Scotland: Day Eight (less of a question and more of a statement; or, let me answer that with another question)

Liz suggested for the penultimate day of our holiday that we should use as a writing prompt questions posed by each other. The questions she has asked of me -

What have you learned this holiday?

What makes a good travelling companion?

So - what HAVE I learned this holiday?

I guess I’ve learned that I still have writing in me. Prior to this it had been awhile since I’d written properly at all. But after this week and a bit, I probably have a good couple of thousand words under my belt. Related to this revelation is that good or bad, if I’ve agreed to do something I will do it. I’m proud of what has come out of me writing each day - the end result - but thinking about it logically I probably could have relaxed more had I not been writing every night, or thinking about what I was going to write, or waiting to be able to write.

I’ve learned that alarm or no, I will now without fail wake up by about 7 AM or so. I’ve learnt that if I really try, I can get back to sleep, I don’t have to immediately get up and make the most out of being awake.

I’ve learned that I always seem to need a drink of water with me by the bedside at bedtime nowadays. That is the saddest old manly thing I think I’ve ever admitted about myself.

I haven’t learned that my enthusiasm for reading surpasses how much I actually read, because I already knew that about myself. Despite this I always try and trick myself into thinking I will plough through at least one book, one graphic novel, and one magazine while I’m away on a trip. The true number? Zero books, zero magazines, zero graphic novels. See above for how I’ve been spending my evenings :D But when you weigh up the result, this way I may not have finished reading a book, but at least I’ve written a bunch of stuff to be proud of, so that’s a net gain for me.

Finally, I’ve learned that the UK really can - in places - rival the best of the United States for outstanding natural beauty. In ten years or so, will Scotland still be part of the United Kingdom? If not, I’ll be stuck with Yorkshire for my landscape needs.

Next - what makes a good travelling companion?

Someone that is willing to be flexible. Someone who, by turns, can have ideas for what to do each day, while also being casual about doing something different instead. Someone that compliments your positives and fills in the gaps. Someone who can be patient, or else someone that can forgive and/or forget quickly. Someone willing to pick up the baton when the other tires, be that in mood, conversation or planning, and who knows when it’s time to pass the baton in turn when they begin to tire themselves.

This is getting a bit “Being Alive” isn’t it?

I think this question is really asking “what makes a long-term partner a good travelling companion”? And I make that distinction because I think different rules apply to travelling companions that you aren’t already in a long-term relationship with. We are blessed as a couple to have a number of friends that fulfil the criteria of being good travelling companions. The difference between them and my one true travelling companion, my constant, is that you ALWAYS want to travel with your partner, and thus a friend who is a good travelling companion has an extra requirement - to not always travel with me, to take a break from time to time. If I wanted to spend all my days off work spending time with friends, I’d be married to them in the first place.

I’ve got one more thing that I’ve learned this holiday - this one, like most of the others, something about myself. When I’m answering earnest questions, my writing might lose some spark of imagination, but hopefully it adds enough insight about myself to be a zero-sum game.

One day remaining, and that’s a travel day. Good night.

Scotland: Day Seven (Dam-nation)

I’m a huge fan of Halloween. I know the version I celebrate is an americanisation of a UK tradition but I just don’t care. I spend the whole of October listening to spooky or seasonal music and I try to watch scary or spooky stuff on TV or films to the extent I can find the time.

Unfortunately this does seem to occasionally clash with one of the best times of year for us to go on holiday. As a result more than a few times we’ve celebrated Halloween in the states, which in effect tends to just mean being there while the Americans celebrate it. But you can normally find one of the Michael Myers Halloween films on TV late at night, and you get to see everyone’s houses decked out with horrific dioramas, not to mention the adorable kids in their costumes, imaginative in a way that British hoodies with identical Ghostface masks cannot hope to match.

We’ll actually be home by Halloween night. I’m hoping we are back in enough time to welcome at least a few trick or treaters, because otherwise we’re going to have to eat all the halloween candy ourselves, and that’s a terrifying horror for my dentist if no-one else.

But here we are in the Cairngorms and mercifully, scares have been a bit low on the ground this week. All the same it’s in my nature to see the scary in everything, especially in October, and this week has been no exception.

We have driven through countless woods way out in the sticks, and almost every time we do a scary movie comes to mind. The obvious one is the Blair Witch Project; I always think of the car that the three documentations abandon at the entrance of the woods, the vehicle they never come back to. Or the nightmare sequences in An American Werewolf in London, where the main character dreams of sprinting naked through the woods, hunting deer. Or the little-seen modern classic The Ritual, with Rafe Spall, something of a Descent-style film but with a bunch of blokes, and lost in the Scandinavian woods instead of underneath the ground, stalked by the locals with their ancient beliefs but also by something much larger and scarier… and angry.

There’s the mist we drove through tonight, appearing from nowhere during the course of our dinner on the banks of the Tay. Is mist the spookiest of all weathers? Who knows what figure may loom out of the distance any moment?

