Christmas from the perspective of a 20 something douchebag like myself

When it comes to christmas, i am neither scrooge or santa.  I must confess to a little scepticism about the whole gig - where the food is as ersatz and sugary as the sentiment. However, there's no denying christmas is a useful social convention - an encouragement of jollity in the depth of coldest winter, albeit somewhat tainted by the capital-friendly clamour for present-giving oneupmanship on the one hand, and the intellectual retardation of the story of christ on the other; ultimately, the reality of xmas is most affirmed by the strained poignancy of childhood memories and hand-me down atavism as represented by christmas, 'winterval', saturnalia,  or what ever the jesus you want to call it. 

For a unmarried, twenty-something 'professional' (i.e. i have a job that pays my rent), christmas is now an interregnum between childhood and potential childbearing: christmas ultimately only matters if you are a kid, or you have kids. The excitement that a child feels at the approach of christmas day is only replicable in a adulthood by the use of cocaine, blackjack and hookers. As a parent, there is the vicarious joy and pride in seeing your children rip the wrapper off the little novelties under the tree that could only be equalled by witnessing them giving a wedgie to the local school bully. 

But nevertheless, for the floundering single twenty-something, christmas represents a nice retreat from social and professional woes and worries. A time with family, away from the neuroses and constant self-examination that comes from always comparing your lot with that of your peers. With your family, it's rare that anyone's problems match; therefore, one can offer sympathy, without the burden of full-blown empathy. The problems of my 90 year old grandmother are unlikely to tally with mine; I can reflect on her problems, without forever referencing my own experiences, which is what i'm reduced to when friends come to me with problems (they call such advice 'the benefit of experience', but that is a misnomer in my case; i should know, I have to live with them). And, perhaps, most selfishly and pertinently, I'll never worry that her worries are more glamorous and interesting than mine. 

Christmas is a time of excess for many; drink, eat and be merry, for tomorrow we die, as the old saying goes (or at least it did, until the early onset of diabetes and heart problems.)  People say they do this, because christmas is the only time of the year they hang with family and friends; christ, who do you hang around with the rest of the year? Embittered traffic wardens? 

Christmas is the one time of the year I don't view through the bottom of a bottle. You may be my friend, and you might like to drink, that can wait till I'm back in the new year. I will be in the abstemious womb-like atmosphere of the remaining stump of my family. Christmas, for me, is not the time of year for excess; the rest of the calendar is. 

peace on earth, and a half of mild, please santa. 

merry fucken xmas. x

Drumro[ll] 1st Birthday with Sandwell District, The Black Dog, George Fitzgerald & Richard H Kirk at Park Hill

Emerging from Sheffield train station, Park Hill, an old sink estate currently undergoing redevelopment, looms over the city skyline like Dracula's castle, as if remodelled by Le Corbusier. From the middle of a concrete fortress, the nights kicks off at unnaturally early 8pm (licensing issues having now required a 2am curfew). Darkness has not long settled in over the city, and Park Hill now assumes its unlikely status as the place to be. An old brutalist monument to post-war social democratic optimism and the subsequent political, social and architectural decay? Not a popular choice, but that'll do me for a night out of dark electronic music. Steely music for the steel city, dark music for a dark space.

All 3 acts (George Fitzgerald, only dj'ed at a subsequent afterparty) formed a logical programme, ensuring a continuity of dark, brooding electronic music, with differences enough apparent to keep things interesting. Richard H Kirk, who as part of Cabaret Voltaire, was making strange noises before most contemporary producers were even sperm, had an early start, and set about establishing the industrial theme of the evening from the off, chafing as this initially was. This was no warm-up. Straight on to local gods, The Black Dog. No nice groovy tech-house interludes, it was on to Techno with a capital T. It was heavy, dark and rolling, as one would expect, but they were not to bludgeon the audience into submission. That role was to be assumed, as expertly as could be expected, by Sandwell District, whose two members have as much techno experience between them as your average Detroit phonebook.

On record, Sandwell District manage to introduce a little warmth into one of the most hair-shirted and ascetic strains of dance music (or any music), through the use of icy synth lines and ethereal washes of sound, forging a continuity between their post-punk and techno/IDM influences. Live, underneath the raw concrete of Park Hill, atmospherics and abstraction is substituted for brittle, body-bashing blasts of percussion. It could be said that it is all just merely very functional, but in the world of techno, 'mere' functionalism is nothing to be scared of. Where the function is to create a dark spasm of euphoria on crowded dancefloors, forms follow function, and ends justify means.

In a mix of their own tracks ('Immolare'), SD affiliated offshoots (Regis' 'Blood Witness' being a sheer glory of a cacophony) and various referents too numerous to name and number, SD prove in a two-hour sprint that while techno may be mocked by many for its apparent dryness and emotional frigidity (as noted in Simon Reynold's excellent Energy Flash), it can, at the right place, the right time, inspire sweaty, mindless (as in un self-conscious) possession as any other music you could care to compartmentalise.

