LISTENING TO - Some Favourite Tracks from 2019

Billie Eilish - Bad Guy
Late to the party yet again, I saw her on TV at Glastonbury this year and thought she was something awesome. You hear this everywhere these days, and she will spawn her imitators and no doubt her own creative demise at some point. But for now Bad Guy is street savvy, catchy and an insolent delight from start to finish.


Nick Cave - Ghosteen
I thought Skeleton Tree was something of a career high until this. Over an hour in length it communicates the ordinariness of personal grief, through references to a search for peace that will not come. Cave bears his soul here like only he can, with storytelling and the use of telling oft repeated phrases. I continue to find it so moving I can never listen to it in the background I have to give it the full attention it deserves.


Dave - Psycho
Deservedly winning this years Mercury Price, this track Psycho offers up an honest presentation of one man's world, his mental struggles with himself and with the racism directed towards him. Not a comfortable listen but important none the less.



 
FKA Twigs - Mary Magdalene
Hard to sum up what this woman does but she has the ability to be utterly mesmerising. Her music has echoes of so many disparate influences. The music seems to exist in a time and tempo all its own elegantly slow and steady world, similar to the balladry of James Blake.




James Blake - Don't Miss It
Another sublime bit of songwriting from James Blake. Who always surprises you musically with his arrangements whilst at the same time remaining recognisably the same. Don't Miss It is quite soul bearing at times and reveals aspects of his difficulties with his internal world.



Rain Tree Crow - Rain Tree Crow
A re-release from 1991 of an album by reformed Japan members which manages to sound like one of the best David Sylvian albums. It was quite addictively on my turntable for quite a few weeks.



Rosalia - Malamente
Everyone wants a taste of this woman these days, and you can understand why. Effortlessly blending flamenco and street stylings into something all her own.


Anna Calvi - Hunter
Oh boy, her third album kicks some ass. My favourite track is Wish which I just love and can never have enough of.

SHERINGHAM DIARY 31 - Echoes Of The Unlived Life

As I sit in the shop looking out at the people in the mall outside, It can feel like I'm in a goldfish bowl going round and round goggle eyed with my mouth open. You start believing you can read the retail runes. The tangible difference in people when they are willing to spend money and when they are not.  Ideally they smell and examine the soaps on our outside stalls and then bring them in with a particular bounce in their step and an air of enjoying that process of choice then purchase. When they do not, you experience what I've come to refer to as 'The Day Of The Soap Sniffers', a series of people disinterestedly shoving soaps up to their noses, inhaling the soap's perfume as a sensory distraction, whilst emotionally inured to taking it further, to actually purchasing. It can feel like some sort of tease, when after a few minutes they wander off with an air of having had their free fix.

Sometimes its possible to expend so much mental imaginative energy on what you wish or want to happen in life, that you can forget to fully engage with the life that is actually before you. Its quite feasible to inhabit an entirely unlived life. When times get a bit tougher its easy to sustain yourself by imagining more favourable outcomes, of a better life. This is another way of existing within the unlived life. Somehow through wishin' and hopin' and prayin', plannin' and dreamin' with enough passionate fervour the imagined life will inevitable turn up and become reality - it will be here. Even now, when I'm in my early sixties my mind can hark back to older dreams and aspirations -'if this would happen, then I'd feel happier and more fulfilled'

On quiet days in the shop, I can find myself imaginatively interacting with the ideal unlived life, because I'm a bit bored with what the real one is serving up. There is a way to look at my desire for busy-ness, for being occupied with custom in the shop, as an existential distraction. Mostly from actually fully feeling the boredom. Tolstoy once called boredom 'the desire for desires' but what is it that we face when we have no tangible desires? There seems to be this perilous undertow of unbridled fear, perhaps of failure, the failure to succeed in life, to do something notable or worthy before I die. To fear our mortal nature will rob our lives of the chance of being significant. Unless we succeed at something, this life wont amount to a hill of beans. The unlived life is like this, its similar to the quest for the Holy Grail, the unlived life wont allow itself to be found. This leaves our actual life steeped in a wake of poisonous regret.

What if I could let go of addiction to the fake optimism of the unlived life and attempt to be with whatever is there? Yes there could be pain, but also the pleasurable relief from reflection, analysis and comparison. If there is only what there is in this moment then the imagined unlived life is just one aspect of what Dogen describes as 'the dream within a dream'?  Can we, as Rev Leoma said recently, trust that whatever happens is what needs to happen as a function of conditioned co-production, and do that without becoming fatalistic or not actively engaging with contributing to those conditions? We have to keep putting something out there, its just the consequences of this wont necessarily turn up instantly or turn out as what we imagined we wanted. Each presenting moment will be whatever it needs to be, whatever the conditions make it.