There’s the moment where we were out at dinner in Elgol on Skye, a journey that took us an hour and a half to reach to arrive at an intimate restaurant in the middle of nowhere, where about an hour in, a glowing light approached out of the inky blackness towards our window. Sure, it turned out to be a hungry camper wearing a head torch, but there was an element of eeriness at first.

There was the dead sheep I’m pretty sure I saw at the Pitlochry dam earlier, as we stood in the rain (again) marvelling at the force of the water. But scariest of all is we’re coming to the end of our time away, and next week I’m back at work. Happy Halloween!

Scotland: Day Six (Release the Cranachan)

Prior to the pandemic, with rare exceptions, we tended to go on holiday at least once a year, and the main holiday each year tended to be in the United States. This sort of happened by accident, as many things do: we always wanted to visit New York; then we got married there, then other US cities and states started to line up and suggest themselves to us. We’d never wanted to go to LA and I had never been keen on the idea of Vegas, but even those rubicons were crossed in time. Our concerns about havens for fakery and the super rich, and dens of gambling and misogyny, turned out… not to be inaccurate, but not to tell the whole story. You could spend weeks in Los Angeles and not encounter fakeness and glamour and Hollywood, unless you wanted to. We engaged with Hollywood, but on our terms.

There’s still America unvisited, of course. There are a lot of these states united, some of them more remote than others, some less appealing than others. I don’t know that we’ll get to all of them (once this covid situation has resolved itself to the point that we are allowed to and are comfortable in visiting the States again) but there’s definitely more that we’ll knock off the list. But first there’ll be a number of cities we need to revisit.

But we’re not in New York or Las Vegas or even Poughkeepsie or Schenectady. Tonight we find ourselves in Pitlochry, Perth, in the shadow of the Cairngorms (and, as I found out earlier tonight, about 30 miles and 50 minutes from the town where one of my nans was born). It’s beautiful but the problem is, I keep thinking I’m in America.

It was gradual at first. Every now and then I’d catch myself thinking that something of the landscape reminded me of there. Something of the trees, something of the road, something of the journey. More than a little of it is my experience of driving in America (we’re always driving in the States; well, unless you’re in New York City, you’d have to be a masochist to do that. The streets and avenues and one-ways unlock and click around into new formations each night, like the metropolis in Dark City or the massive death trap in Cube. Miss one in a dozen signs visible for a few seconds and you find yourself inexorably heading for the Holland Tunnel). In America, driving long distances is a lot easier. The sidewalks in NYC may have been built for giants but the freeways were built for us, and they are always entertaining. There is always something to see, some variation to lock your eyes onto, a roadside attraction promised for hundreds of miles before hilariously failing to deliver.

But England. Oh England. All our motorways are uniform, and uniformly depressing, dangerously dull. Driving at night in particular is like staring too long down the corridor of a hospital. Sterile and sickly. Stare too long and the motorway has you. A reservation booked at the central reservation, or hitting the hard shoulder hard, and then you’re in Accident and Emergency for real, not just an endless snake that reminds you of it.

But Scotland. Ah, Scotland! At least this part of it. Endlessly entertaining, eternally beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, stare at anything long enough and you can fall asleep. Gaze at Michaelangelo’s David for a few days on end and you’d be ready to claw your own eyes out. But here it takes a lot longer before that happens and I find myself having to yell for a horror podcast or stop to stretch my legs.

More and more it keeps being a surprise to be on the correct side of the road. At this point, if NPR came on the radio I don’t think I’d be in the least bit surprised.

I am left to conclude that there is a parallel universe in which Liz and I am on a road trip in the Pacific North West, and it’s happening at exactly the same time as this trip. Earlier today I was damn near convinced that we should stop at a diner for a root beer and a patty melt. You don’t get those here, but I can sort you out with haggis bon-bon and a Cranachan if you like.

Scotland: Day Five (A moment in amber)

We arrived on Skye during the worst rain I have ever seen, quantities of rainfall so great it becomes conceptual and you wonder where it can possibly all come from. It fell in sheets. It felt as if it was being thrown at the car (at ONLY our car) from roughly 20 metres above at all times.

Skye itself seemed constructed like the ideal island by mortal hands, engineered so that every square inch of it was stunning coastline, staggering waterfall or breathtaking hills and mountains. That first night we embarked on an odyssey to dinner on the other side of the island through countless passing places on a road that got thinner and thinner, punctuated with cattle grids at irregular intervals.

We’ve had a stunning run-in with highland cattle to whom we referred as “the welcoming committee”, a Mexican stand-off with horned hulks. We’ve come up close and personal with sheep a number of times, to whom we’ve wished a good morning, a good afternoon and a good evening.

We’ve visited a charming bookshop and a weirdly high quality coffeeshop. We’ve dined like royalty two nights in a row in two very different places, with what was undoubtedly some of the best meals we’ve had in the last few months. Last night’s dessert was the best I could remember in quite some time.

But the highlight of our time here, I think now to myself, with one eye squinted closed in tiredness, was this afternoon, when we sat together on a bench on the hotel lawn and looked out over Portree Harbour while we munched on cheese and onion rolls from the Co-Op. After that there was a blissful hour or so in the comfy lounge with a below-average cappuccino but well above average company, and our individual books to delve into.

