Five words
Jul. 19th, 2010 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaHere's a meme I got off of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ironlord , and it goes like this:
Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.
Here are the five words he gave me:
Brighton
I have lived in Brighton since 1995. It has two universities, a large gay population, an uncomfortably pebbly beach that is nontheless rammed with tourists given the merest hint of summer sun, lots of people who commute to London for work, lots of people who have left London but still sort of want to live there, lots of homeless people because you may as well be homeless somewhere warm, one and a half piers, many, many fine pubs, some hills, a thing that used to be a fishing cottage that became the epitome of Georgian oriental pastiche, a thing covered in onion domes that is bigger than the building that used to be a fishing cottage even though it used to be its stables, which is now a thousand-seat theatre, lots of hippies, some good pubs, lots of sunshine, some huge and intermittently threatening seagulls, a Bronze Age hill fort, lots of musicians who are decorators while waiting to be famous, and amazing numbers of things that claim to be organic.
I like it here.
Deep sea diving
I don't technically do deep sea diving, I don't think; I'm only qualified to 35 metres, which is mostly all coastal stuff. I learnt through the British Sub-Aqua Club or BSAC, which is obviously superior to PADI, which stands for Pay And Die Instantly, or possibly Put Another Dollar In. BSAC is a club-based system, where instead of paying for a specific course, you're trained as you go along by instructors in the club, which means you pick up the bad habits and prejudices of your first club and then sneer at everyone else who doesn't dive like you. Fortunately I learnt with one of the best clubs in Britain (no really, they’ve won prizes for it) and so my bad habits are of a superior sort.
Diving is fundamentally an expensive sport. You can spend £45 on a day’s hardboat diving, which is how people who aren’t in clubs do it, and people can be carrying several thousand pounds' worth of gear. A torch that costs less than £100 is usually considered a cheapy back-up torch, and many people spend hundreds on them. The cheapest of drysuits, not necessary but really rather useful in the cold waters of the UK, costs maybe £350, and the expensive ones are twice that. I do just about the cheapest sort of diving possible; a typical club dive costs between £8 and £12, or something like £15 for two dives in a day, the club owns a compressor so we don’t have to pay for commercial air fills. However, even though almost all of my gear is second-hand, off ebay, home-serviced, home-altered, home-sewn in the case of my thermal undersuit, I still worked out recently that I jump into the water with about £1300 of gear on me. Then again, if I sold it all tomorrow it would be worth nearly as much, because it's all already reached its minimum value.
I am currently training to be a Dive Leader. This means I will be able to dive to 50 metres, which is apparently great fun because you start getting really noticeable nitrogen narcosis down there, which is like being drunk only you get instantly sober when you shallow up, and also that I will be able to officially lead inexperienced divers, which you have to do a bunch of in the training to prove that you can anyway.
The reason I go diving is that you get to see really cool stuff like shipwrecks, and underwater life going unconcernedly about its business, and you get to float around weightlessly like being in space. Also, many of the people who do it are the sort of practically-inclined, cheerful, beer-drinking geeks I get on with. S'good.
Wacken
Wacken is a municipality near the city of Itzehoe in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Wacken was first mentioned in 1148, but there were probably some settlements before, which is proven by the trove of Germanic artifacts.
Oh, you mean the festival? I went there only once, in 2004. I have a mild horror of festivals, in general, ever since going to Reading in 1999 and feeling really like I was missing the spirit of the thing, being the square one, because I preferred going and seeing bands to drinking overpriced lager, being herded into queues, and setting fire to things all night. Generally it remains my policy to do anything like this, right down to beer festivals, as a member of staff rather than a punter, because it mostly seems to be more fun, completely apart from being cheaper and often involving free food.
