Steven Gerrard Must Go

...I love Steven Gerrard, he's my favourite player, perhaps ever... he's an oddly shaped antelope, a boy-faced Egyptian God, a chisel-haired football legend... he's the dark beating heart of Liverpool FC, the boy wonder with guts and bones to spare... he's been brilliant for Liverpool, loyal in a world of spun-out capitalist scree (I'm reading Zizek at the moment); he'd have genuinely played football for free, never even seemed all that bothered by the other trappings of Premiership footballing (the blur of endorsements, the smudge of lipstick on orange-peel skin, the tug of heartstrings and nightclubs - a fracas here, a loose tongue there, nothing critical or defining, nothing McAvennie, nothing Nicholas, nothing Cole)

I love Steven Gerrard but he must leave Liverpool.

This season, it's been embarrassing... for him, for the fans, for the rest of the team. He's still been good, I don't subscribe to the idea flitting around the media that he's had a bad season particularly - it's not his passes that have gone astray, it's that his team mates have been standing in the wrong place.

Time and time and time again. His pass completion rates must be shot to hell. His body language couldn't of got more mangled. When Torres was fit we looked a much better side, of course and I think Gerrard and Torres were about the most lethal attacking combination in the league but... even when they were playing together there was something amiss, something bigger than both of them... an arch psychological impediment that seemed to stem from Gerrard and flow outwards....



Gerrard must go because he's got so good, has become so essential, so integral, that his team mates are scared of playing... you can see it in their eyes, the millisecond of panic, the fractional glance across the pitch towards him when the ball's coming towards them... good players gone bad because there's someone on their team they feel the need to refer to before playing their game...

It's a small thing, a doubt that I'm sure the other Liverpool players think they're dismissing, but it's a cold virus, affecting their judgement... they're like trainee astronauts, struggling with decompression, with anoxia...

Gerrard's not a bully, not a yeller or a screamer, not a Carragher... his motivation comes from his belief, from his actions on the pitch... but the belief must be dimming now, even in someone so in love with the game and his club and the actions are inhibiting his team mates... he passes to a place where they should be, the ball goes out, he's already running for the return, he turns and he's not even angry, just disappointed... the farce starts up again...

Liverpool don't have any other Steven Gerrard's waiting in the wings, but they have good players who could be much better... in the occasions when he's off the pitch, you can almost see the relaxation... in the moments when Aquilani or (especially) Lucas forget themselves and start playing unfettered by Gerrard's silent expectancy you can see flashes of inspiration... it's not Gerrard's fault but I think he has to go...

unless...

unless...

he could stay if Liverpool could recruit a calm, older head in midfield, a Gary McCallister figure to keep things ticking, someone unfussed by reputation, someone clicking to their own desires...

Alonso was critical as we all knew he would be because he wasn't worried by Gerrard, was old beyond his years, was content to not be the star but to be a starmaker, wasn't brain-stormed by Gerrard's presence, could keep his head, could stand in the right place to receive the ball...

If they reunite at Real Madrid they really will make that team immaculate... it'll break his heart but at least, for a season, we're unlikely to meet him coming the other way...

If there's someone out there who could save Gerrard for Liverpool, if there's a McCallister, then the new Manager needs to buy now or else let Gerrard go and let the existing players free, to see where they go with their freedom, to see if Lucas et al really could be amazing players...

The new manager might need to cut off the head to save the body.

Exotica

If you were intrigued by the comment below re: exotica then here's as good a place as any to make a start... there must be a modern counterpart to this kind of thing out there; something seamed from whalehusk or antler or appalachian guthorns -a frog chorus made from steamrollered amphibian sighs, the pretty woodchip techno of deforestation...

Congotronics maybe.

Spiderman of the Rings

Boardroom, Maxwell House, midnight, 14 February 2007:

Geologist, Panda Bear, Avey Tare and Deakin are trapped on the boardroom table in large purple-glazed vases, just their heads and shoulders visible. Davis Bradley CEO, Roger (not that one) Daltrey and Erol Alkaloid are discussing the latest Animal Collective album. It can be heard from a stereo in the corner of the room.

Daltrey "I dunno... I just get this feeling that there's something, well, evil about this..."

Erol Alkaloid gives out a long audile sigh (later recorded and packaged by Touch records in a triple CD with fold out sleeve) "It's hardly a giant centipede, Rog..." He glances over to Davis, who has remained, eyes closed, in a meditation posture for the last seventeen minutes.

"I know, I know... but it's still a little spiky..."

"This coming from the guy who didn't even hear the first two albums"

Panda and Avey blink in sync. Deakin flexes his shoulders. He thinks he can detect a slight weakness.

Daltrey smiles, holds his hands up in the Masonic sign of distress that he only recently learned (cf Daltrey Does Diptheria). "I'm just saying that my guy might put up more of a fight. These guys, " he indicates the captured Collective "can come along if they wish... I like the chanting and the kids, kids are pretty zeitgeisty..."

"There's no children on-" begins Panda Bear before being silenced with a withering stare from Erol.

"Your guy? You mean Mr Deacon?"

"Dan, yeah. Has the same sort of Sesame Street vibe but, I dunno, smoother edges..."

Erol's head sneers so hard his neck almost snaps. "You're going to mention Kraftwerk again aren't you?"

"Kraftwerk, Cluster... yeah, why not? That 80s sound is very now."

The Animal Collective open and close their mouths like guppies.

