My friend Jack and I walked around the river Thames last Sunday. The greyness of London at this time of year soaks through your pores. Last Winter I wrote a piece of music, called ‘The White Sky’. With all that anaesthetic blankness overhead, Summer can feel as distant as a house you you moved out of years ago.

The White Sky

I have written before about the South Bank, and how much I love its blend of expansive modernist architecture, ragged but lovely humanity, and the timeless industry of the River. Its faded and renovated squalor embodies the grandeur and the humanity of the capital. When I was young, my parents used to take me to see Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Royal Festival Hall every year. Even back then, I felt how strong the character of the South Bank was: this thriving concentration of artistic output in the midst of urban dereliction (it used to be a lot seedier twenty years ago, believe me). Nowadays, I like to meet up with friends there. There is always something interesting (and free) to stumble upon such as a musical performance in the RFH lobby or a photo exhibit in the National Theatre balconies. It is the quality and the abundance of this sort of thing where you really see the advantage of living The Big Smoke.

So we wandered round the Thames. We met a girl on (what used to be called) the Hungerford footbridge who was trying to sell dream-catchers. She was somewhat furtive about the fact she wanted to money for them. Jack fancied her. I have no idea what a dream-catcher is.

At the foot of the bridge we went straight in for a free hug (were they the same troop as at Glastonbury?), watched the skateboarders, and discussed Joanna Newsom. A girl was down on the beach beneath the Oxo tower, combing for something or other.

Then Jack mugged a child, and we had a look at some more stuff, and parted company.

With some more time to kill I headed back onto the bridge by Embankment for the second time that day. It was getting dark and I was tired so I stopped to listen to a morbid yet persistent steel-drummer. The West Indian clangs sat weirdly with the gloom, but it was a nice way to take in the end of the day over the Thames, since I was cold and tired.

Looking across to St Pauls, the Barbican, and the Natwest Tower made me think about the persistent grind of London. Working and surviving in this city can really feel draining although people do not often like to admit it. Actually, come to think of it, sometimes it’s all we talk about, perhaps because it is something we all share. The city looks awesome of a Winter dusk. Shelley wrote of the eponymous mountain in his poem ‘Mont Blanc’:

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible

The lines could have been written for those fortress casinos in the square mile. If good old Percy Bysshe were writing today, he might well write about the city instead of Mont Blanc, and he could have picked a worse spot than the Hungerford bridge to reflect man’s relation to the vast and awful power down the river.

I looked over to the terrace on the South Bank where the free-huggers had been. The crowds had mostly gone home. It gets cold down there when the sun goes. I noticed there was an arc of people performing. The double amputee at the end of the bridge was still begging after hours in the bitter evening, poor sod.

I approached the horseshoe of singers by the river bank. There were a few people stopped to listen despite the cold  so I took a seat on a bench. Close up you could see that they were a dozen or so young ladies probably around the age of twenty. I realised they were American immediately when they started to sing. Not from their accents. Everyone sings in American accents. The clue was in their quality and understanding of performance, of which Americans are the masters. They are just better than everyone else at entertainment. It’s like when you see Russian ballet dancers, Italian drivers, Australian cricketers, Spanish Flamenco dancers, British football hooligans, French pickets, or German nudists: as far and wide as you travel, when you see one there is something inside you which clicks and thinks: ‘They’re taking it to a whole different level. Shit, that comes from the source.’

The girls (a troupe from Princeton Universty NJ called The Tigressions) were singing a capella standards, and their own arrangements of modern pop hits. Rich harmonies, perfect tuning, packaged with all that American charm. Perfect to warm the proverbial cockles. Here is a link to some of their music - I recall them singing an arrangement of ‘Happy Ending’ by Mika. It was surprising to hear something so luscious and personable amidst all the cold riverside concrete. Singing just for the joy of singing. No pretensions to fame and stardom, that bane of true music. Just a group of young ladies on holiday in a ridiculously grey city, enjoying singing with each other.

There were others who were enjoying this spontaneous performance as well. I noted a slightly gruff looking cyclist who seemed absorbed by the music. He sat there intently, taking it all in, clutching his bike frame. Also there was a little girl who went right up to the singers and stood right in front of them. She was young and uninhibited, bathing in the overlapping vocal lines.

