Guest Speaker; Sandra Laville, Guardian Crime Correspondent

“I have to be the people’s eyes and ears, to hold the authorities to account and to give people voices who don’t have voices normally,”

Words of hope from Sandra Laville, who recently gave a talk to Journalism students at UCF, whilst explaining the loss of faith in Journalism. In light of the Leveson Inquiry and described the potential restrictions placed on their relationships with police officers as ‘anti-democratic’.
The recent phone hacking scandal and ensuing chaos has damaged the reputation of an already tarnished profession; the public image of journalists, from media moguls a la Rupert Murdoch’s dodgy dealings with politicians, to the seedy world of the  paparazzi, is leading to a potentially draconian imposition of rules and regulations. With the potential for journalists’ conversations with police officers being recorded and supervised, the line has to be drawn to prevent journalists running wild, and allowing them to fulfill their role as the ‘fourth estate’, the ‘watchdog’ for the people.
It will be interesting to see where the results of this inquiry lead, and how the potential impositions will affect future journalism, and the nature of the industry and potential impact of the phone hacking style dealings will be obvious in the near future, but until then we were provided with an interesting illumination on the industry.

News; Ketamine at the UCF

Students at University College Falmouth have been surprised to see a massive rise in the use of the drug Ketamine, it has been found.
The drug, a Class C dissociative psychedelic, commonly known for its use as a horse tranquilizer, seems to have exploded on the University scene almost overnight.
Ben Newham, 19-year-old-student, said of the rise in use “Before it wasn’t around, but now it’s suddenly readily available and most people I know have started using it on nights out.”
He added “It’s crazy, I think because a lot of people first use drugs at University, it’s more a question of what’s around; they don’t know much and it’s just what’s available”.
Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 and was primarily used as an alternative anaesthetic for many years before becoming popular recreationally due to low cost and the ‘dreamy inebriation’ it invokes in the user.
One user at the University who recently began using the drug here, said “More and more people I knew were involved in it, and I was persuaded to use it,” he continued “it was like I was 8 years old again, time seemed to go on forever, my spatial awareness was all out of shape and it was just fun and games”.
The drug, however, has been linked to psychological dependency and ulcerative cystitis. Frequent, daily users also report significant cognitive impairment, as well as bladder problems and memory lapses.
Rory Blair, 21,  student of the university, said “ Nights out are getting a bit wierd; you see the outward effects [of Ketamine] and they’re just out looking like zombies”.
The University was unavailable for comment.