Tomorrow we head to the Cairngorms.

Scotland: Day Four (The Meaning of The Ritual)

On days where we’ve journeyed more it gets harder.

We get into the hotel room straight from dinner and normally Liz starts writing then. It is customary that I let Liz write first, maybe because I naturally tend to be awake later than she does, maybe just out of politeness. We’ve never discussed it. I’ve plenty to do for nighttime rituals nowadays anyway. Dental rods and harps and brushing teeth takes ages just on its own. And there’s Japanese practice to do.

All the same Liz still tends to be plugging away at her writing when I come back and become present. Some nights she takes longer than others, especially if there’s TV in the background to distract us. Eventually she says she’s about to post her diary entry for the day, and about fifteen minutes after that (when she’s actually sent it, after spellchecking and editing and the like) she hands the laptop over to me.

This would have been a lot easier if we’d brought both laptops with us. Or if we hadn’t both decided to make a bloodyminded faustian pact with ourselves to keep going until the holiday was over. But now, we are where we are. We have the laptop, the pact, and the ritual; the recapping of the holiday has become part of the holiday itself.

For the first few days I started by reading Liz’s post, until superstition (and some of that old bloodymindedness) took over and I convinced myself that her topic and writing might influence me and that would be cheating, somehow. I need to write something fresh myself before I can read what she has written. So I open up a new Pages document. There’s usually nothing in my mind as a subject to talk about and something just jumps out of nowhere and onto the page.

What I’ve discovered (so far, anyway; anything can change as the week goes on) is that Liz tends to start from a point of describing everything that has happened during the day, and from that flows what some of those things makes her think of. That’s my interpretation of her work, of course; she might describe it utterly differently. But for me, I start with something that has been sparked from the journeys and activities of the day. The journeys and activities themselves need not necessarily be recounted; sometimes they’re entirely surplus to requirements.

How I am feeling IS the holiday. How we are affected by what we’ve done and seen (ideally, to be greatly more relaxed and to expand our minds) is the point. It is, I suppose, the difference between a photograph and seeing the sight yourself in the first place, though I do both. And, ultimately, photography is more reliable. In maybe two years from now I’ll be asking Liz about this trip and getting details wrong. It is the way I seem to work.

When the writing works really well I can start a paragraph without even knowing what the point of it is, and by the end of it I can tie it into the theme as a whole, or else conjure a theme out of the paragraph almost in whole cloth.

(Sometimes I take a momentary pause to look something up on Safari to assure myself I am not making up an idiom and that I am spelling it right. Like just then, with “whole cloth”).

Somewhere along this process, when I am feeling rather too full of myself and getting carried away with my grand romantic writer schemes, Liz tends to fall asleep, perhaps against her best efforts to stay awake. I’m sure she’d like to read my post hot off the presses, as it were. I always read hers the night she writes it.

When I am firing on all cylinders I sometimes am able to tie together elements from earlier in the post and echo them later on too, or reflect them. It’s nice when the end of a post can ring along with the start of a post, though that doesn’t always happen. I don’t mind cheating and adding a first line in where one was not before, if the result makes it worth it - I’m not proud. If I’m tired; if it’s late, if I’ve been driving for hours in sheets of rain, like today… well, on days where we’ve journeyed more, it gets harder.

Scotland: Day Three (the road more or less travelled)

To Glen Etive Road, then, following in the footsteps of Bond and M in Skyfall, with the promise not of being murdered by Javier Bardem but rather driving down a winding road alongside a surging river, further and further off the beaten track until our little Juke must have appeared like a tiny scalextric from a distance in comparison to the hills and mountains and waterfalls and white water.

Word, as ever with these tiny unknown spaces, nevertheless covered in prominent guidebooks of the area, had got around, and it became common to pull over in the abundant “passing places” to wait while a vehicle came back the other way. Sometimes, to wait for a car to overtake us so we didn’t have to enjoy the majesty with a people carrier at our backs. Occasionally we stopped in one of these places (ideally when there was room enough for multiple cars) so we could take in the view on foot.

While being left alone to the road and the glen was never really expected, we did start to notice a surprising amount of traffic that did not seem to fit the bill of tourists precise about their vodka martini preferences. Engineers. White van men. Rent-a-car vans. The odd truck.

A few more bends in the road and it became clear that this isolated brigadoon from the rest of the world had become host to multiple construction sites, parasitic infections on the landscape. So it goes with all such places that become cursed with popularity. The oasis becomes profitable. The idyll could do with a Services.

Undeterred, we beat on and eventually bypassed the tractors and high-vis and regained our sense of serenity and isolation, as the road wended ever thinner. Leaving behind a tiny hamlet in the rearview (past a rustic house with an unintelligible warning sign on the gate that I took to be Gaelic and instinctively knew to be warning trespassers not to cross), all there was left was Loch Etive itself, ready to reward those adventurers that had made it this far.

(People live all along this route. How tiring it must be to have tourists endlessly and conveniently erasing them from existence to fit their narratives of unspoiled exploration.)

