I'll do GRAFFITI/If you sing to me in French

Of course, the title recalls a well-known(?) lyric from my previously proclaimed saviours Maximo Park.

Thanks to a prompt from a great friend of mine, I remembered something which I had thought about a lot during my recent time in France. You see, there are many little things that make France different to England. There are a lot of big things, too, like the fact they have all different words, and don't sell proper granary bread or decent Tea. But anyway, there are small things that, when you arrive, you just can't quite put your finger on. Over the days I stayed there, some of these things became more obvious, and one of the most striking was the amount of Graffiti to be seen; it literally was everywhere. From derelict buildings to underground car parks to just general... walls.

This Graffiti didn't make me feel threatened; it didn't give the impression that the country was shabby or poorly run, and it didn't prompt anything but a positive reaction.

You see, these spray-canned designs, like the cave-art I studied in year 8, gave me much more of an impression of what France really is than any of the fishing ports or ice-cream parlours I visited. It was the residue of a youth allowed to, without censorship, express their opposition to everything and anything; from (perhaps) Jean-Paul's affair with Marie 'le poulet', to the ennui of teenage life.

Fast-forward to back home, and the clinical white-painted walls do give the impression of a neatly controlled, almost sterile environment. Yes, so I live in a small town, rather than a large city where Graffiti might be more commonly found, but just down the road was a pretty average wall, much improved by a Banksy-alike, boarded up to prevent further damage, as had occured to an original, authentic Banksy design previously in the same place (which was subsequently and heart-breakingly washed over, leaving an almost sinister ghost of a real work of art- imagine someone chucking white spirit at Picasso's 'Guernica'). While the board has now been removed, that ghost still remains; however, there is no trace of Graffiti on the rest of the blank walls around here, perhaps as sinister as the ghost in its non-existence, as stark a reminder of the oppressed youth and our apathy as the French reminders of rebellion.

So, as the guillotine of 'keep britain tidy' severs our anarchic and revolutionary necks, I leave you, not with a plea to go and spray your name over all the bins in your town, but to consider what it is that the French do better than us; I know that it isn't tea or granary bread, but it might well be freedom, bohemian expression and, above all, ice cream. Mine had mini macaroons in it, for God's sake.

Merci beaucoup,
Sq.

Do the D.A.N.C.E.

If I'm going to write a blog in honesty, it has to have a ribbon of silky-smooth music running through it. Not literally (or not yet, anyway), but at least in its subject matter.

Today, reading 'The New Review' in the The Independent On Sunday, I felt myself concurring with many of the views expressed. Namely these:

"Scouting for Girls are like the sound of Satan's
scrotum emptying. They're abysmal." - John Niven

"You can't grow up on a diet of The Pigeon
Detectives and think you could topple the Government one day. If we end up with 20 years of Tory government, it'll be the Pigeon Detectives' fault"
- Andrew Collins

And who can argue with either statement? The article itself was debating the decline of indie into what has been dubbed "mortgage indie", an infinitely more profitable and less exciting version of the original genre.

This is something people have been banging on about for a while now, and I thought it was just a load of hype until I really thought about it. I fell in love with indie through the art-indie-pop group Maximo Park, way back in the good old years of 2002ish. Before that I had groped around with the likes of Franz Ferdinand (who I still maintain are pioneers of soft-dancey-pop-indie) and my parents' Manic Street Preachers and The Charlatans CDs. Maximo Park led me to purchase an issue of NME adorned with a photo of Paul Smith, lead singer of my band of the moment. From that day forward I was what is now known as an 'NME Reader'. Lately my interest has dwindled; I put this down to two things.

1. The ridiculous price of £2.20 for a weekly magazine, which doesn't even has the volume of content it did when it was a lower price.
2. My growing interest in dance music.

It came to a point where music like Dirty Pretty Things (a past favourite band) and Razorlight (NEVER a favourite band - inevitably, quite the opposite) came to sound like they had a hole in them. There was something missing, and it was synths. And a good beat.

I don't really dance a lot. I love it when I do, but my inability to get into clubs (although nearly vanquished) prevents me from doing so on a regular basis. So the source of my foray into the likes of Justice, Soulwax and 2manyDJs, Metronomy and Battles cannot come from my 'happy feet' (Also, see that I like good dance music, not Freemasons, and Ultrabeat, a.k.a rubbish).

I think there's just something in a squelching synth, in a laser and a strong bassline, that completes a song. It feels whole and round, like every possible area in the spectrum of noise has been successfully covered.

In relation to indie, some of the emerging dance acts appear to have flashes of that indie ethos that Scouting for Girls, The Hoosiers and The View lack. Dead Kids, my band-of-the-moment are out there, unbeknown to many music lovers, putting on sincere and riotous rock-and-roll shows. Their genre? Electro punk. It would be difficult (nay, impossible) to class them as 'indie' in the current sense; and yet they have that integrity, that politically-minded drive to stop us being 'dead kids' that echoes the punk roots of indie; Joe Strummer, even to Damon Albarn and Blur.

Enough music, I leave you with this:
I was watching Foyle's war last night, for the first time properly. It was ok, a bit boring and cliched in places, but it brought this to my mind:

"Foyle's war and other stories"

It wasn't just Foyle's War;
It was the war of that boy
Out of Goodnight Mister Tom
And James McAvoy in Atonement, too.

COPYRIGHT 2008
There's another verse somewhere in my mind, it just wont coagulate into a proper one yet. I'll leave it to mellow.

Thanks for reading.
Sq.

Ok, now let's get down to it.

Here at SQUARE WORDS, I intend to present you with lots of wordy stuff.

Now, the format already necessitates the ol' lexis.
You can't have a Blog without words.
But I can go further than that. Deviation from prose is where it's at - and to get us started, here is some verse.

What's the difference between PROSE and VERSE, I hear you scream;

Well: PROSE is like this. What you're reading. But VERSE is like a poem. It has a capital letter at the beginning of each line.

Consider me invaluable to your brain.

Now, here is my original offering to you. It is inspired by the very current affair of that Golf thing on the TV right now. One of the blokes, Greg someone, looks just like Paul Hogan, star of Crocodile Dundee (coincidentally, the sequel, the aptly named 'Crocodile Dundee 2' is showing on E4 RIGHT NOW).

Anyway, while I was passively watching 'the Golf', I was struck by a bolt of inspiration. Enjoy.

"The Golf Music"

The golf music off the telly
Always propells me,
Toward a silent reverie.

Its plinky-plonky easy listening,
And Out-of-focus shots
Of leaves glistening,
Lead my eye
Out of the window
Into the sky.

COPYRIGHT, 2008.

Sq.

Mandatory 'Let's Get Going' Post

Hello, and welcome to my Blog, SQUARE WORDS.

I like words.

I am a bit square.

Thus, my words are square.

You'll know what I mean in a post or two -
but will I?

Sq.