A life in retail is what it is. Quiet days are quiet days, busy days are busy days, with little point in trying to psychoanalyse collective behaviour, to understand why something has or hasn't happened. Some days start off quiet and you mentally write them off within the first couple of hours, then for a brief hour or so it turns into a hive of activity. What was looking dire suddenly turns into a decent days takings. Nothing you did changed that, but nevertheless your mood is transformed from pessimistic to optimistic. Its hard to cultivate and maintain equanimity with your life when your desire is for something else.

Life hurries on towards the end of the year and I feel very mixed emotions about what has come to pass. It has undoubtedly been a tense and momentous year, not without its joy and a sprinkling of hurrah moments, but taking place in front of a nation in a state of unease with itself. The election provides a resolution of sorts, but unrealistic promises have been made, so there will be days of reckoning. Yet maybe this is all as it needs to be, the result meets the current zeitgeist. Perhaps we have to trust that the consequences of handing power to a lying toe rag will show us something we need to learn as a country

As you may have guessed from the general tone of this blogpost I'm not feeling brim full of optimism. Though its intensity has subsided, I still have residual anger and frustration eating away in the pit of my stomach. I voted tactically as I've reluctantly had to do on far too many occasions in my adult life. Most of the time it is without success. But how else do I make my vote effective? Its this, or voting for a party I feel an affinity with, that either hasn't a hope of getting parliamentary representation or will be inadequately represented due to the first past the post voting system. I'm sure I'm not alone in being tired of my vote having no influence. To resort to apathy and not vote at all, though understandable, is a cop out. As our democracy silently slips from being a two party system into a seemingly never ending Tory hegemony, my sense of despair gets angrier and more militant in tone. Giving up for me would only exacerbate the problem.

Sheringham seafront during a recent storm

The political combined with the actual weather, has brought week after week of storms wearing down public confidence in the run up to Christmas. Its been tough trading conditions since mid October, which calling a general election was a significant factor in accentuating. Its our first year of trading in Sheringham so its hard to know if this is what its usually like. Fellow Courtyard shopkeepers tell us 2019 trade is well down on last year. So as we complete our seventh month since opening we bolster up our confidence with how well we've done so far, and bear with all the other external factors that are so much beyond our control. Understanding retail patterns in a small seaside town outside its Summer season has proven frankly utterly baffling.

BOOK REVIEW ~ Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

Sayaka Murata knows intimately the ins and outs of a convenience store workers lifestyle, before taking up writing full time, she worked as one. Its there in all the small incidental details of daily stock promotions and the formulaic prescription of its customer service inserted into the narrative or the observations of customer's behaviour that her character Keiko makes. Here is a seemingly soulless job that somehow Keiko has found great meaning and purpose in. For her this job is not a dead end

Keiko is the quirky outsider, yet also quite a lovably human character. As a child Keiko was prone to behaving really oddly, in a socially unacceptable manner. Its never really clear what mental status she has, is it some type of autism, or does she simply not fit into some standard behavioural profile? Her family have signed off, resigned to her being constantly an embarrassment, they quietly despair she'll make anything of her life that they understand as being normal.

Fast forward to Keiko as an adult, now in her mid thirties, she's found it useful to adopt a number of coping strategies simply to get by without any revealing or disruptive incident. She's chosen to work in a convenience store, a regimented tightly structured work style, one she can easily understand and comply with, to do whatever is expected of her. After eighteen years working in a convenience store she's become the ideal worker. It also gives her opportunities to see other staff members manner of talking, behaving and dressing and adopts aspects of these into her own. In this way she can disguise herself, it eases her relations with others, ensuring her behaviour is socially correct, because left to her own devices she knows her own judgement is unreliable, and she'll be exposed for who she really is, maybe even cast out.

Keiko is the classic misfit character, but one we all can find a way of relating to. Murata's first person narrative cleverly utilises an emotionally neutered deadpan humour, Keiko's world view can seem quite rational. But is she the classic unreliable narrator? We only ever see the world through Keiko's perceptions, so we hear only how she thinks other people are seeing her. But its clear from what she reports that she is quite clearly seen as odd, its just no one says it to her face. She isn't hiding in plain sight. There is a universality to her as a character, we all pretend to some extent simply in order to get by, to get on with others. We conform to stave off criticism, to negate the pressure of having to make your own decisions. These pressures to fulfil societies and her families expectations for her, are recognisable.

Convenience Store Woman is very dryly witty as it subtly pokes fun at the conventions of conformity that become unquestionable. Keiko thinks she has her life flawlessly under her control until she takes one step out of her comfort zone and suddenly she's barraged with other people's views and misinterpretations of why she's doing what she's doing. She discovers she is actually happier and more fulfilled by being a convenience store worker, despite everyone else's view that she cannot possibly be. It creates a space for her to be her own woman, to have a sense of independence and agency within society. Convenience Store Woman is an often moving, funny and a really enjoyable read. Whilst exhibiting many things which we've come to know as inimitably Japanese in tone and character, this is not a conventional novel, its as delightfully odd in its narrative as is its lead character.