having to endure heart FM (tinpot 
local radio) the whole day. in a library most probably with fewer books than 
you have in your house - fewer books that are actually worth reading anyway, 
does that make me sound like an intellectual snob? don't care.

i recall that some of my last post was dedicated to telling you about my 
annoyance at end of year best of lists. well allow me to elucidate further, 
because to my (and i'm sure your) amusment some people posted comedy lists 
which i found highly amusing, a gold star for them (if only i could remember 
their names - damn). and then just the other day the fast show spectacularly 
sent up such lists, as well as those horrible nostalgia programmes whilst 
also showing some of their best clips. did anyone else see that? fantastic.
one such best of list, which despite falling foul of all the faults i 
described in my last post, and is almost criminally predictable, but always 
manages to pique my interest is the john peel festive fifty. and while i 
don't think there was a bad song in it this year, subject to debate 
obviously (that cuban boys song for example isn't particularly palatable the 
second time you hear it). but if i were john peel i would be a tad annoyed 
that the list was dominated by, as peel himself put it: "cute white kids". 
he must play two or three reggae records every show, two or three dancey 
type records and yet the only dancey type thing in the whole chart was 
squarepusher's somewhat tongue in cheek 'red hot car'. most disappointing. 
that said i suppose i was glad melys won, because that is a great pop 
record. far too much white stripes and strokes though, obviously.

aren't minidiscs good?

do you think you could tell what i look like just from reading what i've 
written to sinister? could i do it for some of you? something to think about 
isn't it? or perhaps i strike you as some epicine entity, as smoke curling 
through binary numbers, transcending appearance. being just words. it has 
always struck me as sort of odd that people on the net who belong to things 
like sinister put their pictures up for people to see - surely it defeats 
the purpose of this new unbiased method of communication? or perhaps not, 
perhaps i'm looking into this too much. i'm certainly not saying that 
showing people your picture is a bad thing, but if it changes their 
perception of you then surely my point is vindicated?

i suppose that'll do for now
remember, eccentricity is the last refuge of the played out bourgeois

bye then
- kieran


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