Gig Review; The Fret w/ Fred Champion and Hydroshima

Walking into Underground left me a little uneasy; the last time i was there the walls were breathing ominously as wasted photography students celebrated their end of year hand in, with filter-ridden filth flying through the crowded air as they mercilessly raved away all responsibility ‘til post summer; some of us still have work to do, and luckily for me, in the field of music journalism a multitude of drinks and psychoactive chemicals coffee goes hand in hand with the modus operandi.
Fortunately the air seemed noticeably less ominous this time around, with all manner of lizard people and bad vibrations staying home for the Hydroshima/Fred Champion/ The Fret extravaganza.
When Hydroshima took to the stage, there drinks were flowing and the feedback was waiting to burst the eardrum of anyone bold enough to step close; the front man ensured this fate for some by lulling us forward with his hands, and a cheeky smile filled with promises and a wired looking drummer to back him up.
For a two piece they shook the walls, crashing straight in with riff driven madness and catchy chorus lines, the interplay between the two felt professional yet suitably filthy; somewhere between the stripped down catchy blues of the Black Keys and the sex fire and brimstone of Queens of the Stone Age they cut a niche. It was hard to stand still when the laid back drums started to kick off, pulling everybody closer with gentle, lilting accents before coming down on the crash with almighty power as the kit began to move back from the drummer ever so slowly, as if backing away like some scolded animal. There was a notable stage presence, with the front man causing all manner of ruckus, at one point mounting the drum kit halfway through a song whilst a distortion addled groove boomed from his guitar into the room. This band felt like a good one, and i am very keen to see them again.
There was something of a contrast here to the next band, Fred Champion, who had a more indie style to them, with soaring, complex lyrical content accentuated by clean and dreamy guitar melodies. They managed to hold a crowd fixated with a few changes in the set to the formulaic atmospheric indie style, with subtle flairs and flourishes exemplifying a combination of songwriting prowess and instrumental ability. As a last song they crashed through a tongue in cheek rendition of a Dizzee Rascal song, much to the disgust of the lead guitarist, who summarily chucked his guitar across the room, produced a sly bottle of vodka and marched to the back of the room chugging away at the thing. You’ve gotta love a band with a bit of style to them.
The headliners trundled onto the stage with a look cutting somewhere between anger and loathing at the realisation of Falmouth’s 11:30 pm live music curfew. Some of us could still see properly, what kind of country cuts the line on live music, a most holy of British tradition, at a tender hour before midnight?
In any case, they jumped in with their typically well written and tight-as-fuck songs, kicking off with a slide guitar number which had more than enough “kick ass” to get everybody moving. They came across as the tightest act of the night, and despite the risky move of having another bluesy duo on the bill, there’s little room for comparison between the two. Throughout the gig The Fret oozed professionalism, instantly building a rapport with the crowd, which was now crammed shoulder to shoulder after being drawn in from every corner of the club, as they blazed through a set The White Stripes would’ve been happy with  playing. All of the songs, as well as being catchy and upbeat enough to sing along and dance to, have a distinct character that pours out from the band as instantly likeable; the lyrics stand out as emotionally weighted without ever being over-indulgent, the music struck a perfect chord, driven by catchy, distorted melody with a solid backbeat and just the right amount of dabbling in mindless riff rockery, the chemistry between the two and their mutual enticement of the crowd makes for must watch material around Falmouth Town.

Guest Speaker; Rei Nakamura

I’ve come to develop a growing love for the Lunchtime gigs held at Tremough campus; as an avid enthusiast of everything from standard blues to pretentious art wankery, they offer a range of performances every week for your enjoyment and learning, a space to grow your musical mind and all that kinda stuff.
I was pleased to hear, on arriving, they’d forgone the usual lunchtime gig so an internationally acclaimed pianist-cum-performance-artist could give a brief lecture and performance.
I was kind of offended at the result.
There is a plethora of eclecticism to be found in the performance centre, but this seemed one step too far.
I was trying to listen to her music, to enjoy and try to understand the story being told, and after realizing that i was unable to do that without any tangible sense of melody, rhythm or song structure, i tried to think what message was being delivered; music without music…. what kind of statement was being made?
Perhaps an indictment of an industry ever greater pandering to the throws of commercialism, an ode to the triumphs of individuals who spend years and years developing a finely tuned ear, (insert an ever growing sense of pretentious ridiculousness).

It was all bollocks, it sounded like someone abusing a cat sitting inside a piano, desperately clawing at the strings for some escape and relief from it’s tortuous existence.

Unless you’re the kind of person who enjoy’s talking about Art so it enables you to smugly lift yourself above other people, because, in your mind, the ability to allude to meaning and complex social statements from mundane situations and actions means that you are superior to people who enjoy simple  pleasures, avoid this woman at all costs.

Unless you fancy a casual rape of the ear and ensuing confusion.

Guest Speaker; Sam ‘The Jazzman’ Richards; Associate Lecturer at Plymouth University