I hope the young ladies from New Jersey enjoyed their vacation in London. At least they looked like they were having fun, despite the gloom. It is indeed cool that they were able to contribute to and even become part of the life of the South Bank in their visit. I was grateful, at least.

from http://wackyracists.blogspot.com/

Right, I have gone and started twittering. I was all in an alcohol fuelled frenzy last night and when a friend of mine directed me to Twitter, and I became rabid with a thirst for a surplus of connectivity. Or something which doesn’t sound quite so Barbra Cartland-meets-PC User magazine.

Twittering or micro-blogging, in case you haven’t already discovered it, is simply a way of letting other people (your ominously named ‘followers’) know what you are doing. In other words it is like Facebook minus everything except the status updates. My twitter page is here: http://twitter.com/toxrowlang
I have also replaced this Blog’s sidebar subscriber widget with a Twitter feed. The subscriber plugin never worked properly, and I have spent enough precious time in the excruciatingly fruitless task of trying to fix it.

I am slightly concerned, however. Surely this Twitter lark opens one up to a new dimension of ego-centrism? I have half formed excuses in my head such as ‘I shall try and be innovative, interesting, informative, and wonderfully beneficial’. But I am sure that I shall doubtlessly fall back on obscenity and knob-gags. And what better platform for it (bar Blackpool pier)?

Warhol was wrong. In the future, humans are not going to have fifteen minutes of fame. They are going to be permanently famous at the centre of their own little virtual world. The architecture for it is being thrown up around us as we browse. Will we all end up like Quaid in the film Total Recall? Will we all become the exultant heroes of our exceptionally epic lives, only to be plagued by nagging fears that we are in reality witnessing our own schizophrenic disintegration?

The answer is yes. No sitting on the fence with this one, dammit. We shall all be Quaids, bring on psychopathic Romance and lobotomy.

On the other hand, if human life did become a matter of configuring yourself as a hero at the centre of your own definable world, I am sure it could be no less banal than watching Ulrika Jonsson trying to re-inflate her vicious little career, or some c-list actor off of Casualty mincing about in a ballroom dance-off. I shudder to think what terrible crimes of entertainment I shall be performing to millions of adoring, computer-generated fans in ten years time. At least I won’t have to watch it.

I have been waiting for Obama to win with bated breath for a long time now. I am not alone, of course. But now he is finally there, I have only just realised how deeply the last eight years has affected me (and the rest of the world).

Since the election of GW Bush, we have been living in a world where the strings were being pulled by a bunch of mediaeval despots. The victories of social conservatives in 2000 and 2004 really got the millennium off to a bad start. They talked about creationism, theistic anti-abortionism, intolerance of homosexuality, and a distrust of foreign cultures, un-American ideas, and intelligent thinking as though these were not only acceptable but righteous views to hold in the modern era. And they wanted to proselytise, to ram the neo-con ideology down our throats and burn the brown skinned infidels who could never be brought to salvation. In the new millenium, we were going back to a dark age, if not darker than any before.

The regression to pre-enlightenment culture was something I feared I was going to have to witness in my own lifetime. All round the world people felt that the US was burning with the dark fire of self-interest, of self-righteous ignorance not seen since the crusades. Wars were brewing up everywhere, the world was collapsing into an economic cess-pit, democracy was failing.

And then last night America elected Obama.

I was just writing in the past tense, which is not really accurate. We are still afflicted with the same global sickness. But I feel that I wanted to use the past tense for a reason. I have realised this morning just how much the nastiness across the Atlantic has set me under a foreboding cloud for the last eight years. I could only see it all as part of a general downward trend in human history. Last night represents a rejection of neo-conservatism, of prejudice, of holy wars and division by the most culturally and politically influential country in the world. I am not saying those forces are gone: they are still there and surely will be back to fight their disgusting cause again. But a vital battle against them has been won.

Now I feel that the US, the world and every one of us has woken to a new morning and a chance to shake off the depressing fug of the last decade. People will begin to trust the US more, slowly but surely. We can see this change in American politics as a second chance to start the new century against a better backdrop (and is not often you get a second chance at things).

And today I certainly feel better deep down than I have in years.

It might be a somewhat nerdsome thing to notice but my eye was drawn to this particular photo of the Lehman Brothers collapse:

There were millions of these, I know, as all sorts accounts from the sacked workers emerged. I particularly liked the description of workers clearing out their desks while drinking and smoking, the natural response to apocalypse.