However, Wacken was great. It's a specialist festival so more of the people there give a shit about the music, I was with a large bunch of friends, the weather was hot hot hot which I like, there were strange late-night comedy music acts and an oompah band, beer by the litre (I still have my plastic stein), regularly emptied and cleaned portaloos, standpipes with free drinking water, huge functional hot communal showers, a deposit-based system for beer containers which prevented 95% of the usual swathes of festival rubbish, and I'll mention the people again because they really made it for me. The people I went with and the people we talked to there, including the man who had made himself armour out of squashed, overlapping, ring-linked cans of Spam. I don’t think I’m likely to go to Wacken again, but I’m glad I went.
Clutch (not that I should need too much explanation)
I will make this an explanation for other people who read this, then, who mostly know that I go on about a band called Clutch but don’t know much about them. I am choosing to ignore that most of you don't care about them either. Clutch are a band from Germantown, Maryland, USA, who a long time ago, 1991 to 1993 or so, were trying to be metal. Their breakthrough EP was on Earache, a very metal label, they all frowned in photos, the singer looked like a sort of intellectual James Dean and sang in a brooding, gravelly, shouty voice about, well, here’s a verse from the first album:
How Can I Seize The Day When It Is Dusk?
You Provide The Pull, And I'll Provide The Thrust
Romance Is Nothing But A Sack Of Lies
But It Is Truth Which I Have Come To Despise
Cheerful, weren’t they? And then sometime between there and 1995, something happened. The drummer, who had clearly always been designed to do something more interesting than flat ahead metal, learnt to swing like a motherfucker. The bassist learnt how to do something along the lines of jazz-style walking bass. I can’t tell you much about what the guitarist changed, I’m afraid, because this is me, and I still don’t really get guitar, but all of a sudden they had this roll and stroll that your average grumpy metal band just don’t know a thing about, while retaining the edge and the shout when they wanted it.
And the lyrics took a swing out wider too. It’s not like there weren’t some unusual allusions on the first album, but, well, the first two songs on the self-titled album from 1995 are two halves of a sort of concept thing about the perils of life on a floating gambling palace. Right? Right. And from there it gets onto conspiracy theories, driving to the galaxy M83 in a 1973 Dodge Swinger, finding the body of John Wilkes Booth and exhibiting it as a sideshow, why you shouldn’t gratuitously wobble weebles, escaping from the men in black through secret passageways, and the joys of being a truck driver. The last song with words in is a giant swinging thing in 7/8 which tells us all, repeatedly, that everything’s gonna be all right. And then that merges into four minutes of jamming space guitars, and if you’re walking down the street with it on headphones you reach the end of the album walking in step with this big rolling beat knowing that really, everything is going to be all right.
I didn’t get into them then; I was in Brighton listening to, I dunno, The Wildhearts and Therapy. I first heard about them three(ish) albums later, when their most commercial album to date came out in 2001 (the Radio 1 rock show still uses things off that album as beds for links, incidentally) and they started playing venues the size of, for example, the Underworld in Camden. Well, as support for bigger British bands, anyway. They got a bit bigger after that, but never outgrew, say, headlining the Garage, in London terms. Meanwhile I seriously obsessed about the band for a couple of years. I would go to multiple nights of a tour, hung around on the band’s message board (which was populated with an interesting mixture of what you might call thinkers and what you might call gun-toting hicks from West Virginia) and made a fake album complete with liner notes of rare and unreleased tracks. I got introduced to the drummer once and I think that’s still one of the most embarrassing moments of my life because of course I couldn’t bring myself to say anything even slightly coherent. I can play you anything at all off the self-titled on bass, and one of the first things I ever learnt to play on drums was a track off that metal EP, Impetus, such that if I’m sat at a kit and someone tells me to play something random for soundcheck or similar, it’s very likely to be that. They are inextricably mixed up with me and music, basically.
They have continued to mutate, taking on a regular Hammond player for a couple of albums, the band minus the singer doing a side-project as a jazz band, the singer coming to look less like James Dean and more like a huge-bearded mountain man, and I still buy all the albums but I don’t expect them to change my or anyone else’s life these days. But life without the albums Clutch, The Elephant Riders, Pure Rock Fury, and Jam Room would be a much worse place for me, and there are plenty of albums I’d give up before Robot Hive / Exodus, Blast Tyrant and Slow Hole To China too. I still can’t make a compilation without there being a Clutch track on it somewhere, even though I know hardly anyone else likes them. Ah, Clutch.
