Friday 17/05/13

On Thursday evening my friend Peter sends me the link to an interview with Ezra Koenig (which you should listen to here [LINK] and if you don't like this person, his manner of speaking and the things that he says, please never talk to me) and then I listen to the interview and write to Peter:

Questions:

a) Do any of you have East Coast Pretension accents? 

b) Where on the East Coast should I move to? I'm clearly not made for LA.

Never in the UK quote

(Conversation with checkout person at Trader Joe's)

Checkout person: Hey, how are you!!!!!

Me: Good, thanks

Checkout person (ignoring the fact that I didn't ask him back): I'm great, thank you. It's always great around here!!

Me: Is it?

Checkout person: Yes! I never have any complaints. I love working here.

Tuesday 14/05/13

So, Random Access Memories. I think I have two problems with this album. (Even though I have to say, I've heard it a few times now, and I'm getting used to it).

a) I objectively don't like this sound. It just doesn't appeal to me, and I guess that's very personal / subjective. Regardless, it's unfortunate that one of my favourite groups has decided to go so 70s, when the 70s is my least favourite decade musically.

b) I'm really finding it difficult to stomach the sales pitch behind it. How Daft Punk have decided to 'put emotion back into dance music', because, you know, dance music is now really basic, in your face, and crass. If you have a problem with how dance music in 2013 is, you know what, make a great 2013 dance record. That will show everyone. Don't go running away from it and then try to sell me this as innovation or going against the tide. I've heard the Random Access Memories sound from many French bands in the last few years. Yes, Air, like a few pointed out, but also Sebastien Tellier and Breakbot who have made careers out of churning out 70s soft rock / lounge / disco pastiches while Daft Punk were away (with diminishing results). If anything, that's the sound that's tired - if you've been checking for smart dance music recently. 

If Daft Punk want to react to Skrillex, I find them really short-sighted. They should not be competing / reacting against that. It's beneath them. (Or it should be. It clearly isn't). That's why I think it's a dumb choice to follow this route. And insulting to their fans. I wasn't listening to Steve Aoki before you came back, Daft Punk. I didn't need saving.

That's about it.

Monday 13/05/13

The new Vampire Weekend album is out today and not only is it out today, but it's reviewed on Pitchfork and gets a 9.3/10. This is all extremely important.

Reading the Pitchfork review is blowing my mind. First of all, it links to Ezra's blog from 2006, which I didn't even know about, and in it he's writing in the same learned, multi-culture embracing, eloquent and witty way that you can still see now in the lyrics to, say, Step.

I just can't with this guy. As a gay man I'm utterly, foolishly, head over heels in love with what comes out of this straight man's brain.

I need to stop here because I've taken two Ambien to enjoy an evening of a) reading the Pitchfork review over and over again, followed by b) a listening party of Vampires of The City alone, lying on my wooden floor on top of a quadruple reindeer skin rug and nothing else, whilst eating a brown lentil soup made from a recipe found in the Silk Road of Cooking book that Rostam's mum wrote.

And the other two are great, as well - Baio is the cutest bassist on-stage pirouette performer in a indie band ever (and has wit to spare in his tweets) and finally Chris Tomson, menacingly tall and handsome beating the drums forcefully (like they want it), while all you can catch are blue lightnings flashing straight from his eyes, every time he gazes up mid-beat.

Vampy Weeky, ma Kings.

London Preppy investigated; and dozed off.

Friday 10/05/13

Highlights of self-loathing lives

On my first Saturday in LA I go out to meet some friends for one of those friends’ birthday, and I’m using the term friends perhaps in a delusional way, because I don’t really know anyone in LA, nobody I can call in the middle of the night and break down to for being all alone, for having left London behind, for having left Athens behind too, for keeping running and never finding somewhere to stop. I don’t know that LA is filled with people who want to be my friends anyway; I think I’m too intense and gloomy even in my most upbeat moments, and nobody has time for that here. Here I meet people who tell me that they’re writers and they love Kafka, but in subsequent conversation I discover that they’ve never blacked out or fallen in a k hole in their lives, I mean how is that even possible, or people who read the cover of the book I’m holding back to me and pronounce Proust, ‘Praust’, as in Faust. There’s nothing wrong with not liking Kafka, of course, and not knowing how to pronounce Proust, but a) don’t pretend and b) darling, you’re not a writer. Neither am I, but I don’t go around telling people otherwise within five seconds of meeting them.

