Record label of the day: Chemikal Underground. I've just picked up "Out of our Heads on Skelp", which is retailing at the frankly insane price of two quid and is therefore worth it just for 'The First Big Weekend' (and the Delgados' 'Pull the wires from the wall', but then I already have that). Most if not all of their back catalogue's on extremely cheap reissue this month, too, which means alluring Delgados, Arab Strap and Mogwai records each and every way I turn. The Scottish Guitar Mafia are obviously out to get me.

The only remedy is to see Radio 4 on Tuesday. Bit of a pisser that it's McLusky supporting them, and not some band that I /haven't/ already seen being not massively great in an admittely shitty acoustic, but there you go. And apparently their debut was called 'my pain and sadness is more sad and painful than yours', and how can you hate a band like that? You can't, that's how.

Am in the throes of Deep Thoughts about the ascetic, and the medieval attitude to the body as not the Neo-Platonist or Catharistic division into soul-good-body-bad, but by contrast life is very firmly centred in physical not to say sensual experience. As in, if the Medievals were so firmly grounded in the unison soul and body, how is it that the language of soul-body division has become so pervasive in modern thought - has been such a constant in thought since the Renaissance? Is it just that the nineteenth or twentieth century's cultural leaders rediscovered the Renaissance and have raised it to the level of Point When All Was Good In The World (e.g.1 performances of Shakespeare's plays unedited and unbowdlerised after the eighteenth-century tradition of cropping or rewriting the plays as they desired; e.g.2 the 'dark ages'-ification of the medieval era, because then like poetic justice out of darkness can come light)? As the picture is at the moment, the suggestion is "only in the medieval era was the common official perception of 'self' nor made up of the warring binary opposites of holy soul and sinful body", and that seems a little... odd; as if there's this huge blip in the history of ideas. Which seems quite frankly unlikely.

And, of course, the common perception of religion in the medieval era is of the flagellant, the anchorite, the faster, the ascetic - all of which suggest a punishment of the Bad Body by the Godly Soul, rather than a joint effort by the human as a whole. There's also the theology of the one-willed two-natured Christ to consider. But as you can tell my thoughts are entirely blurry and my syntax is quite deserting me, and so the world is spared.

( cowboy bebop song test )