being the delicate blogging of an english chap in austin, texas, who has recently
ressumed his technical writing career but is still searching for eternal verities in
the bottom of his martini glass and on curious web pages. he is married, quite old
and off to the gym in a few minutes. you can email him at anything-that-doesn't-have-the-word-blog-in-it (at) nerichardson (dot)
co (dot) uk...
You can read about the real "Yes/No Interlude" here.
Saturday, October 25, 2003
Since I can't use the internet at work for new or entertainment I've bought a radio and spend the day trying to find something worth listening to. It's not easy and I'll go into the delights of daytime radio in Austin in a later posting, but I keep ending up listening to Alex Jones on 91.1 FM, Radio Free Austin. I don't know what keeps drawing me to Jones. (Those of you back in England may know Jones from his appearence on Jon Robson's Secret Rulers of the World back in May 2001 where it was revealed that old conspiracy favorites like the Bilderberg Group and all that Bohemian Grove weirdness really exist.)
There's something dangerously appealing about Jones -- he has a manic consistency, gathering together everything that happens each day and fitting it neatly into the all-encompassing New World Order/Global Police State theory he's been banging on about for year on local access TV and the radio. The Diana letter, Governor Schwarzenegger, the phony letters from the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment in Iraq, the NRA's pro-registration lawsuit, the Terri Schiavo business in Florida and a million other stories all slide into place and Alex becomes near apoplectic because people refuse to see the truth. What makes his stuff so powerful and at the same time both scary and appealing is that he only ever uses mainstream media sources. His main tool for getting everything to fit together so neatly is to claim that anything that appear not to fit is deliberate misinformation. The media is part of the conspiracy, obviously. Even when they publish stuff that seems to expose or discomfort the conspiracy they only do it as a sop or to divert attention from some larger misdeed. According to Jones the NRA is an anti-gun group dedicated to the total control of all private firearms. The anti-UN retoric of the right is only a cover to hide the fact that they're passing control of the USA over the the NWO, of which the UN is part. We're being drugged in passivity by the water we drink and even bathe in -- which is convenient as his show is part sponsored by a water filter company.
I suspect it's only because at heart he's a shouty, gun-totting, pro-life, Christian rightwinger that I don't surrender wholesale to his rantings. And the fact that I don't think you need the umbrella concept of a New World Order to account for all the plots, conspiracies, underhandedness and corruption in the world. The pieces don't need to be put in one box,although I can see the appeal of this. It's comforting to believe that everything that is bad or goes wrong in this world is part of one big plot and that everything that assails you in this life is no fault of your own but the scheming of the Illuminati....
So let's seeeeeeee: if PROG ROCK was to PSYCH ROCK what DRUM & BASS was to JUNGLE then where does POMP ROCK fit it? And what was the original question? It's all very well compiling amusing and exhaustive list of band names that sound vaguely proggy or may have had a tendency to name tracks "Within the Oubliette of Onan (Part 3)" but the question still remains, why are some of us suddenly fascinated by a load of hairy old vinyl we would have melted into ashtrays a little while back? (I actually did this as one of my first punk acts -- the record was "Twilight Alehouse", a one-sided Genesis flexidisc that came free with Zigzag back in the mid 70s before Zigzag itself went punk. It's probably hugely collectible now and would fund my early retirement if I hadn't redimensioned it.) Does this not reflect badly on what's around today, when the mere thought of what some beardy geezers from Walsall might have been getting up to with mellotrons and lutes seems immensely more appealing that the sex-decorated shiny confections of now? But back to POMP, which was everything that was bad about PROG inflated to bursting point and with the addition of (1) capes, (2) middlebrow classical borrowings and (3) Alan Freeman. The most perfect example of the dreadful path of PSYCH to PROG to POMP was The Syn to Yes to Rick Wakeman's King Arthur on Ice. POMP was being impressed to the point of priapic wooziness by how many keyboard instruments Keith Emerson used on a single track, particularly if one was a 15th century precursor to the clavichord, one was the latest city-sized invention of Robert Moog and another the organ of St Paul's Cathedral....
Whoooooa, Nelly. The 4th Annual Journalcon thingie (or "web writers' conference" as some seem compelled to call it) came and went without me realizing. I knew it was in October but these days the months just slip by and part of me still thinks it's vaguely August 2002 and we've only been in Austin a few months and....
Skimming round the Nibelung webring of attendees to see if I've missed anything. Aside from Eliza Lou, who not only seems to have gone to something she enjoyed but has the photos to prove it, none of the reports so far posted makes me feel like I blew it by not staying up to date. Other people having a fine boozy time? Good for them but not really enough to get me to leave the comforts of home these days. Hardly any names I recognise. Whatever happened to that old gang of mine?
Do I end The Yes/No Interlude with a big posting that tries to explain why I'm stopping it, what I feel I achieved or failed to achieve with it and why I feel the need to move on to something new? Or do I just end with a mysterious link to the new un that as yet only consists of a single image?
The Yes/No Interlude was supposed to be a brief substitute for my online diary back in the days when blogs were just starting to ease themselves out from the clammy grasp of geeks and blowhards. (I did a brief blog earlier, back in 2000, when I came to Austin to get married and was stranded at some airport where they had free internet access if you could cope with a keyboard that had had half the keys chewed off.) It was meant to last just for a couple of months, to give me a simple way to get stuff online while we were in transit between life in England and life in America. As soon as we were settled and got everything sorted out I planned to do something more ambitious, sort out the online archives, reassemble the bits that had got lost over the years, fix the broken links, translate some of my overwrought gibberish into something resembling English and censor all references to once popular beat combos who are no longer deemed hip by the appropriate authorities. This never happened.
Even when I did get around to digging out the "Countdown to the Big Four Zero" diary archives I got bogged down in the first few months' entries, spending days rewriting and rethinking everything I wrote, expanding already convoluted subclauses into paragraphs of clotted and deeply banal pseudo-profundity, trying to treat every walk to the corner shop as if it were a metaphor for the human condition, turning every nascent gripe into an essay on man's inhumanity to man, every jokey remark into a 13 episode sitcom.
But something is coming. By the end of the month this should be nothing but a pointless personal website with my resume and some pictures -- the real action will have moved elsewhere....
Can I go a day without writing about music? Not if you count the reference to Solresol, but only a stinky pedant would do that. It's almost midnight anyway. So to fill the silence here's something to ponder:
So how is it that the only product from the Eggers' empire that I've wholeheartedly enjoyed is the one I'd never heard of until I found a copy in Half-Price Books last weekend? I'm talking about Banyard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World by Paul Collins. In the wrong hands this could have been "I love the 1800s," sneering at the "forgotten ephemera" of another age: "Solresol! What was all that about then?" "That John Cleves Symmes and his Hole -- what was he on, hah hah?" But Collins is so obviously and genuinely fond of the lost wonky geniuses he resurrects in this book that it's a treat from start to finish.
