Welcome to Lascow. Pull up a div and make yourself at home. This is me. I tend to either love or hate things. I like to create.
"When life hands you a lemon, shut up and eat your damn lemon."
Harry Solomon
Partners in Crime
Boomfruit
"Guess who's living here, with the great undead. This paint-by-numbers life is fucking with my head, once again."
Mark Oliver Everett
We live, to some extent by colours. As much as any other thing, we identify with them, and use them to subset and identify ourselves and others. And sometimes this is positive, sometimes irrelevant, often harmless, and sometimes downright annoying.
In particular this week, I was thinking of a few examples. I identify with the colour black (and I know technicalities abound, it's not a colour, it's a shade or hue or tint or something, but for the sake of this passage, we'll stick with colour for simplicity). I wear black clothes (now almost exclusively), black eye make-up.. heck, I'd dye my hair black again if i had enough to make it a worthwhile activity.
And why? Not (and I may shock you with this) because I'm trying to conform to a certain image, or because I want people who see me to think certain things, and be able to make judgments about who I am (although they inevitably will). No, because it ties in with who I am, and how I feel. This doesn't mean that I'm continually depressed or maudlin per se, but rather that I identify more with darkness than colour.
Yellow tells the world you're happy, red that you're confident, blue that you're calm. Maybe black tells them that you don't subscribe to advertising your emotions. Maybe not.
I've also been thinking this week about pink, being the focus of my present... well, i want to say wrath, but that's probably too strong a word. Maybe somewhere half way between confusion and distaste is a bit better. My usual vitriol is reserved for other topics at the moment.
Being a big 'mo, I'm often invited to events that link me with pink. I can read the pink paper, go to a pink parade, a pink picnic, pink punting. What I want to know is, who decided pink equals gay? I don't like pink. As a colour for Suffolk cottages (and I mean thatched buildings with rural old ladies in, not dodgy lavatory cubicles with phone numbers scrawled on the walls in permy marker, along with the odd injurious graffito and mis-spelled obscenity) it's fine.
Pink makes me think of little girls. Which now that I see it (on the page in front of me) is as good a description of the kind of people that go to pride in crop-tops and wear pink as any other. People, I think I have asked and answered my own question. Neat-o!
As always, I shall never cease to be amazed with the wonders that Photoshop (R) can accomplish.
Oasis suck. This is not only an important musical assertion, but also a valid segue to the point I want to make. They've compared themselves - with the arrogance that comes only from truly stupid people who've inexplicably become famous - to the Beatles. I'm not a massive Beatles fan. I mean they were OK - I can respect them on many levels, but not the the extent of actually owning any of their music. Oasis however, well, I'd rather suck musky dung from a colostomy bag than actually pay money to hear those repulsive turds putting brainless lyrics to stolen chords.
The main reason for my mentioning them is that they neatly illustrate the point I want to make. I'm fed up with people being punished in the popular press, and hence in the mind of every Daily-Mail reading half-wit, for originality. Innovation. Something which the Beatles had in great measure. And something which Oasis wouldn't know if it donned a gravel condom and had its wicked way with them in the pooer.
People feel comfortable with what they already know. This, as (nearly) a human being myself, I understand. However, it is equally important that we welcome the possibility of change. Hell, if we didn't, we'd all still be tilling the fields by hand and you'd be reading this on a slate. The same goes for music. Bands that, with each new album, spore the same incognate shite as their previous offering (and you may realise that it is in this category which I mentally stash Oasis) are continually adored by the chewing masses. Everyone simply yums it up, because it's familiar, comforting. Even if it's crap, at least it's predictable crap - you know the precise shade of brown, consistency and what the little lumps are made of before you've even handed your Mastercard over to the teenager in HMV.
However, anyone who dares to try something new is inevitably slammed by the drooling arse-scum who dare to call themselves critics (and yes, I am aware of the definition of the term "ironic" - something which has seeming evaded dear Alannis).
