the klf, some research and a meeting with my best friend (a weekly recap)

hello, friends!

first of all, i am sorry that i am here today writing about last week’s events on a thursday. my stepfather got food poisoning on saturday and had to stay home until yesterday and that led me to have an influx of intrusive thoughts, especially as my mum was trying to do as much as she could to care for him, which really upset me because he is, well, a person i really do not like and seeing him be cared for made me very distraught. fortunately, he has recovered and is now at work and i am calmer. i just finished talking to a person about the klf (they were an electronic music group that was the best-selling singles act of 1991. famously, when they, thanks to that, had to perform at the brit awards the following year, they, during their performance of an industrial version of their song “3am eternal” (which some of you might know (though, i only assume that because it was a number-one single in the uk and plays on a 1970s-1980s-1990s music radio station in my town) fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep (!) into the afterparty show (as i remember from a music magazine at that time, they actually wanted to do that during their performance, but the industrial band (i have never watched the actual performance (i will, though) and i really wonder what them performing together actually sounded like because, although i feel it can be adapted into the genre well, “3am eternal” is not an industrial song) they were performing with, extreme noise terror, objected to that because they were vegan). they subsequently deleted their entire back-catalogue and, also famously, burnt all of the money they made through their music, which amounted to one million pounds, and filmed themselves doing it. i first found out about them through hearing their song “justified and ancient” (featuring tammy wynette (a very unlikely collaboration, i must say!) i found a comment on a documentary video about them where the commenter said that they were glad that the klf gave tammy wynette her last charting song, albeit, funnily enough, not on the country music charts, and i very much agree. tammy’s lyrics on the song are so funny to me too: the song is, essentially, about how the klf called tammy and asked her to collaborate with them) three years ago on a radio station in russia. my usual inclination to search up any band or musician unknown to me whom i hear on the airwaves eventually sent me down a big klf rabbit hole and i fondly remember reading a lot about them!) and may now talk about the past week.

aside from my meeting with my best friend on saturday, nothing particularly interesting happened this week. though, when listening to shortwave radio last thursday, i came across the serbian-language programming of china radio international (they were teaching serbian speakers how to speak chinese, pronouncing what was said in each language comically slowly. i hope this broadcast was useful to someone, though i do not think that serbian speakers that want to learn chinese is a sizeable demographic!) and i did a little bit of reading on the troubles throughout the week (next month, i will try to read the shorter book on irish history i found two years ago in my school library if i manage to find it online. there is also another one i found there and have occasionally used for detail on events of the irish war for independence and irish civil war called “ireland since the famine”, but i never plan on reading it fully because it is 880 pages long). i read the wikipedia article on the term “acceptable level of violence” (which referred to the british government being unable to completely stop ira violence in northern ireland, but promising to reduce it) (which i find hilarious because, yes, of course there is going to be ira violence because, they, well… want a united ireland and if the british government, army and police are still in northern ireland and if a united ireland is still a damaging idea to both the united kingdom and the republic of ireland, of course they are still going to attack and shock because nothing is being done and unionist terrorism still persists (i do not think my comment applies to the present day, as most ira “splinter groups” have more to do with drug gangs than actual irish republicanism)!) and also on the 2000 uk terrorism act (itself, it was not particularly entertaining, but the “alleged abuses” section left me crying laughing, as what the act states could be applied to any person in “suspicious circumstances”. this led to, among others, a woman who decided to walk on a controlled cycle path in dundee and a cricketer carrying a cricket bat on his way to a match during the 2005 g8 protests to be suspected of terrorism and questioned). speaking of unionist terrorism, i also looked at some flags this week and have another addition to my collection of “graphic design is my passion”-esque vexillological “masterpieces” (so far including the coats of arms if kosovan municipalities i shared in a bulletin post a few months ago):

this one reminds me of a powerpoint presentation and i can very much imagine it being presented as one. “this is our terrorist group and this is how many people we killed in each of these counties”

 anyways, most of the week was spent by me anticipating meeting my friend before i finally set off to the old town in 36°c heat on saturday and waited outside of a bubble tea shop (while i was waiting for my friend to arrive, i remembered that the last time i stood in that exact spot was at the same time last year when i was waiting for one of my classmates to arrive. i clearly remember infodumping him about the brighton hotel bombing (which, now, in my opinion, is such an odd and rather concerning conversation starter) because i had just learnt about it when he arrived) (we had some once we returned to that spot. while i do like bubble tea, i tried it with a mango syrup in the tea, which i really did not like the taste of) until my friend finally arrived. our walk around the town was not particularly eventful, though, my friend was talking about how they had to have lunch with her mum’s friend who lives in the united states and is currently arguing with her over child support money and, while we were walking, we encountered said friend walking past us, which was a rather memorable experience and we stopped to pet every cat we saw, which was pleasant. we ate lo mein at an asian restaurant, which we both did not enjoy (though, we also drank passionfruit lemonade, which was delicious!) (i was having heat cramps already and eating something which came in a hot, spicy broth was a really bad idea. we also opted for tofu instead of meat and we both did not like how it was cooked (the centres of the individual chunks were flavourless, which did not pair well with their fried outside and the broth. i admit, i panicked for quite a bit because i am considering adopting a plant-based diet in the future and the only other dish i have ever tried that included tofu so far was a salad i ordered from a vegan restaurant a few weeks ago, where it came entirely unseasoned. while i do know that the latter is an absolute culinary crime, i was scared that, when cooked as typically, that all tofu tasted like that but, according to my friend, the tofu was indeed not very good, so i seem to be safe!) and then sat on a bench at the pier and talked about, well, a lot of things.

my friend is graduating next year and their partner graduates this year and my friend plans to go to the same university as her. the problem is, said university is in canada and it costs 40,000 euros per year to attend (so, that means that the klf, knowing that, on the 23rd of august 1992, the euro-pound exchange rate was around 0.74, could have attended eighteen and a half years there if they did not burn their million pounds) and it will (expectedly) be extremely difficult to convince their parents to let them attend it (my friend is currently falling into the same hole as me when it comes to parents recommending universities in countries which are on the brink of collapsing into fascism, as their parents are currently looking into universities in hungary!) i wish them the best luck and it very much seems that they are very well-prepared, as, over the past month, they have examined the entire university website and the transport authorities of the town it is in, so, funnily enough, now they know more about the university and its surroundings than their partner, who is going to attend it sooner.

and what did i talk about? well… i just told them about my current panic over exams results day, of course (which immediately disintegrated once they told me that no, i did not have to get at least a 7 and above to take a subject at a level at my school, though it is simply recommended to. they then proceeded to recount the comical story of how the school tried to make them take maths as an a level subject, even though they have discalculia and got a 6 at gcse level) and about the quiz games i attended this month (i showed them my blog entry about the one i went to a few weeks ago too). i admit, this time i did more listening than talking: as much as my friend likes to say that they enjoy talking to me because the exchange of information in any conversation i am part of is massive, sometimes there is nothing for me to say and i have to just sit and listen.

of course, i have not forgotten about this blog entry’s musical accompaniment, which today will be the song “i like chopin” by gazebo because i was listening to the radio while writing it and it came on and i have literally not heard it in years.