Being 6'2" (which is taller than me)
I'm taller than lots of people. I've been tall for so long, though, being taller than my mum when I was ten, taller than my dad when I was fourteen, and passing six foot at sixteen, that I can't imagine not being tall. It's part of me. I can't buy clothes in normal shops and I can't buy women's shoes; would I be the sort of person who enjoys shopping if I could? The difficulties (apart from getting things like technical clothing that I can’t make) around it are to do with what other people think about it, and what other people think I should think about it. Mainly these days the most irritating thing is the moment where I walk into the ladies’ toilets and someone does a double-take at me. Last week, in fact, a bunch of us went into a pub, I walked straight into the ladies, and the barkeep expressed some concern about the man who appeared to have just gone in there. Fortunately the barkeep expressed this to Chris, who explained that it was his girlfriend and there was no need to send anyone in to check or anything, but I wish that didn’t happen.
On the other hand, I have a theory which goes that the people who are inclined to believe rigid things, such as that women can't do science, or play the drums, or be engineers, are also the people who don't think women can be six foot two, so I already break their tiny little minds just by showing up, and thus get shunted into a special category, and I think this gets me a more open reception than I might otherwise. It's easier to believe that a large woman can play the drums than a dainty one in a cocktail dress. I have seen a dainty woman in a cocktail dress kick some serious shit out of a drumkit, mind; she probably gets more initial skepticism, but more gratifying conversions. I dunno, everyone gets assumptions made about them, of one sort or another. People are less certain what to make of me, but then, people are less certain what to make of me. it could very well be worse.
ironlord , and it goes like this:Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.
Here are the five words he gave me:
Brighton
I have lived in Brighton since 1995. It has two universities, a large gay population, an uncomfortably pebbly beach that is nontheless rammed with tourists given the merest hint of summer sun, lots of people who commute to London for work, lots of people who have left London but still sort of want to live there, lots of homeless people because you may as well be homeless somewhere warm, one and a half piers, many, many fine pubs, some hills, a thing that used to be a fishing cottage that became the epitome of Georgian oriental pastiche, a thing covered in onion domes that is bigger than the building that used to be a fishing cottage even though it used to be its stables, which is now a thousand-seat theatre, lots of hippies, some good pubs, lots of sunshine, some huge and intermittently threatening seagulls, a Bronze Age hill fort, lots of musicians who are decorators while waiting to be famous, and amazing numbers of things that claim to be organic.
I like it here.
Deep sea diving
I don't technically do deep sea diving, I don't think; I'm only qualified to 35 metres, which is mostly all coastal stuff. I learnt through the British Sub-Aqua Club or BSAC, which is obviously superior to PADI, which stands for Pay And Die Instantly, or possibly Put Another Dollar In. BSAC is a club-based system, where instead of paying for a specific course, you're trained as you go along by instructors in the club, which means you pick up the bad habits and prejudices of your first club and then sneer at everyone else who doesn't dive like you. Fortunately I learnt with one of the best clubs in Britain (no really, they’ve won prizes for it) and so my bad habits are of a superior sort.
Diving is fundamentally an expensive sport. You can spend £45 on a day’s hardboat diving, which is how people who aren’t in clubs do it, and people can be carrying several thousand pounds' worth of gear. A torch that costs less than £100 is usually considered a cheapy back-up torch, and many people spend hundreds on them. The cheapest of drysuits, not necessary but really rather useful in the cold waters of the UK, costs maybe £350, and the expensive ones are twice that. I do just about the cheapest sort of diving possible; a typical club dive costs between £8 and £12, or something like £15 for two dives in a day, the club owns a compressor so we don’t have to pay for commercial air fills. However, even though almost all of my gear is second-hand, off ebay, home-serviced, home-altered, home-sewn in the case of my thermal undersuit, I still worked out recently that I jump into the water with about £1300 of gear on me. Then again, if I sold it all tomorrow it would be worth nearly as much, because it's all already reached its minimum value.