Placebo are, without a doubt, my favourite band. To the point where if I hear someone being critical of them in any way I generally find I have to beat that person into a coma with my shoe. So you will understand that it is with no bias that I make these next statements. When Placebo's newest album, Meds, came out, it was ritually and unfairly slated by dumbass critics and eyeliner-freaks alike. And why? Because it didn't sound quite exactly like everything else they'd ever written. Good gods, give it a chance! A few listens, you learn to appreciate it as something in its own right, and dear life it is good.
Think of any band or artist who've been around for a while. The good ones are those who can take the criticism and continue innovating, knowing they're doing something worthwhile.
This is a drawing I did... must have been a good four years ago. The strange thing is, I can't draw this well. Sounds strange I know, I did draw it. But if I tried again - to achieve that simplicity, that succinctness, I could not. It was a totally random event, as if for some few seconds I was occupying a plain beyond my usual.
Rico is not a London person. That is to say, London is not a Rico place. Let me explain: I have a short fuse for people getting in my way. I intensely dislike crowded places. I hate having to queue for things - generally, if I find I have to queue for something, I decide it's not worth doing. In fact, it would probably be accurate to say that I'm almost entirely intolerant of every Londony feature of London. I'd forgotten what the place is like. You're constantly queueing, always in a homogenised sausage of people moving as slowly as it's least eager component. People keep stopping in front of you, bumping into you, hitting you with rucksacks. It's frankly enough to make me want to rip their arms off and slap them silly with their own hands.
Samuel Jonhson said that when you're tired of London, you're tired of life. I would venture that if he had been there when it was jammed with 30000 Spanish tourists, all with less spatial awareness than a tomato and able to communicate only at a volume slightly above the destruction point for human hearing, then my friends, then he may have made a slightly different assertion.
I think part of the problem stems from the fact that I'm quite selfish about my personal space. I like a lot of (please forgive the horrifying Americanism) "me space". Generally about seven miles in every direction suffices. In London, you're never more than a few inches from someone else, and their inherent noise and smell. As you can imagine, I'm a laugh a fucking minute on the tube.
In case you haven't realised, I've just been to London. Pleasure trip, the usual sort of jazz - bit of sight-seeing, shopping. Perhaps going over the easter weekend (and as it transpired, probably the hottest easter weekend in... well, a long time anyway) was less than wise. But we did, so suck it up. One of the things we'd both wanted to do was visit the British museum, seeming a perfectly laudible use of time in the capital. God, what a snooze that was. Time has done nothing to age her beauty. In fact, time has done nothing at all - no visible impact. I can image people going 100 years ago, and seeing the exact same stuff, "presented" in the same way (I'll come back to my sarcastic use of inverted commas in a second).
And this isn't me bitching because everything wasn't lit up and in Dolby 5.1 surround because I am such a product of the technology age that I can no longer appreciate objects which aren't brightly coloured and moving, and I have to have everything shoved down my gaping craw in bitesize, five-second chunks interspersed with ads for Durex and Sky. No indeed, this is because they have no idea how to use the stuff they have. Everything is just sat in boxes. It doesn't tell a story: here's a case of statues... and another. They're Hindu gods, all neatly labelled and in ascending order of nudity. Who cares? Well, I'm sure lots of people do, but it doesn't tell you anything. A country of a billion people, with a history and culture so incredibly rich and vibrant you could learn for a lifetime and never get bored. But what do we get? Endless cases of tedious stone carvings. Yawn.
Anyhow, the main reason for going was to have a look at Camden - which seems to be changing (aside from the seemingly perennial rumours that it's about to be levelled and replaced with a giant Burger King). It's getting less alternative, which for me is very sad (although you may not care as much). However, you should care that's it's getting more touristy. There really only needs to be so many shops selling crappy models of Big Ben, England flags and fucking bong paraphenalia. What we need is a return to the old days, of alternative clothing and music and cafes that sell odd-looking cake and smell faintly of hemp.
So, I'll do what I always do: hate the idea of London for about 6 months, then forget why I hated it, glorify it again and return. Until then, eBay-ho!
Welcome to the new look Lascow site. You may (or probably will not) have noticed that I got decidedly lacklustre about updating the old one. Well, now you know the reason why. It's got a bit darker, which I feel is a little more in tune with the 'real me.' See, I'm sharing already. You must be delighted!