Anyway, look at the chap on the right. Look at his t-shirt. If you ever watched any of the ‘Alien’ films you might recognise the logo on his t-shirt as that of the murderously capitalistic not-too-distant-future corporation of Weyland-Yutani. In the Alien films this quasi-governmental company is responsible for using people as fodder and human petri-dishes in its machinations to weaponise the nasty Aliens. It always struck me as a really effective ‘bad-guy’. The positive advertisements of capitalism are always so sinister, don’t you think? We know they are only in it for the gold.

Was the Lehman Brothers worker making a deliberate statement? As he was getting dressed that morning in casual clothes on his way to clear his desk, did he grab his WY t-shirt to make a point to his bosses/colleagues/the world?

No matter, it was a nice little poetic moment. 

And what a moment this is. Now that professional bankers have been shown to have been either conned by or acted like boiler-rooms, does this current crisis in the banking sector signify the end of unbridled capitalism? The US banking sector now resembles a communist state-run economy. In this chaotic time with the world shifting under our feet is there anything or anyone who can lead us out of the nightmare?

Maybe this man:

And I don’t mean the fat bloke training for the Olympics

I know we live in a shock-numbed, media-jaundiced society. I know that even Guardian readers make jokes about sex-slaves and city bankers drink their own urine. I know that it is unfashionable nowadays to read the content of books and that the cover art and witty sub-titles are everything. But surely oh Islington, oh wearers of Philippe Starck glasses, oh modern world, surely this is going too far?

Probably not, actually

My local acupuncturist reckons he can cure baldness with some needles.

I am sure they got the promotional picture from a wigmaker’s catalogue.

I tried acupuncture once for a bad back. Needles felt funny. The electricity they put through them felt funnier. The cupping (suckering cups on to your back using the vacuum from a match) felt a bit silly. Back felt just the same.

The kicker to acupuncture is the medicine. They give you a brown paper bag filled with assorted herbs and bits and bobs which you are meant to boil and steep and then drink. To anyone who has not had the pleasure, you can make your own brew by visiting your local park, grabbing a couple of handfuls leaves and crap from under a bush and boiling it in water. The flavour is fantastically nasty.

Mm, not quite what my back was in need of. I’ll take a good old-fashioned punch in the kidneys every time.

Here is something not for the children, despite its ‘yoot-kolcha’ graphic [click on the image to read the notice if it is too small]:

Clearly Hounslow council don’t want to get sued for letting kids get damaged by falling coke bottles. Or perhaps they are worried about a caffeine-fuelled teenager running amok in town hall, destroying civic amenities like a Hindu god on crack.

The Israeli authorities are much more child friendly. If anyone knows about respecting kids, it is them.

This must be worthy of some caption competition or other.

It is just like that neo-con nightmare: a spontaneous, nationwide terror-cell uprising.

Every year, all on the same day for some bizarre reason, ants grow big and sprout wings. And bugger each other in mid-air. Here the terrorist comparison ends.

Any way, the spectacle is faintly gruesome, as the sight hoards of insects appearing to your eye always seems to be. But ants are ‘clean’ insects, and not bad eating so who cares?

The answer to that seems to be ‘young children’. Let’s be sexist about it: young boys, they love playing with insects. I used to when I was a kid and so did these young tikes in West Kensington the other day:

I know what you’re thinking, and yes it is always a risky business taking photos of children in public. One minute you are photographing your son learning to play football, the next minute there are people holding candles singing ‘burn the stinking nonce’ outside your house. Anyway, these kids were fascinated by a nest of flying ants, and were evidently considering the best way to kill them. One of them was clearly not playing ball:

“Do you believe in God?” he cried mightily

“Yes” replied his colleague

“Well then, why are you killing one of God’s creatures? HA!”

I really liked the ‘HA!’. It was worthy of Torquemada. Bloody hell, you just want to go and kill some ants after a hard day’s work and then someone goes and brings God into it. 

But as Gloucester reminds us in King Lear, the gods have their fun too: 

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.

I was going to discuss it with the boys. But, having already taken a photograph, discussing poetry with them was sure to get me lynched by a gang of scally mirror readers. Anyhow they were more interested in their new game whose rules they were just perfecting. It involved killing the ants with a bottle and a ball, a kind of cross between cricket and divine wrath. I wonder what to-hand items gods use to sport with us? Perhaps a wad of torn-off cloud and the odd aeroplane.