And on this first ever Saturday night out in LA I meet those friends, Scott’s friends (most of whom I like, I can’t lie) and we’re in a bar, which I find only borderline insufferable, because it’s in Silverlake (i.e. not in WeHo) and straight (i.e. no pornographic and tragic go-go dancers in the corner). Then everyone gets bored in the straight, boring Silverlake bar – which I’ve just developed a soft spot for and grown comfortable in – and we drive to WeHo? I want to say WeHo although I’m not so sure, don’t know where anything is. A $40 entry fee later and I’m in a weird leather club where no one has bothered to turn up in trousers that cover their butt. There are people here though wearing devil masks and various other infernal paraphernalia, so the average body coverage comparative to normal population is reached.

Nobody in my group pretends that this was a smart choice, but some of them become more easily accustomed than others because they’re better at finding ___ and one of those friends who is very good at finding ___ comes up to me at some point for an intimate bonding moment and tells me something along the lines of: welcome to LA, I hope you don’t get sucked into the gay scene here, just be careful. And I find the fact that he’s telling me this even more upsetting than the sight of all the unselfconscious, degenerating old men dancing on podiums in nothing but Lucifer face masks and worn out leather jockstraps that I’m surrounded with, and that says a lot.

And I find this really upsetting, because, well, how do you tell somebody that their warning has arrived too late? How do you tell them you were sucked in approximately eight years ago and are still trying to find a way out? When I came out at 25 and started going to these places I used to think I’d never be doing this at 30. I’m 33 and, still, here I am. But as you get older, your self-imposed timeline keeps getting extended. Right now, can I really set my gay scene getaway at 35 with any sort of conviction? What about 40? Can I genuinely promise to myself that I won’t be 42 and crawling around some gay party with my shirt off?

Unfortunately some gay men never grow old. Gay men like me. Out of all those gays in the suburbs, leading the dreary lives that I so want, maybe some used to go out. Maybe some had been sucked in and they managed to escape. But I think that most of them never got involved in the first place. Not to the extent that I have and the people around me have. And those people from the suburbs won’t touch me or the likes of me. The likes of me will continue to live in central London, LA, New York, etc, and find ourselves in infernal clubs on Saturday nights at 4am, passing around delayed warnings about avoiding to get sucked in.

_____________________________________________________________________

Never in the UK quote

(Overheard in the lift between the parking garage and the gym. In the lift: me, two douchebag-y bros in baseball caps, tanktops, basketball shorts, and an old lady).

Old lady to bros: Are you boys going to the gym?

Bro 1: Yeah

Old lady: To exercise and get ‘buff’?

Bro 1: Haha, yeah

Old lady: And get those six-pack abs?

Bro 1: I already have those

Friday 03/05/12

I want to write a big old gay blog post because I never write about being gay anymore, although I live and I think it all of the time, so we'll see. For the moment I can't sleep I'm and making notes on my phone that might turn into something, maybe tomorrow. I have a new website too right now, because my online presence has been really lacking over the last decade and the internet really needed this, you know? www.northmorgan.com Kinda wish all the crushed sleeping pills would kick in quicker, if they kick in at all, feeling more awake with every Xanax I snort, good morning.

Monday 29/04/13

My main problem with LA, and I don’t necessarily know if it’s exactly a problem, but the main thing that I notice about LA that is incongruent to me, is how everything and everyone is linked to films and/or the entertainment industry. I mean, I know, what kind of a moron am I if this comes as a surprise, but the reality of it is much more intense than any expectation someone who hasn’t lived here before may have.

The signs were there a few hundred miles away from the city, in the wilderness of Southern California, where I was during ‘Oscar night’, staying with Scott’s family soon after I first arrived in the US. (NB: when I used to write London Preppy I referred to my boyfriend as Scott. I will continue to do this now, even though Scott is a different person. My boyfriend will continue to be Scott until the end of the internet. However many different people this name ends up representing. Let’s make things easy. Who are these people anyway, to deserve their own nickname, etc). So anyway, yes, little town, middle of nowhere, Oscar night. Well, Oscar night is a big thing, and the whole average Southern Californian family watches it and has seen all the films and makes informed comments and discusses the actors referring to them by their first name (“Scarlett has a great singing voice…I mean, Scarlett has many great things, but also a singing voice”). As in, everyone’s involved. This is their award show, for their people.

Then you get to LA, of course, and almost everyone around you has a job that’s got something to do with celebrities / entertainment. I haven’t been here long enough yet to decided which of these jobs in particular I value the least and, in all honesty, I really hope I’ll never pay enough attention to differentiate between your publicists, your producers, and your network executives, but all these people (so, most people in LA then) have two things in common: a) they’re very, very loud, much louder than you and me, and b) they incessantly share celebrity anecdotes, but in a contrived, pseudo-implicit way that tries to come across like, yes, they represent Oprah Winfrey / that hot guy from The Vampire Diaries / Blake Shelton, but it’s not a big deal, you know? The answer to that, of course, is that it really isn’t a big deal, but I’m not sure they know it.