The man was Jazz personified, a worn brown leather jacket, a black flat cap over some Janis Joplin style circle glasses and a shirt so colourful he resembled some kind of acid-jazz peacock.
I was new here, in the field of ‘other people’s lectures’, having gone to a couple of English guest lecturers after being slightly pissed off by the lack of anything resembling ‘learning English’ as an ancillary to studying journalism, but maybe I’m alone in thinking grammar, syntax and creative writing are complementary to becoming an accomplished word-smith.
But anyway, this lead me to find out that all guest lectures are free-for-alls in terms of who can turn up, which lead me to be sitting in Music in Society, surrounded by a few odd gazes of ‘who the fuck is this guy’ and presented with a history of jazz music by a strange looking fella who’s first thought of Tremough Campus were ‘it’s difficult to find a parking space and it’s easy to get lost’.
Save the last 15 years or so, where things have started to move a little faster, his main theory was of the 30 year cycle of music. Roughly speaking, every 30 years, music goes a new and dramatic change. He took us back to the 1830’s, where minstrels would adorn brown face paint and play music for entertainment, affectionately referred to as ‘Ethiopian serenaders’, which seemed strange to imagine, but i guess shits and giggles change with the cultural pendulum of fashion and societal taste. I’m sure a Victorian man exposed to dubstep and ketamine would probably shit himself, lest he still had the bodily function available.
Anyway, Minstrelsy was overtaken in the 1860’s by ‘Music Hall’ in the U.K, and burlesque in the U.S.A, which Sam Richards believed to be the starting point for modern popular music. I found it hard to see the connection he was making here, and he declined to explain any further, but the only link i can see if any is the combination of sex and musical entertainment.
This moved gracefully towards ragtime – think ‘The Entertainer’ – in the 1890’s and then to the Jazz age. His jazz addled eyes lit up as he started waxing lyrical about the golden age of Jazz, 1920-1950.
There are a few theories about the name Jazz and where it came from, you could almost hear him giggle with excitement as he bounced through the theories; from jizz (seminal fliud), ‘the life force’, or from the jasmine perfume worn by prostitutes where jazz originated as a form of entertainment, or a jazzball, meaning a curving ball in French.

Anyway, by the time the Al Jolson film came on, i was pretty bored, so i skiddadled out of there, feeling quite spun out, and left with a nice quote swimming around my brain ‘Jazz is the misunderstood utterance of a prayer’.

Guest Speaker; Oliver Poole; The War Correspondent

‘On the streets of Libya it was a different score; three kids with AK-47′s to welcome you in’
Some of the grappling words spilling from the mouth of a man who’s seen more than most; from spearheading the frontline of the Iraq Invasion, embedded with the famously ruthless Black Knights US Tanks corps, to the tension addled roads of Gaza and the enthusiastic greetings of a weary Libyan people, Oliver Poole has taken a slice of life too rich and too dangerous for most palettes, and does so with a jaunty smile and a multitude of tounge in cheek English witticisms.

‘I think that was all a big mix-up, you know, with the Black Knights. I was standing there next to the high-flyer New York Times reporter,  it was pretty dark and hectic, and we just got thrown in with our divisions; i think he ended up in some rural village minesweeping squadron.’

He spent five years in Iraq, getting to know the local customs and style, but notwithstanding the fear ridden, pressure addled situation of constantly being a target for kidnapping. Most journalists had already seen a number of videos of kidnapped Westerners pleaing for their life, before being beheaded live on internet T.V
‘But it was alright,’ smiled Oliver, as if acknowledging his own fortune at the expense of some of his colleagues, ‘it was simple enough; Don’t go out at night, Don’t go out alone, Don’t stay anywhere longer than 15 minutes and Don’t tell anyone you are coming.’

The golden rules of a man who’d seen the worst of it hung around the room, an almost tangible effervescence to the words of wisdom that managed to keep him alive.

I looked around the room, and amongst the muffled laughter of his buoyant wit, sensed a real depth of appreciation for the reality of war reporting. The surreality of watching your surroundings with a constantly sharp eye for danger, and the colleagues you see from War-to-War succumbing to kidnappings, post traumatic stress and insomnia was all too real. It was like a breathe of fresh air, but littered with savage realities not all to easy to swallow.

Hunger Games and the last-minute blag; How to write a feature in 20 minutes after no food for 48 hours.

My hands started to tremble as it began to dawn on me my body was beginning to metabolise itself for sustenance. 24 hours into starvation the body begins to gather energy from lipids, or in layman’s terms, fat, fat soluble tissue and vitamin molecules, though in the depth of a hunger fuelled frenzy, through research I realised I was just hours away from catabolysis, where the muscles become the soup de jour.