For the journey back, and with many slow miles of oncoming vehicles to avoid, we put on a podcast suited for the time of year and the season and the overall ambience. Tales of the paranormal soundtracked our return leg as we raced the setting sun back to the main road (you know the main road. It’s the only road. The Road). As Liz fell asleep next to me I fancied our car was reacclimatising to the rest of the world like an astronaut in an air lock or a diver avoiding the bends, and it struck me that we really had been into a Passing Place, passing into the quiet otherworld or into our own private reveries but detached from The World all the same.

Scotland: Day Two (in which Matt spoils a number of films)

In the film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s “The Shrinking Man”, the lead character begins reducing in size, at first an almost imperceptible amount each day, but by increments more and more noticeably as time goes on. Soon he perceives himself as too small to be respected any longer by his family, then he’s hanging around with a sideshow, until eventually, no longer visible to his family at all, he’s literally fallen through the cracks, off the grid, battling spiders (Goliath to his David) in the basement of his house. As he inevitably approaches the size of an atom he prepares for the end of his life, assuming he is about to shrink out of existence, but with relief he eventually realises one can always get smaller and life - of a sort unimaginable to the rest of us, but life all the same - continues. He persists.

I thought of this as our Scotland trip continued, first on a boat tour around Loch Lomond and eventually on the long drive into Glencoe. At the loch, our boat, the Lomond Chieftain, set off from Luss pier’s insane tranquility and rapidly was swallowed by the enormity of the water and the landscape around us; lowlands and highlands; Munroes towering over us, their summits obscured, shrouded by mist and rain.

I thought of the first time we walked up Fifth Avenue in New York, the skyscrapers gargantuan and impossible to take in no matter how you craned your neck. The sidewalks, far too wide for us mortals, seeming to have been built aeons ago for a long since disappeared race, surely not humans but much, much taller, with different needs. I want to go all Lovecraft here and use the term “cyclopean”; can you tell I’m holding back?

I thought of the Japanese guy found in the jungle, decades after the second world war had ended, still fighting it. I thought of the team of spelunkers in The Descent, descending into the earth in the Appalachians, disappearing from life and the rest of society, dying off one by one until only the last remained, changed so much by her experiences and the savagery required to survive that by the end of the film she barely counted as human anymore.

Of Schwarzenegger in Predator, covered in grey mud and folded and creased into the bowels of a tree until he became one with it.

It feels like we are shrinking into the landscape, vanishing into the past. The road signs repeat in Gaelic. We’re still visible for now. On the map. But there’s more journey to come.

Later, entering Glencoe, a myriad of routes became a single road, The Road, winding through the mountains that arched over us. Humanity has carved this route into the earth, but it seems so insubstantial when compared to all surrounding it, as if by turning one’s back for just a minute it might disappear behind us entirely. The Munroes grown so large now (or maybe so obscured by the driving rain) that all we can see are outlines, are shadows.

Is it any wonder that those close to this sort of staggering beauty in the past, this all-conquering landscape, these giants that dwarf us, embraced them and worshipped them from then on as Gods? Still do, in some places. Isn’t that what they are? The lochs. The mountains. They are Gods and we are ants. They are not eternal, but they may as well be, to us. These ephemeral mayflies in our little cars and little raincoats, carving out a week in our lives to pay tribute, to commune.

Scotland: Day One (breaking the concept of my tumblr but it’s not like I update it anymore)

It manifests like this every time; a long series of statues, taking up the view as far as one can see. The thing you’re looking forward to is on the other side but you can’t see even so much of an inkling of it until you’ve knocked down some of these Easter Island pretenders. So you make a sublist of things to do, and then another, and then a list of sublists, and then you get to work on toppling the first golem, which is Packing.

There are so many things to do and so many things that can go wrong before we get to the holiday. I’m not panicking about them or catastrophising but until some of those statues are down for the count, I’m not going to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The packing is largely finished on Friday night but there’s still the long drive to go. Apple Maps and Google Maps and Alexa all disagree on how long it’s going to take. Is leaving at nine A.M. early enough, once you factor in a couple of service stations stops for coffee and lunch? My brain insists that the amorphous “Scotland” is 8 hours away. But our spa slot in Gleddoch is at 6:30PM. Dinner not til 9PM. We better make sure we’ve had a big lunch at one of the stops.

We get into the car and it thinks we are going to make it by 2:30PM. That should be enough with a couple of hours added on, swilling coffee and chowing down on farm shop sausages, even allowing for the CrapNav forgetting major roads exist, and unexpected traffic jams. I relax slightly.

Later we escape from the middling lands and the northern industrial cities and the landscape turns to heather or lavender or both, and a wind farm stands on every hill, shrouded by mist (and how could anyone ever think of them as blights on the landscape? It’s rare I see anything this gigantic and peacefully majestic), and at last I have real statues in my vision rather than the ones I set up for myself, and I begin to feel cheer, and something in my head untenses.

