How to think Stray Thoughts and influence people

1. Just in case you haven’t checked it out yet, I once again recommend you check out The Writing Factory, a blog written by a friend of mine. It’s frequently sharp and insightful, and definitely worth a look. Go on, click on the link in the column to the right– you know you want to…
2. Currently on the turntable chez moi: the new albums by Jewel and The Divine Comedy, as well as selected Scott Walker CDs. Have you heard Scott’s Jacques Brel covers ? I hadn’t until recently, but when I did … well, they felt familiar, like songs I already knew, or had been waiting to hear all my life. Terrific stuff.
3. Speaking of things musical, and as this is Stray Thought 3, I think it’s a very silly state of affairs that the forthcoming Meat Loaf album ‘Bat Out of Hell III’ features a minimal input from Jim Steinman, who wrote, produced and generally sorted out Bats 1 and 2. It’s a matter of obvious historical record that Loaf’s non-Steinman written stuff has attracted less acclaim and fewer sales, so it seems a bit cheap to use the Bat element in an attempt to bolster up sales of a CD which has virtually no connection with the ones in the same ‘series’. You might well think I’m oddly concerned about this, but – and this appals most people when they first find it out – I think Jim Steinman is a great and distinctive songwriter, and that it’s a pretty transparent attempt to leech off past glories to call the forthcoming album Bat III. And I have a suspicion that much of the coverage of it will say as much. Keep an eye out for that in a few months, if not for the album itself.
4. As a friend of mine pointed out, the US Government’s claim that recent suicides in Guantanamo Bay were ‘asymmetrical acts of war’ do rather echo the Monty Python line that ‘a murder is only an extroverted suicide’. And they ring even less true coming as they did mere days after the US had proudly displayed photos of the body of a member of Al-Qaeda, which is, er, kind of barbaric, isn’t it? There may well be some truth to the fact that the Guantanamo detainees knew their deaths would make them martyrs, but that’s absolutely beside the point when you recall they were being held without charge or trial, in contravention of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Call me a bleeding heart, but if you think it’s okay for people to be arrested and detained in a location without access to lawyers or family contact without being charged with any recognisably criminal offence, I would respectfully suggest that you google the name ‘Pastor Niemoller’.
5. I’ve been doing some personal writing recently – a poem to write and read at a friends’ event, and an intergenerational collaboration for a family member – and it’s been rather strange to finish off these pieces of writing and realise just how different my mindset has been when I’ve been working to a genuine, immovable deadline; it’s made it feel more real somehow, and so there’s more of a sense of momentum to the writings. Very interesting, and really rather fun…