I am currently training to be a Dive Leader. This means I will be able to dive to 50 metres, which is apparently great fun because you start getting really noticeable nitrogen narcosis down there, which is like being drunk only you get instantly sober when you shallow up, and also that I will be able to officially lead inexperienced divers, which you have to do a bunch of in the training to prove that you can anyway.
The reason I go diving is that you get to see really cool stuff like shipwrecks, and underwater life going unconcernedly about its business, and you get to float around weightlessly like being in space. Also, many of the people who do it are the sort of practically-inclined, cheerful, beer-drinking geeks I get on with. S'good.
Wacken
Wacken is a municipality near the city of Itzehoe in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Wacken was first mentioned in 1148, but there were probably some settlements before, which is proven by the trove of Germanic artifacts.
Oh, you mean the festival? I went there only once, in 2004. I have a mild horror of festivals, in general, ever since going to Reading in 1999 and feeling really like I was missing the spirit of the thing, being the square one, because I preferred going and seeing bands to drinking overpriced lager, being herded into queues, and setting fire to things all night. Generally it remains my policy to do anything like this, right down to beer festivals, as a member of staff rather than a punter, because it mostly seems to be more fun, completely apart from being cheaper and often involving free food.
However, Wacken was great. It's a specialist festival so more of the people there give a shit about the music, I was with a large bunch of friends, the weather was hot hot hot which I like, there were strange late-night comedy music acts and an oompah band, beer by the litre (I still have my plastic stein), regularly emptied and cleaned portaloos, standpipes with free drinking water, huge functional hot communal showers, a deposit-based system for beer containers which prevented 95% of the usual swathes of festival rubbish, and I'll mention the people again because they really made it for me. The people I went with and the people we talked to there, including the man who had made himself armour out of squashed, overlapping, ring-linked cans of Spam. I don’t think I’m likely to go to Wacken again, but I’m glad I went.
Clutch (not that I should need too much explanation)
I will make this an explanation for other people who read this, then, who mostly know that I go on about a band called Clutch but don’t know much about them. I am choosing to ignore that most of you don't care about them either. Clutch are a band from Germantown, Maryland, USA, who a long time ago, 1991 to 1993 or so, were trying to be metal. Their breakthrough EP was on Earache, a very metal label, they all frowned in photos, the singer looked like a sort of intellectual James Dean and sang in a brooding, gravelly, shouty voice about, well, here’s a verse from the first album:
How Can I Seize The Day When It Is Dusk?
You Provide The Pull, And I'll Provide The Thrust
Romance Is Nothing But A Sack Of Lies
But It Is Truth Which I Have Come To Despise
Cheerful, weren’t they? And then sometime between there and 1995, something happened. The drummer, who had clearly always been designed to do something more interesting than flat ahead metal, learnt to swing like a motherfucker. The bassist learnt how to do something along the lines of jazz-style walking bass. I can’t tell you much about what the guitarist changed, I’m afraid, because this is me, and I still don’t really get guitar, but all of a sudden they had this roll and stroll that your average grumpy metal band just don’t know a thing about, while retaining the edge and the shout when they wanted it.
And the lyrics took a swing out wider too. It’s not like there weren’t some unusual allusions on the first album, but, well, the first two songs on the self-titled album from 1995 are two halves of a sort of concept thing about the perils of life on a floating gambling palace. Right? Right. And from there it gets onto conspiracy theories, driving to the galaxy M83 in a 1973 Dodge Swinger, finding the body of John Wilkes Booth and exhibiting it as a sideshow, why you shouldn’t gratuitously wobble weebles, escaping from the men in black through secret passageways, and the joys of being a truck driver. The last song with words in is a giant swinging thing in 7/8 which tells us all, repeatedly, that everything’s gonna be all right. And then that merges into four minutes of jamming space guitars, and if you’re walking down the street with it on headphones you reach the end of the album walking in step with this big rolling beat knowing that really, everything is going to be all right.
