Swing Dancing.

(In response to Henry's 'Flirting, With Disaster' post below.)

Rock-step, kick-step, kick-step.

Once you have the footwork in order, you can turn to your partner. Who your partner is, well, that's of no importance here. Make sure you feel comfortable. Turn to her and assume the closed position. 5, 6, 7, 8. Rock-step, kick-step, kick-step. On the next bar, a subtle movement of your left hand will show her your intentions. Tuck-turn, open position. Pass-through. Now you're playing the game, following the pattern. All the other people in the room, gathered in a circle facing each other, are playing the same way. New song, new partner. The girls stand still, while the boys shift one partner clockwise. New girl, same moves. A subtle movement of your left hand will show her your intentions. You're the boy, you have to lead. You know all the moves, and it's up to you. Whether she likes you or not, she'll follow. Whether she likes you at all, you'll never tell. New song, new partner. Dance as metaphor for life.

Of course, life never works quite that way. The boy may not want to lead. The boy may not want to make decisions. The boy may still be having too much trouble finding his feet, searching too hard for the kick-step after the rock-step, to choose the next move. Even as he makes up his mind, he may not be gifted with the subtlety that allows his left hand to show her his intentions. New song, new partner, a smile and an apology. Life as a metaphor for dance.

It was only a one-hour lesson, but it taught me something very valuable. Sometimes I will have to take the lead. Sometimes I will have to show my hand - only a subtle movement is required to show her my intentions. The lesson was on Thursday night. I had the whole weekend in front of me. It is now Monday morning, and over the last three days I think I might have turned a corner. But on this side, the world is full of madness.

Flirting, with disaster.

I am currently single. To be more specific, I just recently became single again. There's a difference between being single for a long time and coming out of a relationship; it's like the difference between being constantly short of money - where you'd like to have more but you're used to doing without - and losing a fortune on the stock market overnight. So now I am, as they say, back on the market (somewhere in the bargain bins, I'd say). This is a place I really don't want to be, mainly because it means I'm grouped amonst other singles, and it seems the accepted way for singles to interact is to flirt with one another. This is a problem for me, because I can't flirt to save my love-life.

I can't say I've practiced the art much; they say if you've got it, flaunt it, but I never thought I had so I don't. But even assuming I had the bravado to go up to a girl I fancied and try my hand at impressing her, I actually do not know how to flirt. More than that, I don't understand the concept. That is to say, while I get its purpose, and envy people who can do it, I can't grasp the fundamental principles. I have no idea how to select those words that are flatter, entice, tease, even test the boundaries a little, all while making the recipient feel as if they are the most important person in the room. I love talking to people, but I'm more likely to discuss politics than tell them they're wearing a fantastic dress. To me, going up to a girl in a bar and flirting would make as much sense as attempting to broker a corporate merger on the dancefloor.

More than the words, though, I'm fascinated by the way two people who know each other only a little settle into their corresponding roles. It takes two to flirt, after all, at least to do it properly. How do guys and girls figure out the correct level of back and forth that separates flirting from, well, sleazing onto someone? Maybe it's because I'm not a very rhythmic person (as anyone who has seen me dance can attest) that it impresses me so.

Then again, maybe I'm not the only one. Not everyone manages it successfully. One person's red-hot moves are another's sad blunders, and I doubt anyone has a 100% success rate. Which leads me to wonder if you can flirt by accident. After all, if you don't know what you're doing, you wouldn't realise if you somehow got it right; a million monkeys on type-writers will probably bash out at least one line of Shakespeare. Find me in the right mood, on the right night (and a few drinks inside me will help) and suddenly talking to a pretty girl doesn't seem any harder than talking to my oldest friends. I don't know what kind of effect this has, but I've never had a restraining order put out on me.

And I'm always encouraged by, and appreciative of, those people who don't play by the rules. I'll long cherish the night I spent at a bar, drinking with some new acquaintances, when one of them said to their neighbour, in the middle of a completely different conversation, "You have such gorgeous eyes!" True, it was a straight (and married) girl saying this to another girl, but the fact that the comment was entirely unexpected, and completely genuine, gave me such a wonderful warm feeling inside. Because I'll never be good at flirting, like I'll never be good at spot-welding. But there's always fun to be had when you meet the strange people that make up this world and take them as they are.

Watching Grass Grow.

I can see my reflection in my office window, shadowed in the glow of artificial light fighting hard against the darkness outside. Beyond the pane, clouds have gathered, an ominous army of dark grey firing shots of water at the ground below. The war zone outside looms dangerously, and I feel it, despite the comfort of my temporary sanctuary. And yet, despite the risks lurking beside me, I can be nothing but excited. Rain in a drought-ridden city, although annoying, is a truly wondrous thing.