Even though we are heading directly towards (and THROUGH) another major city at the end of our trip, I allow myself the whimsy of thinking we are retreating into the past, regressing from technology and industry to grass, fire and water (and firewater). It’s not true of course (and Scotland rolls its eyes at the lazy characterisations of it to which I have resorted), but it’s indicative that I’m slipping slowly into Holiday Mode, a brain setting similar but legally distinct from Gig Mode and Gallery Mode. I am allowing space for creativity and metaphor and calm and this can only be good. It’s a start.

Halloween Directed by John Carpenter (1978)

Antony and the Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now

Are any of us the culmination of all our potential at birth? How about upon reaching adulthood? All we ever do is change, and that's a necessary thing, something to be welcomed, even celebrated. Even to someone like me who is deathly afraid of change of any sort. I see who I am now, conceptually at least, as the best version of myself. It's a pleasant ideal anyway. Looking back at yourself a few years back, a decade back, a few decades back… cringing should be the natural impulse. Just as you're never the pinnacle of what you can be, and looking back at yourself in a few years time, you'll probably recoil in awkwardness at who you are now. I had a few possible options for my pick this time. I had an initial thought, dismissed it, dithered between two other options (those of you who saw my Twitter poll about Americana Folk and Baroque Pop will now know what that was about, if it wasn't clear at the time), before, eventually, returning to my first instinct. Because, not to put to fine a point on it, when I was trying to choose between the other options I could feel something wasn't right and it wasn't the way things were meant to be. The real choice - the only option, really - was staring me in the face the whole time. So this week's pick is about metamorphosis, about transformation, about improvement, about realisation, about being the best version of yourself, about being true to who you've always known you are, instinctually. It's also Baroque Pop (with a bit of soul thrown in). Sorry about that.

Joanna Newsom - Divers

In the beginning was the word. In 2003 we came to New York for the first time. The East Village was our playground and Alt Coffee and Computers, next to Tompkins Square Park, was our watering hole. Internet cafes were a thing back then. (Later that year, if I'm right about the time we visited, New York suffered a blackout and places like Tompkins Square Park became gathering places). In 2005 we came back to New York (this time staying in Union Square) and got married. (I think by now Alt Coffee and Computers was long gone.) It was going to be in Tompkins Square Park but we changed venues. It was unseasonably hot for September, the city in the grip of a heatwave and the humidity clinging to you like a shroud. We were there in 2008 on the night Obama was elected. We stayed in an upmarket apartment block in Clinton. Clinton used to be called Hell's Kitchen and was dragging itself out of the run-down area it used to be, when nothing was going for it but the docks. In 2010 we came back for our fifth year anniversary and returned to the housing complex and fountain where we got married. They were showing Ghostbusters up on a big screen in the park. It rained a little but we didn't mind. (You used to be able to visit quite a few of the Ghostbusters filming locations around Manhattan. We had to visit one, the Municipal Building, to obtain our marriage certificate. I'm not sure the firehouse is in use anymore.) We visited last year, this time choosing the Lower East Side of Manhattan for our abode. The area has completely changed since we first visited. There's a buzz of excitement. What used to be a lot of clothing stores (before that, tenement blocks for immigrants) has been gentrified and hipsterized. Manhattan used to be called Mannahatta, back when the Native Americans owned the place. All these moments are slivers of time, the cities of New York from each trapped in amber. We can visit them whenever we like, in our memories. The City of New York now, today is no more or less real than all the other cities of New York we visited, nor the cities before we were alive, nor the cities of New York to come. A bunch of spins of the planet and there'll be nothing of us, the only constancy the birdsong the accompanies us as if psychopomps on our endless march. In the end was the word, and the word was 'In the Beginning...'.

Arcade Fire - Reflektor

There are two sides to everything. No one thing is just that one thing. Take life. Take death. One can't exist without the other. Neither mean a thing on their own. Both are required to make sense of things. You need to have lived for death to have meaning. You need to die for life to have a point. Why fear one but not the other? There are places where death is… not embraced, but celebrated, yes. Many areas of the world believe that at times the lines between the geography of life and death are paper thin, but some places don't see that as a bad or scary thing. If we aren't so scared of death; if we keep death in sight and in mind more often; then those that have gone to the other side aren't so far away - and, when it comes to our allotted time, we won't be so scared of joining them because they'll have always been with us. Some are more than happy to stay on the side we're accustomed to, not to reach out and fully explore our reflection. I can understand that. For instance, tonight's selection is a record of two sides. It's a long one based on my personal barometer for what a record length should be. I'm often only really comfortable with an album being up to about 45 minutes long; this one goes well over an hour. If you choose to turn back when this, the first side, is done, not to part the veil and look on what is ahead of us, I won't blame you. None of us will blame you. Seeing things from the other side can be scary, raw, perhaps dangerous. I'll give you a warning when we're meeting the point of no return. But if you choose to hold on, to stay for the whole thing, I think you'll appreciate it. We can see the whole picture together. Both sides of the argument. Embrace what is beyond, see that there's little difference between there and here. You've nothing, really, to be afraid of. They've been among us all along. You'll join them one day. But not today. Today, we celebrate.