I didn’t get into them then; I was in Brighton listening to, I dunno, The Wildhearts and Therapy. I first heard about them three(ish) albums later, when their most commercial album to date came out in 2001 (the Radio 1 rock show still uses things off that album as beds for links, incidentally) and they started playing venues the size of, for example, the Underworld in Camden. Well, as support for bigger British bands, anyway. They got a bit bigger after that, but never outgrew, say, headlining the Garage, in London terms. Meanwhile I seriously obsessed about the band for a couple of years. I would go to multiple nights of a tour, hung around on the band’s message board (which was populated with an interesting mixture of what you might call thinkers and what you might call gun-toting hicks from West Virginia) and made a fake album complete with liner notes of rare and unreleased tracks. I got introduced to the drummer once and I think that’s still one of the most embarrassing moments of my life because of course I couldn’t bring myself to say anything even slightly coherent. I can play you anything at all off the self-titled on bass, and one of the first things I ever learnt to play on drums was a track off that metal EP, Impetus, such that if I’m sat at a kit and someone tells me to play something random for soundcheck or similar, it’s very likely to be that. They are inextricably mixed up with me and music, basically.
They have continued to mutate, taking on a regular Hammond player for a couple of albums, the band minus the singer doing a side-project as a jazz band, the singer coming to look less like James Dean and more like a huge-bearded mountain man, and I still buy all the albums but I don’t expect them to change my or anyone else’s life these days. But life without the albums Clutch, The Elephant Riders, Pure Rock Fury, and Jam Room would be a much worse place for me, and there are plenty of albums I’d give up before Robot Hive / Exodus, Blast Tyrant and Slow Hole To China too. I still can’t make a compilation without there being a Clutch track on it somewhere, even though I know hardly anyone else likes them. Ah, Clutch.
Being 6'2" (which is taller than me)
I'm taller than lots of people. I've been tall for so long, though, being taller than my mum when I was ten, taller than my dad when I was fourteen, and passing six foot at sixteen, that I can't imagine not being tall. It's part of me. I can't buy clothes in normal shops and I can't buy women's shoes; would I be the sort of person who enjoys shopping if I could? The difficulties (apart from getting things like technical clothing that I can’t make) around it are to do with what other people think about it, and what other people think I should think about it. Mainly these days the most irritating thing is the moment where I walk into the ladies’ toilets and someone does a double-take at me. Last week, in fact, a bunch of us went into a pub, I walked straight into the ladies, and the barkeep expressed some concern about the man who appeared to have just gone in there. Fortunately the barkeep expressed this to Chris, who explained that it was his girlfriend and there was no need to send anyone in to check or anything, but I wish that didn’t happen.
On the other hand, I have a theory which goes that the people who are inclined to believe rigid things, such as that women can't do science, or play the drums, or be engineers, are also the people who don't think women can be six foot two, so I already break their tiny little minds just by showing up, and thus get shunted into a special category, and I think this gets me a more open reception than I might otherwise. It's easier to believe that a large woman can play the drums than a dainty one in a cocktail dress. I have seen a dainty woman in a cocktail dress kick some serious shit out of a drumkit, mind; she probably gets more initial skepticism, but more gratifying conversions. I dunno, everyone gets assumptions made about them, of one sort or another. People are less certain what to make of me, but then, people are less certain what to make of me. it could very well be worse.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 10:48 am (UTC)Dublin
Bleach (as in hair)
Self-portraits
Tubewalking (it's a word)
Poptimism
no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 04:59 pm (UTC)Liked
Incidentally, i get challenged in the ladies too - and i'm hardly an unusual height/build, nor do i look very butch. Most recently i think by a cloakroom attendant. It's a strange one. I don't really mind, though.