THE GREAT PRETENDER

FACT:

Chrissie Hynde was a very early member of the Damned, and wanted to call them "Mike Hunt's Honourable Discharge".

I watched Don Letts's film Punk : Attitude last night, and I'm afraid that's the best I can come up with tonight. You want crude jokes, you've come to the right place. You want analysis of the most important movement in pop culture, well you'll have to wait.

Actually, I'm having a wee bit of a crisis of confidence vis a vis Homo Ludens. This happened a while ago and so I stopped blogging for a while. I don't think I'll do that this time, but one can create a pressure on oneself to write something original and/or perceptive and/or humorous at least once a week (with a bit of filler in between) which it can be difficult to fulfil. Actually, it is not the pressure of workload as such, but the pressure caused by a half-knowledge of your audience. The Big Other looms over you when you write a blog, or does for me anyway. Who am I writing for? What do they wish me to write? In writing my latest piece, will I please them? Will I become the person they wish me to be? Che vuoi? (This is made considerably worse by the fact that the bloggers I aspire to are usually a good 15 years older than me and full-time academics.)

But besides this, my ideas about the world are all up in the air at the moment. When I discovered Marx, a world of chaotic appearances suddenly began to make sense ; this year, Freud and Lacan (and a small host of pomos) have dissolved all of that. Which is absolutely not to say that Marx has been disproved in my mind : I still believe that the accusation that his weltenshaung is overly determinist / essentialist is misleading. I'm just a little, y'know, confused.

The things I really want to write about at the moment are :

• The illogicality (not to mention misjudged morality) of neoconservatism - I may well combine this with a look at punk and post-punk. That may not appear to make too much sense, but given a bit of work, I think it might.

• Something on the ethics of religion, with reference to Three Colours : Blue and (if I can pluck up the courage) Mulholland Drive. This post, should it come to fruition, will also include lots of disses towards Richard Dawkins, surely the worst "public intellectual" this country has ever boasted.

• A magnum opus on architecture, and how - on the smallest of scales - we might build our way to a revolution.

• A review of Bryan Ferry's These Foolish Things, and a comment on why Jerry Hall might have dumped Ferry in favour of Mick Jagger. How might Ferry have viewed Hall? How might he have viewed Jagger? Would he really have seen them at all?

Sorry - I shall cease my slightly piteous whinging, for tomorrow my final month in the UK will commence - and about that I am, despite myself, more than a little excited.