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useful life

by Simon Aulman

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about

the third album in my new and very temporary change of direction which has clearly lost all my old regulars, and this one is so noisy (at times) and undisciplined (considering that it's meant to be highly disciplined) that it will lose anyone still with me. However, I must follow my Destiny, which is to be the unfamousest unsuccessfullest musician in all of history.

...................................

Today's Guardian/Observer has a wonderful review of the new film Perfect Days - www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/25/perfect-days-review-wim-wenders-koji-yakusho-tokyo-toilet-cleaner - I saw this a couple of days ago in a cinema full of about one person. A most amusing thing happened. I have a good bladder and can sit through Oppenheimer or even a Scorsese film without needing to nip out to the loo. I haven't needed to nip out to the loo mid-film for YEARS. Ever ?

Perfect Days is a couple of hours long, and after 20 minutes I was bursting. The film is about a man who cleans posh public toilets and that really is the film, 2 hours of him cleaning toilets. My bladder couldn't stand it. I had to go. I am glad I didn't disturb anyone. Any man who has prostate trouble and has problems peeing - keep this film handy.

On a much less profound level, the review is right and the film is beautiful - slow and quiet and uneventful - and I am going to blow my own trumpet because like lots of quiet luddite HSPs we find that by staying stubbornly behind the times we actually end up ahead of the times. While watching this film I actually thought it was a film about myself. I am not usually that conceited. But here is a man of my age, he lives alone, his job is the sort that you can do well or poorly as you choose, and you don't take it home with you, there is no overlap of worrying about what you did.

He cleans loos and is a vital citizen. I make music which is so unpopular that all other musicians can at least get some pleasure from the relief of knowing that at least their career isn't as unsuccessful as my own. So we both make other people's lives better.

He has lots of books, arranged simply around the floors of bare simple rooms. So do I. He sleeps in a room with just the bed. There are differences between us. I do actually have a "proper" bed - though it is the only thing in that room - nothing else at all. He rolls up/out a mattress on the floor. I'd love to sleep like that but I dislike having the spiders running all over my face while I'm asleep.

I didn't noticed the thing mentioned in the review/comments about his watch. I've never had a watch at all. Like him I only have an old text-and-speech flip phone thingy. I read a lot but couldn't lie comfortably the way he does when he reads. Also I don't get on with William Faulkner. We both drive vans, though mine is SORN'd now, it was too much of a headache.

He listens to tapes. I prefer CDs. Tapes were the first music-format I ever bought, back when I was a child, it seems incredible now to me that these things can be fetishised, I think they are awful. CDs are too, but they are easier to organise and get my head around than LPs on heavy shelving or digital things in a computer. He has a proper-film point-and-click camera, I have a point-and-click old digital camera. He takes one photo per day - usually of sunlight coming thru the leaves of his favourite tree. I take about one photo per week, usually of Calshot.

Oh there are a million similarities. Comments also mention Ghostdog, another film that I sometimes feel to be about me in some ways. Apparently this quiet luddite life is a new "revolution" for the billions of miserable people around us to embrace and maybe get a bit of joy back. For fuck sake, wasn't it always obvious, just how fucking stupid did people have to be to think that they could get any kind of happiness out of owning lots of new technology and having a smart phone and having a proper status-y job and knowing what the time is and keeping up with other people, knowing what they are doing right this minute, jesus christ it's enough to make me almost wish the Tories get back in so they can finally destroy the NHS and everyone can get depressed and die because stupidity and obedience are choices and those who take them deserve everything they get, we all do, I don't know what anyone can've done wrong-enough to've deserved this album, it's one for the History Books to decide whether it's a misstep or a masterpiece.

recorded this morning, cover painting by me

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released February 25, 2024

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Simon Aulman Southampton, UK

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