Because I have discovered that, contrary to perpetual English cliché, grass grows eerily quickly. Both my front and back yard were a cemetery of yellow not two weeks ago, and now they are alive with sweet, lush pastures of green. I have spent the last fortnight watching grass grow, and it has truly been a riveting display.

In other news, it took me a worryingly long time to realise that the Nice Jazz Festival was to be held in the quaint French city of Nice, and not just a festival dedicated to jazz in its most polite forms.

Singsongs.

Two years ago, Rickard Falkvinge, a Swede working for Microsoft, quit his job to establish the Piratpartiet: the Pirate Party. As its name suggests, the Piratpartiet is a single-issue party based around the issue of piracy, and in particular, encouraging legislation to decriminalise file sharing. At the 2006 election, it secured 35 000 votes in the Riksdag; not enough to win a seat, but enough to mark its place on the electoral landscape. Like any advocacy party, the Piratpartiet need not actually win a seat to pursue its agenda. Its electoral legitimacy - the potential for it to gain more votes in a subsequent election, away from the mainstream parties - gives it traction. Whether or not as a result of this traction, two days ago the Left Party reversed its support for anti-piracy laws, joining the Greens and the Centre Party.

Pirating copyright reform (On Line Opinion)
Left Party supports file sharing (The Local)

Of course, sharing of music was occurring long before the advent of broadband Internet. When I was a youngster rationing my pocket money, all I needed to do was borrow my favourite CDs from the public library, and then make a copy that would last me a lifetime. (I am still yet to own a copy of Nirvana's Nevermind.) File sharing has exacerbated a problem, of course, but exactly what is that problem?

The problem is that people are spending less money on CDs, and pay-per-file downloads are so clumsy that they are never going to reclaim that ground. There are two groups of people who are significantly disadvantaged as a result: record labels, and high-earning artists. When Metallica's Lars Ulrich successfully sued Napster, he wasn't just spoiling a party. Metallica is a highly profitable business able to attract a seemingly endless slew of new, young fans whose natural obsessiveness encourages them to spend every cent of their pocket money on the band's entire back catalogue. However, these kids are also fickle enough to not care greatly about the band's tactile art, and are unlikely to be interested in having the tangible package for its own sake. In the post-Napster world, one click and they're done.

Metallica, however, is in the minority. Those musicians whose work is entirely an artistic product and who attract a small but nerdy audience - Shellac, for example - will continue to sell their old albums on 180-gram, 12" vinyl. Bands who continue to release albums with relevance and vitality, such as Radiohead, can take advantage of the new distribution technology to actually increase their profitability.

The initial argument that less money on CDs will result in less music being produced is, as it turns out, absolute garbage. The myspace world gives us access to more music than ever before, more-than-occasionally of exceptional quality. So what is actually happening here?

Well, the same technology that makes file-sharing cheap and easy enough to destroy the music industry is also making recording cheap and easy enough to save it. Any fool with a computer can spend a few hundred dollars on a studio-quality microphone and record an album to match any commercial masterpiece. And they do: several of my favourite albums of last year, including El Perro Del Mar's amazing debut, were self-recorded.

(Trailblazers of this tradition were managing it in the 1980s: Big Black, for example, followed in the 1990s by Sebadoh and Elliott Smith. Electronic music then dominated the self-recording world, and with records such as Air's Moon Safari, it was well worth it.)

Many of the most prolific studios are housed in sheds or lounge rooms. Almost any band able to extract a sizeable record label advance - Radiohead, Wilco, dEUS, etc. - will no longer spend the money going to Abbey Road. They'll simply buy enough gear to build their own Abbey Road, wherever they like.

The effect of mass-file-sharing will not be the end of good-quality music - it will be the end of commercial monopoly. Over the last sixty years, a handful of large record labels has worked in concert with a handful of commercial radio stations to limit most listeners to only a handful of artists each year. The money they made from this was then spent 'finding' their next key artist; spending thousands of dollars buying the songs and the producers to make a 'quality' record; then spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing. Now the days of A&R tyranny are numbered.

The major labels are hitting back through the one medium which is still both popular and monopolised: television. Idol shows are simply easy ways for a major label to remain profitable through democracy.

For the rest of us, it is exceptionally cheap to record an album - once you have the basic gear, the unit cost per record is practically nothing. As for the distribution of music, and the potential of making a living out of it, the options there are opening wide.

I have spent the last six years writing music articles for independent magazines. For the last two years, I've been contributing to a magazine in a foreign city, having been recommended by a former home-town colleage. Two weeks ago, that colleague switched employment - as a result, I now write for a magazine whose entire staff are strangers to me. I realise that the days of getting 'care packages' consisting of new albums by Low, Arcade Fire, The Decemberists and The Hold Steady, for no reason whatsoever, are gone. I need to find another way.