The sun seemed to set on the issue of world poverty after the end of Live8; 20 years after the Live Aid concert, that brought poverty to the attention of millions of people around the world, another concert was staged, this time bringing some 3 billion viewers in, highlighting the injustice of Euro-centric trade, starvation and poverty all across the world, and nobody really cares now.

Partly due to an indulgent love of food, a strong sympathy for those less fortunate, and the lack of anything good on T.V, I decided to stage a miniature hunger strike.

What seemed like a bold and honourable undertaking quickly took a turn towards something savage and confusing; hours after I awoke on the first day of fasting, I found myself lying on the beach, full of insipid disgust for the people around me, happily munching away on their fare of assorted barbeque nibbles and scrumpy cider. On any ordinary day like that one, with the sun charmingly set amongst clear blue skies, I would be knee deep in scrumpy and pasties, and like any good student, happily cracking on with the playful madness I’ve found typical of this side of the Cornish coast. Things took a turn for the emotional when I started mentally re-arranging in order of deliciousness the contents of my fridge, and I remembered the last thing I ate; a small chunk of cheese and my girlfriend’s contraceptive pill.

Maybe there was something in the air, or the carefree paddle boarders serenely gliding across the water that aggravated the situation through contrast. It could’ve even been the oestrogen induced tender breasts and heightened emotions I was feeling, but the thing that typified this stage of the hunger was a massive and volatile irritability. Imagine being tapped, ever so gently, repeatedly on the balls by a golf club for hours on end. This dull, dragging pain in my stomach seemed to be a minor nuisance, but apparently something about the physiology of your stomach shrinking induces vehement disgust of anything and anyone within range of anger.
The next thing I noticed was an intense increase in the quality of my sense of smell; I knew, with olfactory artistry, the exact ingredients of all of my friends footlong subway’s as i sat there and rolled my lunchtime cigarette. At this point, I remember starting to worry I was pregnant; the mild morning sickness, the tender breasts and the incredible sense of smell, it all made sense for a moment. I then remembered I had taken the pill, so I had nothing to worry about. Also, I realised quickly that I was in a state of hunger induced delirium, and that, being a man, I don’t have much chance of getting pregnant without divine intervention or some major surgery, a weekend in Mexico with a moral-less doctor and a strong course of HRT.

It was all an interesting experience, found myself feeling closer to men people who suffer from the effects of poverty, as well as a greater sympathy toward folks who go on hunger strike in the name of injustice. Just recently, some Palestinian men starved themselves for more than 80 days in order to bring attention to the plight of their people and the human rights abuses going on in their part of the world, and felt an unbelievable respect for them, because at the end of the day, my 48 hours total was marred by insanity, irritability and a sense of achievement, that was vastly put in perspective by the efforts of these individuals. I hadn’t achieved much other than a strong exercise of willpower and some pale ode to greater men.

Throw Yourself Naked and Willing to the Lions; Doing Battle with Big Cats will Keep You on Your Feet

Where am i and Where’s my Underwear? Mevagissey to St Ives, Artful Dabbling and The Great Hippyrave Fiasco p.t 1

I haven’t written in here in a while, mostly due to the fact that the entirety of work in here thus far has been written with the loom of University deadlines minutes away and the strange providence of being surrounded by some of the most fantastic people i’ve met on this planet.
But this is no time for sentiment; throw a mattress from the rooftop, fuck a goat, hijack a tricycle, whatever gets your motor going; it’s been a strange one and i’m not quite sure it’s over.
Somewhere along the line i found myself of an evening on a rickety green bus gently chugging it’s decrepit chassis through the Cornish countryside, surrounded by half a dozen comrades, £100 worth of alcohol, and £60 of assorted narcotics for those who were into that kindof thing. Heading in the darkness through amblesome winding roads, the only person who knew where we were going assured us it was only a 4 mile hike through dank, unlit farmland paths. Glancing at the faces of my compatriots only exacerbated my anxieties; they, too, seemed to hold onto the assumption that the Cornish countryside, as well as home to awe inspiring views and cracking cider, seemed like it was host to an array of City-boy raping, murderous, atavistic neanderthals and torturous Myra Hindley types.
Needless to say, we managed to make it to the Farmhouse intact, and a quite contained evening altogether ensued, although a couple of children’s mattresses were thoroughly violated, countless tobacco packets reduced to rubble in a fiendish intoxicated desire for nicotine, and i misplaced some underwear. Waking up to an early afternoon sun after fucking around till the sunrise, we all seemed to find ourselves in that strange, carefree Zen-like lackadaisicality brought on by 12 hours of perpetual wastedness….. strangely enough the only other place i’ve seen a similar expression on faces around me is from those who’ve recently spent a 6 month stint in a Buddhist monastery.
Listlessly drifting towards the sea, we found ourselves in Mevagissey Harbour, an old pirate town, decked full in stoneware and earthen, adventurous history. We walked the same streets as smugglers of Old England, these vast towering cliffs and open harbour snugly settled into the shoreline. We played and drifted, messing around and trying to remember the events of the night before, closer together, occupying our time until that inevitable sunset painted the sky as we skimmed stones into the sea. I kind of got the feeling these people around me would be along for the stranger trips, the out on a limb, aspirative journeys you hold onto for a while. But this little venture was definitely just the beginning