Rain Dogs

It could be any city, but I've always thought of it as New York. All it takes is a change in the weather for the worse, for you to lose your sense of direction, for street signs to be unhelpfully nowhere to be seen, and you could find yourself among them, living their lives. They burn bright, like mayflies, because no future means living life to the full. And that means dance and drink and trouble. This is the quintessential United States experience; the American dream. The melting pot, in the flesh. They haven't made it yet; they're shoved and cramped into the dark places, the back alleys, the lower east sides, the tenements. Life is cheap but so, so vibrant. Everyone is out to get something. No-one is to be trusted, least of all authority figures. Do you think you could cope with this life, knowing there was no way out of it, that you couldn't go back to your comfy brownstone after the end of one day, that this was it, from now on forward? Are you cut out for this life? Maybe better to watch from a distance. Dream that this could be you if you just quit that job, that you could blaze like they do. Watch from a passing train, glimpse it only briefly.

The Age of Adz

I wrote this for Twitter's weekly Listening Club, on the week where it was my turn to choose an album everyone would have to listen to, and I chose Sufjan Stevens' challenging "The Age of Adz".

(as a side note, you should join in with Listening Club. Every Sunday at 8PM GMT we all start playing the same album, easily streamed from Mixcloud, and discuss it at length and with as much or as little seriousness as we can muster.)

In my list of genres in my musical library, I have entries for both "Chamber Pop" and "Baroque Pop". There's only one artist in each genre. They're both the same artist, actually, for different albums, and that artist is not the artist you'll be hearing tonight, but it's a useful demonstration that my musical tastes sometimes favour those who don't easily fit into obvious genres; those that straddle several, a lot of the time. Tonight's artist is no exception. Here's the thing; I was going to go a bit easy on us all. I had something picked that was nice and upbeat, even dancey, and it evoked in me feelings that reminded me of Spring, so it was quite apropos, too. But Listening Club offers the opportunity of both exposing yourself to new things, and in my case, tonight, challenging an audience and showing them something you love. So I chose this. You don't get dancey. You don't get Spring. You don't get "nice" and "upbeat", either. You don't even get "easy". Or to be more accurate, you get all of those things at times… it's just not the whole package. Our artist contradicts himself. He is large. He contains multitudes. So you get love. You get death. You get betrayal, breakups, you get Art, you get God, you get aliens, you get the end of the world. I hope you like brass, strings, and a bit of electronica. Even if you don't, it'll be an experience. Just wait for that last track. I hope it blows your head off like it did with me, and still does.

On the music of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

A choice Luhrmann made which has been focused on a lot in reviews and the press is the anachronistic soundtrack. On a smaller level Rhapsody in Blue is used for one key scene, despite not coming out until a few years after the time when the book and film are set, but more prominently, the soundtrack uses modern music, including jazzified covers of Crazy in Love and Back to Black, but also rap, as Jay-Z was the producer on the soundtrack.

All this works really, REALLY well, honestly. I really enjoyed the soundtrack, it doesn’t seem out of place (though it is over the top, of course, like everything else). Rap actually works perfectly. It’s African-American in origin, as was the jazz used in the novel that was controversial and “dangerous” at the time but nowadays would not be.

A major theme in rap, certainly that of Jay-Z, of course focuses on braggadocio, aspiration, opulence, focus on material things: all things very in fitting with the time in which the novel is set and some of themes upon which it focuses – that fixation on class and attempting to rise above the station (hopelessly or not) to which you were born.

Awesome.

Chambaland - “Never Want You Back” (Taylor Swift vs. Jackson 5)

Just before Halloween, we embarked upon our major holiday of 2011 - our first visit to Los Angeles and to Las Vegas. It meant we were able to celebrate America's Halloween and the latino Dia De Los Muertos while we were there. I created a chronological playlist of our experiences.

Blue Moon - The Marcels - it being just before All Hallows Eve when we travelled, our flight had decided to adopt a Halloween theme to many of their film, radio and television choices that were available. This meant I was able to doze off to a theatrical adaptation of M.R.James's stories on the radio before watching John Landis' Comedy/Horror classic, An American Werewolf in London… on a tiny, tiny screen. If you've never seen the film, the soundtrack consists of a number of songs that reference moons. This is the song that accompanies the closing credits.

Party in the USA - Miley Cyrus - for little reason other than it's a great lick and the opening lines mention jetting into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). And something about wearing a cardigan.

Sweet Dreams my LA Ex - Rachel Stevens - even more tenuous, in this case the title subtly suggests LAX. That's about it. I don't even like the song that much.

Abracadabra - Steve Miller Band - whilst in Los Angeles we stayed at a place called the Magic Castle. It's a combination of a hotel, and next door, an exclusive magic club. One can only visit the Magic Club if you are a) a member; b) the guest of a member; c) Staying at the Magic Castle hotel. The club has all sorts of small rooms of different themes, magic antiques, secret passages, paraphernalia. We planned to visit for dinner at the weekend, but when the weekend arrived (as the club was hosting an event for Halloween that they ironically named "Inferno"), there was a fire at the Magic Castle that required the attention of several fire crews to resolve. The club was closed down for the foreseeable near future as a result.

