:: alpha male ::Firing stuff up before the laptop and master tapes get boxed, packed, mislaid, dropped, soaked in knocked over Pot Noodle and then trampled on. Passed a tempting abandoned vehicle today and whaddya know?- airy, space for guests, great acoustics. Plug into the cigarette lighter and away we go. Punk rock. And what a closer for the CD - genuine screams, freewheelin street poet repeatedly compacted by industrial crunch, then - an awful silence that says so much. So so much.

:: dub housing ::So I'm down in this basement mixing up some incisive and freeform journal/ism, and ripping and burning wild MP3 gold. And I pause for a second - lean back, glance around and am forced to admit "Archway bunker, you're damp and have broken windows and at times you would unnerve Fred West, and I feel like apologising when people come round but I've grown accustomed to your jazz, man. You've been good to me over th -" when the phone goes and it's the housing co-op and it's like this and like that and they're not sure why and they're sorry but the quit letter was addressed to the wrong flat so unfortunately it's really short notice. So start packing, pal. Superb. Any interesting places-to-let in London most welcome.

Well, interesting but sane. On this site's statistics, I can see a list of phrases typed into search engines which have produced the DPS address as a result. Over the past few weeks, people have come to this site whilst searching for, amongst other things, "dog intercourse", "dogs with ladies" and, bafflingly, "the aroused cock." I gasped audibly, and had to bite my knuckles, however, at the following search entered into Lycos UK just last week - "martin amis fucking" Lovely. Is this a live webcam? Does it make him any money? Is it a style? A new book? The internet sure is a piss-soaked stairwell towards our moral collapse.

:: the name ::Hola. Entries slowly down on the DPS website until the final group of songs hits Peoplesound later in the summer. This one's a mere diary entry - a strange yet beautiful realisation. Concentrating energies. Also fiddling around with a Quicktime movie taster. Drop a line.

Voting this week. Love it. Usual decision-making process is to log all tactical possibilities, draw flowcharts on a whiteboard and graphs on an overhead projector, have heated exchanges in coffeeshops and then charge into the polling booth and plant an x beside anyone at all left of new Labour. Round our way that'd be Socialist Alliance's Louise Christian.

  
:: the black panther cert x :: Music's the name of the game. Spent the day chez great friend Vic 20, helping myself to analog warble and acid squelch. Middish way in the third act of the DPS. "If I could remove any word from the English language it would be closure", said James Ellroy. But I'm optimistic. ::korgsequencer::The structure you love - songs that had to get out somehow, doo lally palette of styles, DIY production and, I hope, scope record co's don't believe the public would fancy these days; I blame the dumb-down decade myself.

JLG season at the NFT. Even the French folk I know can't stand Jean-Luc Godard films. But I like them - for the audaciousness of things like the traffic jam sequence in Weekend, the oblique and political cut through with moments of poetic brilliance, the sense of play, the editing, the style. These days, of course, he looks like we've frightened him out of an afternoon nap, his beer gut's bigger than a bouncy castle and he has all his maverick genius needs taken care of by a low-maintenance oriental 'maid'. Oh and the films are just filler, output. Dear JLG - why did you fuggin bother sleuthing out the female heart in Two Or Three Things I Know About Her? All that insight must come in real handy while Yoko's changing your Pampers.

::transparent::

::meenk::
:: the loveless::"Hey you, with your eclectic occasionally uptight pop, I bet you're a big fan of the Beatles White Album." Apart from the key songs, I didn't know it that well - until a friend gave me a copy for my birthday. Interesting recurring themes, I rubbed my chin as I listened. Lennon had some 'mommy was a hard woman to love and squeeze love from' thing starting to happen, and McCartney must've been getting broody with all those songs of simple folk living simple lives, replete with merry infants. 'Savoy Truffle' has the Louis Sclavis-style horns I'd love to crank up on 'Uberbaby'. But anyone who creates enough of anything ends up with recurring themes. So, it's time to peep further into one of the Dog And Pony Show's - the Loveless.

::badge board::

This month, frieze magazine recounts an anecdote regarding a dinner party held in Richmond, Surrey before the last election. The hosts were Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall - with guests Tony and Cherie Blair. After several bottles of Pinot Noir, Jagger pops the question he's be dying to ask all night - 'ere listen, Tone, what about wangling an honour this direction so I can give it the old Sir Mick for a bit. The future prime minister, however, suddenly voices his private disenchantment with the monarchy. Devout royalist Mick takes offence and the Blairs find themselves reversing out the drive long before the arctic roll.

False, this story might be just a mischievous new form of street-spin, an attempt to leak an image of Tony Blair as a closet radical. True, it's a potted example, if you really need one, of how inherently servicing and risk-free the high-end of pop has become. And certainly of the Stones: the first band to accept complete sponsorship to a corporation - clothes, advertising, the whole kaboodle.

Enough conversing, convertable. Guess what happened ..

::fsflint - london::

Poetry On The Uberground for los anarchistos. More than substantial website content if you ask me, and happy to give my gob a rest quite frankly. There's a stand-off on
Oxford Street as I type. Anarchistos - we'd probably be on your side if you, y'know, believed in them. We'd vote you in if we could vote you out again someday. I've ate your stinking tofu and kipped against your amps and chewed over Proudhon. You're all heart really, cut out and thrown around in the street. Not that I claim insiderdom, if that even exists. Just people are bound to ask, whatever you do - is that it? Is that what we do with total freedom? You'll always be Shot By Both Sides. But then you kids are used to that.

Patti Smith once said, of lyric writing, that she couldn't just coldly confront a blank page - she had to scream, jump about and even masturbate whilst attacking it. I took this approach once down the Kingfisher Fish Bar. No-one batted an eyelid. But that's Archway, where they never stopped drawing a circle round the A. And where property really is theft. Most of mine is. Boom boom. (i.e. a joke).