Operation Fuck Turtles……Letters from an Outback Adventurer…The Seductive Power of Alien Lands

‘Be Careful here guys, the pigeons can lip-read, the hills have eyes and the women are about……’

The Score was simple enough, the acquisition of a house with military precision codenamed Operation Fuck Turtles; Amphetamine Fueled Hares With Fire In Our Bellies. Most folk seemed lackadaisical about their approach to a house for next year study, but not Us, we became the Unit, staking out that shit so hard when we got the place nobody would know what hit ‘em. Dodgy looking rendezvous under the Harbour Bridge and speaking in hushed and suspicious tones; In the City people have been arrested for less. This kind of mission tends to brings men together, particularly when suited up, guarding the door of a house in the harsh harbour breeze for the best part of an hour-and-a-half, two days running. The imagination runs wild and untamed, but somewhere along the borderline madness bonds are formed, we build bridges across the islands of conciousness we are all forced to inhabit alone, but slowly we realise the similarities in other Men, we all want to be Happy, have a good time, make the most of things and all that jazz. Did you know in Sanskrit, one of the oldest known languages in the world, the root of the verb ‘to be’ is the same as the root of the verb ‘to grow’, gives a whole new edge to the term Human Being, ay? You do the logical Maths
Woah there hombre, where are we going again? How did we get to this? I thought we left this pretentious business back in the Philosophy classroom. People in some countries get castrated for this kind of optimistical Hippie jargon. The true nature of reality doesn’t do well for polite dinner table conversation, at least not in crude, unrestrained terms.
Where was I? Somewhere about coming together…
We worked as a team, and it payed well, scoring the nicest house in town with the best group of comrades for the job, including an Artistic Chef, a Musician, a Mixed-Martial-Art trained Northerner and a Photographer/fellow Man of Knowledge/The World in the making.
I’m sure long after sciatica, old age and Alzheimer’s has set in we will all be telling the crude and wonderful tale of Operation Fuck Turtles.
I told the tale to a long and well-traveled comrade of mine, but although enjoyed, this was met with a grave and deliciously insane story of mouth-watering adventurousness, hitch-hiking, Himalaya-conquering Pan-Asian homeless busking farmer Cowboy style intensity, just to glaze over the edges.
For a while there i felt it brewing in the bones, that hot footed ants in the pants desire for Adventure, it ate at me like some kind of flesh eating parasite, haunting me in my sleep and calling out to me. It occurred on more than one occasion to me i was a light-footed, backpack-packing train journey from the Airport and a $5000 credit card. Knowing for a fact that Middle East, India or even better South America lay waiting for me, seductively waving their backpack hips with tales of sensual Adventure and exciting characters, Great Fuck was i close to getting me some Travelpussy. Even writing about it now, a month after i’ve settled down to the unknown world of housing contracts and committed conventional living, i’ve managed to arouse that deep-seated curiosity for Unknown Lands…..

nb; Writer’s note: Although posted 19/03/2012, this entry was written on 10/2/2012, and unwittingly unposted