But what the heck, everyone jettisons their core principles nowadays.

Also, the Management tries to avoid 'acting out'. Amateur dramatics are best conducted indoors.

Maybe the Twitternet's Ozone Layer -- Name, Johnny Cool; Occupation, Ozone Layer -- won't 'fill up' after all...

<Jess> My Queen of Mixed Metaphors, you are a Cassandra crying 'wolf' in the wilderness. And Nesses don't come any wilder than this one.

That was the sound of me leaning out of the window and breathing in the sweet, sweet air on the Regent's Canal -- it's going to be a long time before I can taste a non-Torified London again.

It probably can't be stopped now, but a vote for Ken Livingstone might impede it somehow. And would make <mack> happier, which would be a good thing.

I'm grouching because I've just been informed that the next rating list, due in a week or two, will probably include two events where I performed horribly ... but not (yet) the league games where I have a plus score against 2100+ types. Which means I could actually sink below 1800 for the first time ever - or since I paused there briefly on the way up.

I've also got one game to play - tonight - in the club championship. Club championships bring out the worst in me. Something to do with not taking seriously any opponent in a club that would have me for a member ...

(Whining in advance)

I met a touring Dutch club group last weekend - good people. My club organized a one-day blitz tournament for them on Saturday - and then some of them represented 'us' in a league match next day. All quite legit - and it gave a jolt to the opposition who had rounded up an FM and an olympiad player from foreign parts to surprise *us*.

Yes, the Dutch are very flexible, in a traditional kinda way.... Always messing things up nicely abroad, as well as at home...

START!

I won the game. A fairly typical effort in the King's Indian Attack versus the French, with me playing Black. Both sides arrange their pieces and start edging forward, with no exchanges at all before move 21, just tension. Then a flurry of exchanges and I'm a pawn up with a better position. Then a burst of tactics and I'm a piece up and still attacking... et voila.

<Dom>-<Club championships aren't so bad after all... heh.> hmmm... seems to me that you are replacing some of the old memories and thought patterns with fresh new ones...

I dig that - though maybe I'm incorrectly connecting some "dots" here.

heh - <When I was (nearly) ten.> Could be a good first line in a verse that could have started this Sinatra song 'It was a Very Good Year':

When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights
We'd hide from the lights
On the village green
When I was seventeen

When I was twenty-one
...

When I was thirty-five
...

(http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/thes...)

I'm off now ... going to Dublin to see something called 'Hard Rain' - a photographic exhibition based on Dylan lyrics and the environment.

Two birds, one stone:

'Fifty year old baby
all that time to live
pissing God to stake your stance
whilst old men drill for heaven

If you're really loving in your ilfe
every dollar/cent from zero
heaven calls a fifty year old boy

History rollin' numbers
blindly sees them straight
crawling drama
human spirit
and it's slow salvation

Fifty year old baby
good for all at once
do it, chew it
anything that brings you lots of flavour...'

Robert Pollard, '50 Year Old Baby'.

It's a vile, horrible noise, of course. But so is practically everything ever done by Mark E and his ever-changing line-up. Though I'd make an exception for '(How I Wrote) Elastic Man'. Not that *says* anything of import: just that the noise seems less abrasive and almost somehow musical.

*Gode in Heofen-ryche* ... if that's the line I want: Anglo-Saxon for 'god in heaven/ gott in himmel, usw. I'm turning into a musical purist. Minus the ear.

"This mental space is uccupied and everything is mine..." (Leonard Cohen & Phil Spector, Death of a Ladies' Man)

Sic.

< Nothing wrong with seeing life and the world through song lyrics, is there?> You weren't ever so right, Dom.

Not wanting to get too technical-- but I think the song format demands the chosen words to be of a certain length, the verses are of a set number, roughly, (like in the Sonata-form)... so the writer is challenged to deliver his message without too much room for complications and getting cluttery using an avalanche of words...

Mastery of "simplicity".

Many songs will show the utmost intimacy, honesty and truthfulness; yet on the other hand a lot of them do not. But the lyricist has the choice to go either way.

So I'd have to say that, for me, the most precious pieces of poetry, (if I may call it that), I have found in various songs.

Hard for me to imagine Life, without songs; Words & Music.

Leading to a bit that went something like -- "They're quasi-effeminate characters in love with oral gratification ...". In a pop song, for Crumb's sakes. Bring back "da doo ron ron", I say.

Which isn't to say that lyrics can't be intelligent. Leonard Cohen, for example:

"Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and Saint Paul
I've seen the future, brother,
It is murder."

or

"She took his much admired
oriental frame of mind
and the heart-of-darkness alibi
his money hides behind"

*heart-of-darkness alibi* -- that's exquisite. I wonder if *our* Mr Kurtz has one of those? Jess would know. She knows everything, really.

Meanwhile ... here's a (minor key) idea that I had yesterday while looking at a (superb) exhibition of photos by Mark Edwards based on the lyrics to Dylan's 'Hard Rain' ...

They're beautifully diverse (some can be seen at the Hard Rain website: I haven't got the URL to hand but you can Geurgle it easily) - some are literal, some metaphoric; some tragic, some comic; some vast in scope (planet Earth from space), some horrifyingly specific (torture in Abu Ghraib - the line being "I saw a white man who walked a black dog").

Und so weiter. From a song written in 1964 - a poetic protest song, I guess, if categories are required. But even though almost every line starts with "I saw...", the song constantly moves away from the 'I' figure and out into the world: which is what permits it to combine into a powerful environmental message ("a highway of diamonds with nobody on it" ... "a black branch with blood that kept dripping" ... "where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten, where the executioner's face is always well hidden").

Most of the pics are by Edwards himself, but he also uses other sources for, eg, Abu Ghraib and planet Earth. Possibly the most resonant image of the 20th century: Earth from the moon, Earthrise, a milky-blue green globe hanging in the void ... our whole world.

I was suddenly reminded of *another* song, by Joni Mitchell, from the album Hejira, around 1976-77. Where she describes seeing the Earth photo in a "highway service station" and realizing that "you couldn't see a highway on that marbled bowling ball ... or me here least of all ..."

Which is just so impossibly self-centred. This massively resonant image: and it makes her think about herself, her smallness in the great cosmic void. Which is real enough - and Mitchell is still one of the great poets of pop/rock music - but to me it was a great contrast with Dylan.

He's constantly moving out, back into the world. She moves deeper into her own head ... something of a problem with that 1970s singer-songwriter Me Generation.

"I've suffered for my music. Now it's your turn."

I'd better stop before I write my actual review feature here instead of some newspaper ...