More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I was going to say I did it because back then anything seemed possible, back then being 1983 and 1984 and 1985, what I call the glory years. The glory years in Airdrie – what a joke, right? But really that would be untrue because back then everything seemed impossible.
when they came together it was undeniable. They sounded like nothing else. They sounded like Airdrie, which is to say they sounded like a black fucking hole. Everyone loved them or hated them and the people who hated them loved them twice as much.
I did it because, for a moment, even when everything seemed impossible, everybody was doing everything, reading, listening, writing, creating, sticking up posters, taking notes, passing out, throwing up, rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing in dark windowless rooms at 2 p.m. like the future was just up ahead and we better be ready for it. And now already it’s the rotten past.
hearing this music really did change everything although it might be more accurate to say it deformed my life rather than just changed it if you know what I mean. And if you do you’re in.
That’s genius right there, if you ask me. In my opinion genius is accidental, is mistaken, is actually wrong at first.
… I said to myself … okay … from now on music has to sound like a building coming down or forget it.
Looking back I feel as if I was never really there, that I was storing up all of these experiences, gathering material as opposed to living it, always the author and never the character in the book, which explains why I wanted to be a writer obviously.
I would start to wonder if any of the books he read penetrated deep enough to have an actual effect on his life. My own life has been so seriously damaged by books – I’ve never been able to enjoy a paperback without wanting to commit myself to it forever – that his library seemed more like a collection of firearms that had failed to go off.
But soon enough I realised that neither of us were ordinary. Which in a way is the whole point of the story.
The point is, if you’re gonnae spend yur whole life waiting aroun fur Jesus Christ tae arrive then you’ll be waiting furever. But if you decide tae plug Jesus Christ intae the equation, then, well, ye built it yersel.
Obsession is a state o fixation that goes beyond the specifics o relationship tae an analysis o relationship itsel.
Ah thought we wur aw weird, ah says tae masel. Ah thought that’s whit we hud agreed on. But really electronics wus their only weirdness or rather the single weirdness that took up aw their time.
ah became used tae the idea that these transgressive types, these avant-gardists, were just as ordinary as embdy else. Look up tae the sky at night, lookit the spray o the Milky Way, and tell me any different. We’re aw cosmonauts.
I want to be adventurous, he said. I want to live. Books aren’t living, he said. Music isn’t living. Staying alive isn’t living. Chasing a twenty-year-old-girl halfway round the world and setting up shop in a war zone: that might be living. It was hard to argue with him, even though I knew full well that books were alive and music was alive.
Music is always more than life, he wrote. His thoughts had been turned around. It’s life’s duty to live up to music, he wrote. When is life the equal of music, except in memory, except in dreams?
it’s life that we need to live up to, it’s art’s duty to rise to the occasion.
That’s typical of me. I’m always wishing things back, despite all of my talk.
punk was a way of aggrandising weird character traits and specific tics and making levels of ability interesting because it got rid of any notion of a norm so everything became fascinating and every failure became a breakthrough and every disappointment was like something awarded you, in heaven, which suddenly was these back-room gigs and wash-out art-centre shows and rehearsal-room jams, which were like new routes to immortality, man, like for a moment everyone was beatified or forgiven but of course then everyone began trying to play like everyone else and grace was suspended and there was a
...more
At this point let me say this, let me underline it. We all live out our unhappiness on different scales.