Walk - Foo Fighters - American radio is radically different from the UK, where Radio 1 sets out the sort of music that radio stations will play; sets the tone, as it were - and most music nowadays is out of the UK grime, rap or dustup scene. In the States, at least for the stations we listened to, radio is still settled firmly in guitar rock land. As a result we heard this track every day, sometimes several times a day. I like the Foo Fighters, on the whole, but one can have too much of anything.

These Dreams - Heart - this stone cold CLASSIC was playing on one of the rock classics stations as we headed away from L.A. to San Diego for the day to meet up with an old friend from the Internet.

Afternoon Delight - Starland Vocal Band - when in San Diego, thoughts inevitably and happily turn to Anchorman (stay classy), and the stand-out a cappella scene within.

Bad Bad Leroy Brown - Jim Croce - Croce lived in San Diego for a time, I believe, but regardless of the veracity of that rash statement just then his widow definitely lives there and runs a bar/restaurant using his name. We stopped there awhile so our friend could show us some of his artwork on his iPad.

Saved By The Bell - TV Theme - my wife Liz had already been considering buying an iPad during our stay in the States. Apple goods are much cheaper to buy overseas than in the UK, even moreso if you're lucky enough to do so in a state without Sales Tax (Delaware, say, or Oregon). I dare say our friend showing off his paintings through his iPad made her mind up. So soon after our return from San Diego - it may have been the next day - we headed off to the nearest Apple Store, which happened to be at a mall known as "The Grove". We didn't know this when we were planning our shopping excursion, but The Grove is also the location of a daily entertainment TV Show that goes out on the E! network. It's called "Extra! At The Grove", and it's fronted by Saved By The Bell alumni Mario Lopez (nowadays perhaps best known for being the host of America's Best Dance Crew which goes out on MTV in the UK and the US). We managed to stumble upon him filming that day.

Looking for Freedom - David Hasselhoff - and one of his guests for the day was David Hasselhoff. We only discovered this when we attempted to board a streetcar/tram which was idling on one end of the outdoor section of the Mall. As we boarded we were told that the car would not be leaving for another ten minutes, as it was waiting for the arrival of David Hasselhoff, "From Knight Rider". The tram was to be his method of entrance on the TV show. So we sat, and waited, and in time Hasselhoff did indeed appear, wearing a train conductor's hat. We'd sat downstairs, assuming that the Hoff would be upstairs on the open-top tram, but apart from a momentary visit upstairs, he stayed downstairs for the duration, standing right in front of us, in fact. The tram set off on its journey and The Hoff played tour guide. When we were done with our journey, he sang along with a version of "Looking for Freedom" piped out of some hidden speakers, put the conductor's hat on my head, and disappeared. We stumbled off the tram in a state of disarray and uncertainty, wondering indeed whether the whole encounter had taken place in our heads. But it hadn't. We have photos.

Makin' Whoopie - Dinah Washington - at Halloween, we booked to go and see the Los Angeles date of the Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer tour, at the Wilshire Ebell. Lots of people were in costume as one might have expected, given the date. They started with a version of "Makin' Whoopie" as a duet.

The Problem With Saints - 8in8 - the only track from the experimental one day band (made up of Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds and others) to be sung by Neil Gaiman (who wrote all the lyrics to each of the songs). Neil performed this at the Ebell.

Science Fiction Double Feature - Richard O'Brien - Gaiman and Palmer were late to the stage at the Wilshire. This song is why. They were busy recording an appearance on the Craig Ferguson Late Late Show to go out later that night. On the show, Amanda Palmer, Stephen Merritt and Moby (!) performed a cover of Science Fiction Double Feature, from the Rocky Horror Show, featuring Neil Gaiman in the background on an occasional child's toy piano. Amanda performed the song at the Ebell later that night for us.

Woodstock - Joni Mitchell - one of the greatest things we did while in LA was to visit the Griffiths Observatory, high up in the Hollywood Hills. While there we bought tickets for the planetarium there, to see a film about the wonders of the universe and the history of those who study it. It was the first time I had been to a planetarium and a great experience. The show closed with an observation from the narrator that we are all made of stardust and that our fascination with the universe and exploration thereof was about going home. This song seemed to fit.

Eyes Without A Face - Billy Idol - Idol based this song on a french horror film of the same name (well, the English translation is), which has elements of Frankenstein in it and is an early example of the Mad Scientist in horror. In fact, the French name of the film is also in the lyrics and sung as background vocals in the chorus. We were lucky enough to be staying in Hollywood while the AFI (American Film Institute) were holding their annual film festival in town. We looked into it and it turned out that all the film showings (taking place at a number of historically important cinemas around town) were free - you just had to apply in person for tickets. We chose a few films that we quite wanted to see, and Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage, to give it its proper name) was one of them. The film had been chosen specifically for the festival by the guest director of the festival this year, Pedro Almodovar. His recent shocker, The Skin I Live In (which I always refer to kermodically as "The Skin In Which I Live") uses Eyes Without A Face in large part for inspiration.

