Harvest Goon

I untangle my amusingly short headphone lead from a bus ticket and stuff it into my blue record bag. The bag bearing a stencilled image of Bill Hicks smoking a tab. It goes everywhere, holds everything, taunts the world with its irreverent image and the potential it embodies.

'What's he building in there?'

Each day a small crisis of diet. To seek out the best takeaway foodstuffs. The least expensive/least unhealthy ratio. Or as the Indians would say ‘cheap and best!’

So far Boots The Chemist do a good line in a bland sandwich. They are skilled at taking sandwiches and removing all salt, pepper, spice and butter, and then adding a hunk of cucumber just to irritate me.

I drag fruit around with me at all costs in my big record bag of stuff. My guitar in one hand, taken each way by the wind, precariously hidden beneath an ugly cheap black plastic guitar sack which keeps most of it from getting soused in rain.

My shoulder aches from the weight of apples and bananas and a novel and a big red notebook from Varanasi. My lovely notebook, thick with much page potential and a red cotton on brown card covering.

As I march around town I often listen to recorded versions of my songs. Increasingly I realise how talented other musicians are for making their music NOT sound like it was recorded with the most basic of tools in the corner of a small room.

Hours on top of hours listening again to the same collection of clumsily picked chords, uncompressed vocals flying in and out of aural harmony. Adding bits of keyboard drums, poking out some improv tabla.

In my Bill Hicks/H&M collaboration bag, I carry with me a spare set of THICK socks. The three pairs of identical looking blue skate shoes that I insist on not repairing (or replacing) have noticeable (by their presence) holes in the sole. This makes any short walk outside sadly tinged with cold footed depression. Everything’s ugly when your feet are wet and cold.

Last night I went to the cinema for fun, as a patron, to watch a recent live concert by Neil Young. A delightful cheese fest, which I enjoyed alone, in the shared dark room of strange middle aged men and their wives. I sat up front and I drank in every country chord and folk wash and string arrangement and lyric of Canadian ranches and broken women and drugged out deslolation.

I also played games with myself like, "Emmylou Harris, woman or machine?"

I wept during a particularly delicate rendering of Harvest Moon, a song forever associated with my distant wayward girl.

And then I walked home in a wet feet paradise, running the charva gauntlet.

Cinema shifts involve a pacing of mood.

Restraint, patience: waiting silently for customers to arrive.

Cheerfulness: smiling and welcoming, whilst doing a laid back best at making myself look useful or in some way relevant to the proceedings; at all times oozing potential assertiveness solutions for any possible cinematic crisis.

Then, snack in hand, I must emotionally strap in for whatever exploration of the heart they have in store for me.

I am increasingly aware of an audience’s reaction. Especially during a film I’ve seen a hundred times. I can watch a film from a totally different place dependent on who’s leading the crowd. I just wished that at least once someone would think that Marie Antoinette was a Snakes on a Plane-style spoof and laugh hysterically throughout. That would have improved the experience, immeasurably.

I gaze at the flicker and grain of the big furry picture on the wall. See those massive up close faces and huge foreign landscapes, impassively making imprints on my brain.

O the ambivalence of the image!

O the equality of the image!

Precious image!

Yesterday a woman left to the toilet to be physically sick after watching a rape scene in Red Road.

Sick vile image!

That’s tonight’s late afternoon viewing for me.

I haven’t once encountered a strong negative reaction from a cinema goer as the lights go up. No one has verbally owned up to disliking a film. Obviously the hunch of the shoulders and the darting floorward eyes are a dead giveaway.

But we become helplessly submissive during the big loud clever light pictures and agree to leave quietly at the end.

On closer enquiry I can usually tease out a genuine response, but perhaps it is Englishness; that vague projection of optimism blended with an unwillingness to offend that has everyone blithely say “yes, I enjoyed that.”

Yes, mustn’t offend the cinema assistant.

Logic: “that film was rubbish, and therefore by association, so are you.”

Besides, “we paid good money to see that film and it was on at the Tyneside and they show quality films right?”

Or as mommas say, it’s just that they haven’t anything good to say so it’s best they say nothing at all.

Jeez, I'd never get anything written.