Erol smiles. "Zeitgeisty."

Daltrey senses atipathy like bees sense hairspray. "Ok, how about Chris Carter, that track on TGs Third and Final report, AB/7A. Would you be happier with that reference?"

"You know I would," Any mention of Throbbing Gristle always sends Erol into minor paroxyms. He kissed his first living girl at a Throbbing Gristle gig and got no bite-backs whatsoever. "But I don't see how you think 12 minute songs are going to-"

Davis Bradley stands up, thumping his fist on the table (later, he'll recoil from this blow with coriander poultice and goat's milk enema but not now, not now.), "The figures coming in say the kids'll pay up for 12 mins quicker than they will for 3. Same price, quadruple the value... Download only. We're thinking of putting every song we do into this kind of format. Blow the competition out the water. Think of the market, gentlemen. Forces, gentlemen, forces."

Davis sits back down, resumes his meditation.

Roger senses there's an initiative to grab. "That's just it...song-cycles. Wham City is really three songs, ebbing and flowing, chasing each other's tails..."

Erol sits back. "We could give it a go, I suppose. Don't get me wrong, I like Mr Deacon it's just... well you don't think he could come up with a, mmm, groovier name?"

"His Mum won't be happy. Have you met her? Fierce lady. Nought to a hundred in three seconds."

Erol laughs, glances up at the Animal Collective boys. "What do you reckon guys? Fancy a sing along on this guys record?"

"We just want to go home."

"That's settled then. Roger, can you make the necessaries? I'll cancel the Tuvans. I want these two records coming out simultaneously, rough twins, like two drawing pins..."

Amanda Barrie, PA to Bradley emerges from under the table, still scribbling in shorthand. "Sorry, I've forgotten how to do vowels again. Could you repeat that last bit?"

"Eh?"

"Starting from," she flicks through her notepad, "Ah yes 'hardly a giant centipede'"




Listen to Dan Deacon here or here or here or here or anywhere here

Wham City on the latest album is my favourite track of the moment; if I was young enough I'd giggle and wriggle but nowadays I just raise a single eyebrow in appreciation, close the curtains and try to remember how to do a headspin.

Notes on The Animal War

Based on a once recurring dream I had that has now re-recurred:

Notes on The Animal War.
Chapter 2: A bender in the making.

It didn't take long for the cats to work out thermonuclear weapons. It was guessed that way: Professor Cranberry, of the Bio-labs, set the idea down way back in the 70s.

'Y'see, there's something peculiar about the feline neurology. Something seems to be missing here. From the records. The computer's creaking, of course, but that doesn't cover all the blips. The records have been altered, I'm sure of it, and the only things I can think who would possibly have anything to gain are the cats themselves...'



Cranberry got called a crank and had to call it a day. The Bio-labs gave him a generous pension; told him it'd be better all round if he just turned a blind eye. He gave up on cats, went quite mad.

They Louis Wained him, cut him loose, hurled abuse at him in a rain of paws and catnip calls. By the end, the fruitcakes from the Ministry of Health got him carted and then pumped full of drugs. He claimed by the end of the first round of medication he 'could hardly breathe.' Paranoia, they said (they actually said it was furballs) and dumped him in the secure unit with people who thought they were Elvis.

And later, at Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea, some small glue-sniffed boys looked up at a sign that used to say:

No Dogs Allowed

But had been altered to read:

Only Dogs Allowed

Everyone thought it better not to mention it; to blame the kids from the Valleys. No one suspected that there was a militant band of canine maniacs already plotting against the dominant species...

And here we are now, with the cats getting the edge over the rest, as Professor Cranberry had perviously suggested. Anybody who's anybody has their nose in his book 'Feline Neuropsychology and the Garage Disease' trying to figure out a plan. The cats had taken several minor cities by Sunday the 19th and Chief of Staff McGovern was quoted yesterday as saying: 'The cats themselves, led we think by James Crawley, are increasingly looking like they will eventually use either bacterial warfare - possibly anthrax - or thermonuclear technology. Either way, we have two major decisions to make: do we attempt a swift counter-attack right now or do we send more of our, let's say it, fairly pitiful negotiators to their doom. Personally, I don't see how it makes anything any better to receive lungs through the mail. These cats are disturbed, there's no doubt. We should attack without further delay.'

James Crawley was a sly tabby, known since the very early days of the Doolittling because of a live TV appearance when he swore at Bamber Gasgoine. 'Bamber, you're a fuckanine,' he said on a day time TV show. James was thought to have an IQ 'somewhere in the mid 260s' - Govt. Animal Intelligence Dept. - and was also known to have something of a bad attitude to women in particular and humans in general. James ran for Feline Parliament initially and then dropped out to work behind the scenes as something of a political agitator. Commentators at the time suggested he was 'mid way between Abbie Hoffman and Hodgkinson's disease' - The Sunday Times. Despite thorough psychoanalysis during James' brief prison sentence (for aiding and abetting the abuse of alcohol by minors), the source of James's malcontent with regard to humans was as yet unmarked, though Dr. Carny suggested that perhaps 'there was a minor complex evolved from losing his right eye in a gardening accident'. To this day, James' thoughts on gardening have remained unclear.


Cat Stevens - Peace Train

Cat Stevens - Wild World

Which is obviously partly a ridiculous / obvious failure to make a conceptual link but also included because it was used in the final scenes of Skins which is coming back soon...