: 19 February 2004 :

Went to a gig earlier, in Camden – Jeffrey Lewis and Ballboy. JL was excellent. Not seen him before, though I like his recorded stuff. He does this brilliantly cracked anti-folk songs, like “The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song,” that are funny and quirky and touching and which went down a storm live. He threw down some punk shit later in the set, too, him and his brother on bass and another bloke playing drums. And he did a couple of what he called doumentaries, which involved him standing on a chair and singing an informative song about something while showing the audience pages from a comic book he’d drawn on the subject. He did one about the Fall and one about Rough Trade records.

Ballboy were good tonight, though they’ve been better. Gordon MacIntyre, the singer (who’s also a primary school teacher) was losing his voice, so they were wondering out loud how to do the gig. “Jazz odyssey!” someone shouted. “Karaoke!” was someone else’s suggestion – “You’re not the first to think of that,” Gordon said, “we were thinking about getting people up out of the audience to sing, if they knew all the words.” In the end they decided to chance it with G’s dodgy Embra croak.

They did “The Sash My Father Wore,” a song about how Rangers fans are all fat bigoted arseholes which happens to share its name with a Protestant paramilitary anthem beloved of Rangers fans. It was prefaced by a ludicrously long explanation of Scottish footballing culture and history, which commenced with the words “There are two great footballing institutions in Glasgow, Celtic and -”

“Partick Thistle!” yells this girl, to much laughter. It isnae Partick, Gordon says. He’s from Edinburgh and he’s a Hibs fan (“Hurrah!” shouts a small but vocal portion of the crowd), so he tells this story about how he hates Rangers fans for a number of reasons “but mainly,” he says, “because someone from an Orange parade pished against the wall of my house when I was a kid.” Then a story about a recurring dream he has, about being a sub on the Hibs bench against Rangers in the Scottish Cup final and Bobby Williamson brings him on with a minute to go and he scores the winner. “It was a hand ball,” he says, “I punched it in instead of heading it, but it doesn’t matter cause it’s my dream and I can do anything I like.”

I only realised tonight while Gordon was rambling that the Molehills are decked out in classic Fenian colours – green, white and gold – but I assure you it’s not intentional. Well, maybe subconsciously.

Oh, before I forget, I was going to mention something about Ursula LeGuin. Private Eye magazine has a section called Pseuds Corner, where they take the piss out of pretentious types, and she was mentioned in the latest issue. Apparently she did a bit for the Guardian recently where she answered readers’ questions online. One of the questions put to her was quoted in Pseuds Corner:

“As opposed to the standard model of time travellers projected onto previously lived cultural patterns, what do you make of the concept ‘collective experience of temporal variation,’ such as stalled, recursive, or redundant sequences of year sets? I am thinking of collective delusion or the social construction of reality, wherein mere participation in humanity’s elaborated schedules makes distance between avowed temporal judgements and an undercurrent of more objective time. For instance, what would happen if global culture lost track of the passage of the years due to the complexity of information elaborating its rote performance? I am thinking of this not so much from a narrative science fiction perspective as an anthropological dissonance between (world) culture and context.”

Yeah, whatever.