21st Century Schizoid Man

I haven't seen Breaking Bad but I have seen Aaron Paul's X-Box ad, and now I no longer feel a pressing need to see Breaking Bad. That ship has sailed, I feel. In any case, can anything that everybody likes really be any good?

In the ad Paul is seen lounging on his sofa (or in any case, a sofa), playing computer games and chilling out after playing 'the role of a lifetime' as he describes it. Oh what, is your career over then? Apparently not, since he is at pains to assure us that he is 'busy' – and indeed he seems to have a script in his hand (presumably not the one for this ad) and at the end he answers his phone. We only hear one word of the resulting conversation ('Yo!') but I think we are meant to assume that this is not the pizza delivery boy double-checking the address.

Yet there is something weird about showing a man slobbing around playing on his X-box and then insisting on how 'busy' he is. It's schizophrenic in the popular sense of the word - an impression only enhanced by the fact that the X-Box allows Paul to play games and watch his 'favourite shows' at the same time ('This is insane!', he crows). Can this be the key to Breaking Bad's universally good reputation - nobody was really watching it?

Adding to the insanity is the fact that Paul talks to his X-Box, and not just his – everybody else's. Apparently his command 'X-Box, on!' has caused machines all over the country to wake from their slumber and – for all I know - start taking over the world.

Still, I rather like it that all his orders are prefaced with the word 'X-Box', since it guards against the melancholy possibility that some other household appliance might think it is being addressed, and suffer an identity crisis ('But Aaron, I'm the vacuum cleaner, I can't record Emmerdale!')

Of course this isn't really insanity (inanity, perhaps), just the way of the world. One must adapt or die. At work we had a big meeting about the new structure we are moving into – not the actual bricks-and-mortar building we are going to occupy (this physical move is currently scheduled for next May) but the new department structure – which is going to be a 'matrix structure'. Uh-oh. I've seen that film. The paperless office is one thing but now I'm starting to think the new office won't have walls, floors or ceiling either. Maybe we'll just stay in bed and experience the working day from there. Mind you, that doesn't sound too bad, come to think of it.

A further spell of unreality is cast over the whole thing by the fact that we are moving into what is continually described as the 'SHU', or Stock Holding Unit. That everyone pronounces this 'shoe' lends it all a fairy tale air ('When we all go to work in the shoe...')

Finally, maybe we will all end up working from home. If I have a home. I came back from this meeting to discover an e-mail from Mat, headed: 'Is your house on fire?' Was this a new marketing technique by his design company? If so, it was effective, since I rang him right away, in a panic. It turned out that the houses on fire were further down the road and had been dealt with. My reality stabilised again. Or seemed to.

Swans Are Alive

I went to see Swans in Brixton. Normally I am used to being surrounded by middle-aged men at these things – Swans have been active since 1982, though not in quite the same form – but here everyone standing around me was a kid. Luckily everyone on the stage probably was older than me, with the exception of bassist Chris Pravdica, and he's balder. Arguably.

Not that I cared anyway – you get like that as you get older. I was unselfconscious enough to wear earplugs I got free many years ago with my subscription to The Wire magazine (Adventures in Modern Music). Back then it seemed perverse for a music magazine to be giving out earplugs, and even more perverse to be shoving them in just as the band I've come expressly to listen to starts up. But after all it's just the aural equivalent of safe sex - Swans are notoriously loud – and all the young people seemed to be wearing them too.

Unless they were hearing aids, and they were more hardcore than I thought. Some were headbanging after a fashion – or nodding violently, at least.

The earplugs immediately created a cosy ambient fug around me in which people's irritating conversations were dissolved, and I wasn't conscious of missing out when the band started – I could hear them and I could feel them. The set was nothing new, but that doesn't mean it wasn't experimental or forward-moving: it was just old, as in primeval. A throbbing miasma of sound building to crescendoes with which the band were possibly trying to summon some entity that would finally allow them entry into Hell, or Heaven. Lead singer Michael Gira stumbled about with a beatific smile of his face like a prematurely-aged child, drunk on noise. When he and Pravdica faced each other, brandishing their guitars, they appeared to me as dinosaurs wanking furiously at each other over a primordial swamp.

I hadn't yet got my head around the album, which is so long you need to book an appointment to listen to it. Their first album was called Filth; this is called To Be Kind. Something has changed, then, though it isn't quite a mellowing, unless it's a very intense mellowing. Nevertheless, I get the impression that something life-affirming - joyous even - has drifted into their sound, previously often characterised as a punishing grind. The performance confirmed this. As I left someone handed me a leaflet saying 'Eat Your Own Ears', as if after this experience, nothing else remained to be done with them.