Barry Johnson's Diary

This week:
Pizzas -- 1 -- v. bad
Fish and chips -- 0 -- v. gd
Chinese takeaway -- 0 -- v. gd
Lard -- 0 -- Excellent!
Vegetables -- what? oh, some tomatoes. That's very good, very good indeed
Fruit -- some bananas, 2 apples -- outstanding
Cigarettes -- 0 - ever -- easy
Lovely lovely mushroom, spinach and pine nut ravioli -- 1 -- nice. (Oh, and the dessert too.)
Chocolate and biscuits -- oh, I've run out of ink...

Boy music/girl music

I'm not very clear about this, and I'm tired, and I'm full, and I'm not thinking too well, but...there's 'boy' music, and there's 'girl' music, isn't there? I can only talk about my own youth of course - I'm too divorced from any musical currents that started flowing after 1985 to say anything about anything remotely contemporary.

When I think of boy music, I'm thinking Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, King Crimson - all that prog rock stuff I grew up with and which I still, to my slight shame, feel a deep sense of connection with/enjoyment of. (I've been transferring a load of CDs onto my Mac, and the album covers dominating my desktop are those Roger Dean/Hipgnosis designs of the early 1970s.) These were tastes that I inherited from my big brother - he was my male role model, I guess, and I thought that his (vinyl) albums were big and clever. I thought those impenetrable lyrics and hippyish utopian covers had some deep meaning: if I could only listen to them enough times in the summer twilight, while my teenaged hormones raced and pulsed, the music's opaque symbolism and underlying structures would emerge with crystal clarity. But they never did: it strikes me now - especially Yes's stuff - as the musical equivalent of a drug-rich drunken party.

But I'm not complaining - that music did something to my brain back in the early 70s, something more subtle and insidious than anything purely intellectual, something pleasurable derived from the music's textures and colours, washing over the impressionable matrix of a teenaged brain that was still open to suggestion, and influence, and mystery. Nothing was fixed then - I was still free to believe anything that I wanted to, still open-minded enough to follow new paths and obsessions (I'll tell you about my UFO conspiracy theory phase sometime - I did that before it was remotely fashionable, sending off for mimeographed copies of some weirdo's paranoid rantings...)

There's something about the power of music and memory: its ability to fix emotions, moods, eras; did you ever watch The Rock and Roll Years? That mix of music and archive news footage penetrates deep, and drags up memories that I never knew I had: hairs stand up on my arms, and I can feel the era vibrating at the base of my skull, almost scaring me with the sense that some other forgotten memory is going to bubble up.

I don't remember seeing many women at the Yes/Genesis gigs I went to in the 70s. Was there something about the music that made it appeal only to the 'male brain'? Something about systems/patterns/lack of emotion? Something distinctly nerdy and geeky, something cold and cerebral (or cod cerebral)? I recall that it was the music and the 'ideas' (ahem) that interested me. I don't recall much emotion in the music.

I'm rambling about this now, so I'll stop. Maybe come back to this later, work through my traumatic teenaged years again...

prententious, moi?

Just went out into the garden to put something in the bin. Head down, a bit tired. There's a rough paving stone just outside the door, where the rainwater gathers in little wet shards. The moonlight was glinting in the puddles, silvery-white. There's beauty everywhere.