Current mood:	quixotic
Current music:	Some drum and bass compilation.

I just came to go to the library, your honour.

This week is jury service week, which means something of a holding pattern as i wait to find out if i'm needed during the week. Yesterday was the selection for two 3-day trials with a 70 person pool with a goth population of one. I figure that with the amount of times i seem to get called up for jury service, the odds would be equally good for the occassional other goth to spring up, but no. So anyway, selected for one trial pool, but challenged by the defence lawyer just as i declined a free Bible from the bailiff and stepped into the jury box. Grateful i am though, as the case in question wasn't something i wanted to have to deal with.

The other holding pattern at the moment is a technical one, with a new computer coming my way in a week or two meaning that it's pointless to start, or resume, any major musical projects. So i find myself defaulting to the often neglected writing feather in my bow. This is where the necessary train journey into town for jury service comes in handy, because it gives me a chance to pick up research material at the central library. If only i'd remember that, if i'm going to the big library, i'll inevitably get more books than i can safely carry on my own, and it'd be so much easier to bring my own bag than waste 50 precious cents on one with the library's logo on it. So newly-aquired plastic bag bulging at the seams, i leave the library having picked more books than i had expected, and exceeding the bounds of my current writing topic.

*Ida Rubinstein by Michael de Cossart (My main reason for the visit; my secondary reason, The Queer Encyclopedia of Visual Arts, was undetectable, no matter how much i stared at the shelf where dewey said it would be. At the moment, i'm trying to decide who my favourite early 20th century Salome dancer is, Rubinstein or Maud Allan [Mata Hari is so out of the running she may as well be... ummm... well something not in the running and a long way back]. I fear Maud may lose out to Ida, simply because Rubinstein did both Salome and Sebastian.)

*Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology by Kathi Meyer-Baer (With a title that sounds like i should have found it in a dusty book shop that then mysteriously disappeared once i had left, this wasn't part of the research brief, but anything dealing with the totentanz and music as a symbol of death in antiquity does relate to other things i'm writing.)

*The Dark Reign of Gothic Rock by Dave Thompson (Published in 2002, i'd never heard of it before. The writing style is quite arch and chatty, where you notice the author's voice, rather than just absorb the information, and i'm rather looking forward to reading it. This is unrelated to the aforementioned totentanz or any research, it was just "ooh, cool, another goth book, must read now".)

*Fatboy Slim: Funk Soul Brother by Martin James (Not reseach related obviously, though goth related as Martin James went out of his way with a whole paragraph to explain who Susan Ballion was when describing Norman Cook's suburb of birth: Bromley. Most un-proof-read book i've seen in ages, with glaring mistypes and mispellings, including calling Jason Nevin's 1998 resurrection of Run DMC "It ain't like that", and yet using the correct title [sans the negative] later in the book.)

*Dancing the Darkness by Sondra Horton Fraleigh (A book about Butoh, which might tie in with what i'm writing, depending on what Fraleigh says in it; i've barely skimmed through it. Otherwise i might see if can write a separate, and totally dilletantish, article about Butoh.)

*Knees Up Mother Earth by Robert Rankin (Seems like ages since i've seen a new Robert Rankin book. Part seven in the Brentford trilogy, so should be some easily readible occult-tinged frippery; and on the full page artist photo on the back, he looks like an non-semitic version of Anton LaVey; or that guy from Ikon.)