And so I have come, belatedly, to blogs. There are an amazing amount of music blogs around, offering great diversity in taste, opinion, language and geography. Blogs can also support new distribution techniques. Denovali Records, a small Swedish label, offers downloads in lieu of attracting support for their operations. On the downloads page for French post-rock/metal band Celeste, is the following message:

" we have started the preorder for the new CELESTE - NIHILISTE(S) CD/LP to gain some money in order to pay for the pressing. But since you probably would not like to preorder a record you haven't listened to before, we have decided to make the full album available for download from our side. we support downloading music, especially as a way of getting to know unknown releases. But of course we are also record lovers, so if you want to be our personal heroes, you can preorder the record and help us releasing it faster."

Music can be art. Art can be loved. Money will still change hands - fair pay for fair art. File sharing may just open music up to the people, and allow mass audiences to be more discerning, and have more investment - financial and otherwise - in the music to which they listen. In the meantime, go searching - you'll be surprised at what you find.

Another Post About Drinking.

Of course, I could start this off by apologising about my recent absence from the regular-posting game. I could detail the many busy activities of my futile existence, each more stressful than the last, and declare that I wouldn't forsake you lovely people forever, and that I'll be more diligent in future, and please, please don't hate me for hiding in the corner for a while. But the truth is, if I don't have a story to tell, I'm not going to write. My quotidian life, with all of its breakfast-eating, work-going, lunch-eating, work-finishing, dinner-eating and all, is not a terribly amusing adventure for onlookers. It is rarely an amusing adventure for myself. But, having turned a corner in the last few days, I figure it's time to tell my not-so-amusing story for the week.

Another reason why I haven't posted for a while was that I spent all day Friday sick in bed. And it was entirely my fault.

I was suffering from The Worst Hangover, Ever.

In fact, I doubt anybody in the world, all through space and time, has ever suffered a worse hangover than mine.

So now it is Sunday, and I have slept an entire night, and I am again able to hold my food down. I will present you with a recipe for how to achieve The Worst Hangover, Ever.

1. Go out somewhere you would rarely go, with people who, on the whole, you have never met. (In my case, a surprisingly good French film called UV, with members of my university's French club.)
2. Go for 'a drink' afterward, and begin buying rounds with the guy sitting next to you.
3. Feel like a third wheel while sitting with your drinking partner and the girl who invited him. Get progressively drunker as not only the rounds keep coming, but other French club members keep going home, leaving half-full carafes of potent house red at your disposal.
4. Begin talking to drinking partner and his prospective girlfriend about pretty-well everything you shouldn't talk about. Religion, for one. Where your family comes from. Why you may, or may not, want to live out your life without ever having children.
5. Realise that drinking partner and the girl have no romantic intentions toward each other when, in the course of a conversation, the girl inconspicuously mentions her boyfriend (yet only once, and only in context).
6. Wait for the girl to go home, leaving only you and drinking partner left at the table. Wait for her to just reach the door of the venue before he earnestly, dumbfoundedly, asks: 'did she actually say she had a boyfriend?' Become privy to a moment's emotional turmoil as drinking partner realises he was only invited as a platonic film friend.
7. Encourage drinking partner as he decides that, on that basis, he needs to get really drunk. (Disregard clear fact that drinking partner is already really drunk.)
8. Go to an awful nearby nightclub, the kind you have sworn for years you would never enter. Switch from the clever combination of beer and wine to gin (or in his case, scotch), and enjoy as he complements his next round with a bonus round of shots of vodka. When it is next your round, make sure to reciprocate. Seeing as the music, and the clients, of this nightclub are all awful, ensure that the very act of drinking is the pervasive feature of your evening. Celebrate this, and compete with fervour.
9. Laugh when the girl with whom you now find yourself dancing guesses your ethnic background, and exclaims, 'I can marry you now!' This despite her being pale and blonde and not exactly a stereotypical example of the ethnicity she purports to share with you.
10. Realise you probably don't want to marry her, leave and catch a taxi home. It is now 3.30am. You started drinking at 11.30pm, and have consumed anywhere up to 15 standard drinks, of all sorts, in this time.
11. Despite intending to go to work on Friday, only wake up at 11.30am. Your head will not lift from the pillow, and your stomach will accept neither food nor water. You will not have a headache so much as a dull thud consuming your every limb. Spend the day wishing you were asleep (and, for the most part, being asleep), and declaring that you will never, ever do that again. Rather than, say, see one of your favourite bands on Friday night, end up nursing your head while staring blankly at a football match.
12. Sleep well Friday night. Still, wake up dizzy and disoriented on Saturday morning. Realise that you're a fucking idiot, and you deserve everything you get.