The remarkable congruity of the programming, the venue and the novelty of the occasion was an affirmation that dark, sometimes difficult electronic music, is to be enjoyed, and is not the arch soundtrack to pseudo-nihilistic grandstanding it can sometimes appear to be.

6am On A Normal Saturday Night at Fabric, London

Room 1: Boom tish.

Room 2: Bum Tisch.

Room 3: Closed.

Berlin - A Reprise

The following is a selection of notes I wrote when visiting Berlin for the second time in 2011. These were mainly written in a myriad of local bars, and hence the views expressed in this piece are not necessarily those of a sober and collected Alex J Caldwell.

I have been attempting to transcend the iniquities and anodyne tyranny of 21st century capitalism by not permitting myself to cross the area formerly established by the Berlin wall. This is rendered somewhat difficult by the fact that the wall snaked through, rather than neatly declinated the east and west of the city.




I gingerly stall, for example, the area around Freiderichstrasse (the former U-Bahn stop on the border), knowing that one false step will take me into the bourgeois liberty and its accompanying tat of the west. I walk, not so much on eggshells, but on little pyschogeographic landmines and booby traps. The watchtowers may be down, the riles lowered and impotent, and only caution, a detailed map, and a careful reading of Marxism-Leninism will see me safe.

Luckily for me, in the east, the beer is cheaper, the air is smokier, and the clubs (legendary techno temples Berghain and Tresor) are better. And, despite the absence of the wall, there are always indications that you are indeed in the east. If it's dirty, if rubble litters dead chocked lawns and rotted industry, you, mein freunde, are in ostberlin.

The reunification of Berlin has, rather paradoxically, rendered the whole of the city socialist, east and west, in a way that was not true at the time of division. Electorally, Berlin is the exclusive territory of the social-democratic SPD, the Greens, and Die Linke, a left-wing ragbag of ostdeutsche communists, socialist radicals, anarchists and other malcontents. The Christian Democrats bear out not the slightest contour in the local political topography. There is next to no chance of a right-wing suburbanite acceding to the mayoralship of the capital, unlike London, presided over by the sometimes amusing, but generally rather vexing semi-rule of Boris Johnson.

Despite the marginal hegemony of the SPD in Berlin, little of the regulatory nannying associated with New 'Labour' and the European centre-'left' prevails. Smoking is so prevelant that the city has been twinned with Ashtray, Marlboro Country. OK, Berlin maybe an ashtray of a city, but at least it's not so emasculated, that it drinks red bull for some pep, and would rather you went on the border to have a cigarette.

Berlin is not health-conscious, but instead realises that even 99.9% of people who don't smoke, don't drink, and do yoga and eat tofu to the point that their colon is sponsored by Linda McCartney, will in time die, a fate so depressing that the only effective recourse is to pour y'rself a beer, light up a fag and wait for this mortal coil to become unsprung, and hopefully have some belly laughs and occassional epiphanies along the way.

The result of all this fine living and disregard for health-related prissiness, is that Berlin sucks at sport. As at the time of writing, it's hopeless football team Hertha Berlin lingers in the second tier of the Bundesliga. The level of football in Berlin is approximate to that of Scottish football outside the confines of Celtic and Rangers. Hertha Berlin plays in the er, olympian munificence of the Olympiastadion, the equivalent of Leyton Orient being rehoused at the new Stratford Olympic stadium.

Still, anyway, there's not much time for sport in Berlin. In any case, is not exercise just that thing that uncultured people do in lieu of artistic creation, an asexual, hair-shirted sublimation of the overriding, ultimate drive to snag one's genitals on the orifice of another?

Instead, Berlin's sport is creation, including that of it's own environment. Having rubble and delapidation - you have to paint that shit well for it to look good, or get the contractors in. And Berliners have opted, being poor, for the first option, but how they put their back into it. Graffiti is done with brains, thought and passion, as well as with a spraycan, instead of a little piss-artist tagging every bus shelter, as is the case in London. The city is dotted with playgrounds for children, most of which would violate any number of health and safety regulations. A splinter and a skinned knee is nothing to be scared of. Berlin is a hard city, for hard men, spirited women and robust children.

Berlin is a city that has had enough of rules, its current intemperance possibly rooted in previous decades of war, and authoritarianism (for more on this spurious theory, scroll down and see my previous article on Berlin). It's made uo for having so little fun in previous decades, but probably outdoing any other European city in the safely unregulated exericse of hedonism and artistic creativity.

I'm a fair few beers in by now. I'm nearly the sole remaining customer in a bar at 2 am. Where's Edward Hopper when you need him, mixing paints and setting up an easel?