Then again, people may just be making (loud, very loud, that’s a given) conversation about their every day lives and that involves talking about their celebrity encounters and I’m just reading too much into it.

The point about all the above is that, unfortunately, my own personal interests don’t overlap with the interests that are the norm here in LA. I’m not saying this in a snooty, I’m-better-than-you way, which would be really quite pathetic, but in a pure, factual way: I don’t watch films. I can’t watch films, I just can’t sit through them and I don’t know anything about them. I’ll sit there in a room on my own and happily listen to albums or read books for hours, but there’s something about films that doesn’t hold my interest and something about actors that really puts me off. I think it’s the extroversion.

So in a city full of extroverted people talking loudly about they things that they do, or the things that other extroverted people they work for do, well, my reaction is to completely disappear, keep my mouth shut and stay in my apartment. LA is the place where a functional, quiet introvert can turn into an agoraphobic sociopath in need of psychiatric help. I’m typing this home alone on a Saturday night.

---------------------------------------------------

If I do end up writing on here more often, I've decided to close all posts with a quote from somebody I overheard here in the US. These are quotes that might not be 'only in a America' (I haven't been to every country in the world) but they certainly are 'never in the UK'. So.

Never in the UK quote

Overheard in Whole Foods on a Sunday afternoon:

(Heavily tattooed female, late 30s, angrily, to friend) "I'm a stylist, not a designer [pause] well, I'm a DJ now, anyway"

Tuesday 23/04/13

The main thing to say about America is that, whether I like it or not, I never want to love it. I don’t want to be American. I don’t really want to belong here. I don’t ever want to have lived here long enough and I don’t want to live here convincingly enough for people to think that I’m actually from here. Living here convincingly would be a ridiculous stretch of my character and my abilities anyway, so it’s probably for the best that I feel this way.

I don’t leave the house that often, nothing’s changed there, but when I do, I want people to think of me as an outsider, definitely a foreigner. This is the complete opposite to my intentions when I was in the UK. I lived in England for fifteen years out of my thirty-three in total. I’m going to write this down in numerical form as well, because it makes it seem higher than words, that’s how much it matters to me: 15 out of 33. It really kills me that it’s not half or more, I have to be honest, but it’s close enough.

Well in those fifteen years, from the very first day until the last, I believe that I took it very personally when somebody inferred that I wasn’t British – inadvertently or not. Particularly hazardous areas for that sort of thing were airports and such, where people have a higher awareness of other nationalities. But then, eventually I found a way to combat that. I would travel always with my British passport face up.

Every day situations were easier; I didn’t stand out physically that much as a foreigner in England…until I opened my mouth. Fifteen years later and I still sound foreign there. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake the accent off, despite it getting softer, despite me knowing exactly how things should sound in the accent that I want. My mouth just can’t make these noises. So I’m stuck with this really mixed up indistinguishable hybrid accent of my own that might not say Greek, but it certainly doesn’t say North London either. In the UK, new people that met me used to guess ‘somewhere in central Europe’ but they couldn’t say exactly where. Nobody wanted to pick a country, like Germany for example, because they know what a German accent sounds like, and even though mine had elements of it, it wasn’t it.

Here in America, people are even more lost. Depending on how culturally aware they are, some people will actually go along with it when I say I’m ‘from London’. Other unprompted guesses so far indicate that to some American ears, I sound Australian. Three different people have said that to me just by hearing me talk in public – and I wasn’t even talking to them. (American people will talk to you in public a lot, but more of that later). I’ll take Australian, because it’s closer to having a British accent than you might think. Somebody guessed I was Danish the other day, which puts me back in this very vague central European territory.

Anyway, I think I got sidetracked. My point is: I moved to England when I was 18. I had wanted to be English, to belong to England, ever since I first visited there at 12. And I spent the next decade and a half trying to blend in. Now I’m here, I don’t know for how long to be honest, and although I really like the place and it’s nice to me, all I want to do is stand out. Kinda curious to see how this goes.

I might start writing on here again for the following reasons:

Because I just finished writing my second book so I can finally face a keyboard without the guilt of ‘oh I should be writing for my book right now’

Because the idea of London Preppy in the US amuses me.

Because I’ve missed this a bit.

Because I’m lonely.