Les Yeux Sans Visage - Combustible Edison - the screening was at the fantastic Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. To our surprise, Almodovar himself turned up to introduce the film, mostly through an interpreter. Here, Combustible Edison provide a cover of the main theme from the film, evocative (as in the original theme) of fairgrounds and sinister as all get-out.

Mack The Knife - Bobby Darin - a few days later, and we found ourselves following the recommendation of a friend to visit The Dresden, a bar, restaurant and music club in Los Feliz, an LA suburb. The Dresden is stuck in the fifties, but luckily it happens to be stuck in a time period that style has not forget. The whole place is effortlessly cool, and they pride themselves on their cocktails. The club is prominently featured in a standout scene in Doug Liman's "Swingers" (starring Vincent Vaughn and Jon Favreau, both impossibly young). A constant feature of entertainment at the Dresden - for around thirty years now, several times a week, is the musical stylings of Marty and Elayne, Jazz and Swing musicians and singers. With the greatest respect to them, they looked pretty old when they appeared onscreen in "Swingers" performing a cover of Stayin' Alive; they look positively ancient now. But they've still got it! Marty sang an awesome version of Mack the Knife, and at one point Elayne provided us with a jazz flute solo. Aqualung!

Heatwave - Marilyn Monroe - the second film which we booked tickets for at the AFI Film Festival was a preview screening of "My Week With Marilyn" (starring Kenneth Branagh as Lawrence Olivier and Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe - roles for which they were later both oscar-nominated). This was apparently a "Gala Screening" and it seemed like a good idea to dress up. I don't think either of us realised that a) there would be a genuine red carpet outside; b) that actual celebrities would walk down said carpet and be watching the film with us; c) that the film would be introduced by HARVEY FRICKIN WEINSTEIN, bringing Michelle Williams, Dominic Cooper, Julia Ormond and a world-famous pianist to the stage (who performed for us the main theme from the film). It was a pretty special screening anyway, taking place as it did in the famous Chinese Theater. The Monroe-sung "Heatwave" opens the film.

Viva Las Vegas - Elvis Presley - after Los Angeles came Las Vegas. The next two songs reflect our conflicting feelings about Vegas. Take into account that neither of us are notorious lushes or gamblers - my Dad had a pretty bad gambling habit, it's not something I'm normally drawn to - and you may understand why we were conflicted. But this song represents the good parts of Vegas.

Don't Make Me Come To Vegas - Tori Amos - this reflects the downside, the trepidation, and heck, let's throw in the awful all-pervading attitude to women, the prostitutes, the naked and mostly-naked women everywhere, the staggering crassness of almost everything, the debasement, and so on.

You Make My Dreams - Hall and Oates - this was one of the songs on the soundtrack piped out by our hotel (The Wynn - the best) and also one of my favourite songs ever since keyboard cat and the dance routine from 100 Days of Summer (watch both if you've not seen either).

Wild Horses - The Rolling Stones - on day two of Vegas (I think), we were exploring The Venetian (the hotel and casino, not just someone from Venice) and stumbled into the House of Blues for a bit of a break and a drink, wherein we were conversationally engaged by a delightful american couple who were well-accustomed to Vegas as a vacation destination and very chatty. It was the middle of the day so the place was far from packed, but on-stage a musician was busy performing a cover of Wild Horses, a great song whichever way you cut it.

Neon Bible - Arcade Fire - one of the, perhaps, less than common activities we chose to indulge in whilst in Sin City was to visit the Neon Boneyard, an open museum (currently hoping to raise enough money to get a proper building for their collection), which exhibits neon Vegas signs of yesteryear (from casinos, bars, hotels, petrol stations, launderettes… you name it, they've got it), discarded and upgraded in the constant Vegas neon war of competitive advertising. Well worth a visit, some great sights, but the whole time I was there, this was stuck in my head.

My Life - Billy Joel - our Silicon Valley friends Nadyne and Michael joined us for the last few days of our stay in Vegas (it was Michael who had suggested the Wynn as our hotel of choice, and for that we must be eternally thankful), and it was while wandering up and down the strip with them both (somewhere near the Bellagio I think) that this song starting playing out from the (as-ever) hidden speakers, and most of our foursome started singing along. You can't beat a bit of Billy, really, can you?

The Phantom Of The Opera - Original London Cast - the Venetian has an (apparently) monstrously cut-down version of Phantom, and if you're anywhere near the theatre in the casino, the music from the show will be being played on the speakers. It was our soundtrack as we sat one afternoon with our cookies and coffees.

Lean On Me - Bill Withers - an absolute pleasure, some would say strangely, for me whenever we are in the States is being able to watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report, almost every night. On this particular night, an evening's drinking and dining with our holidaying partners ended in our hotel room (steady now), from where we had a great view out of the window down onto the strip, and onto the Lake of Wonders or Dreams or whatever-the-hell they called it at the Wynn, the venue for a several-times-a-night light and music show, sometimes featuring giant frogs or copulating coloured balls (I'm not kidding). The Colbert Report had a surprisingly-moving segment where Stephen Colbert and Michael Stipe duetted on a version of "Lean On Me". We all watched, spellbound.

A few days later the vacation was over. I think we'll be back someday.