Ain't life grand?
Still masquerading as Nigel E. Richardson,
your slow-motion friend is an Austin-based Englishman, currently resting between career developments.
If you need a technical writer, dogsbody or diamond geezer, see the obligatory resume. No nude work or telesales. Neglectis urenda filix innascitur agris, as we say around these parts.
This week's reading list -- if the Austin branch of the capitalist system reckons it can do without me for another five days I might as well kickstart my brain again and ween myself away from 37 daily repeats of Will and Grace:
The Philosophers' Secret Fire : A History of the Imagination -- Patrick Harpur (2002)
The Lightning Cage -- Alan Wall (1999)
War in Heaven -- Charles Williams (1949)
All of which are very nearly taken from M. John Harrison's Top Ten Books. Lists, lists, lists, lists, lists....
Okay, this is really why I moved to Austin. (And this, obviously. The idea of a science fiction musical co-written in 1958 by Thomas Pynchon is just too otherworldly to take in.) (via The Modern Word.)
The obligatory My First Thanksgiving will follow shortly, don't you worry. It'll be mainly aimed at my English readers who have only experienced it through episodes of Friends and other sitcoms.
I don't know if it's because I'm such a wishy-washy dimwit or a mighty brain capable of holding two contradictory belief systems in my head simultaniously, but I thought 24 Hour Party People was a terrific film yet agree with everything Simon Reynolds has to say about it. You should also be aware of Reynolds' blog, which is, to quote TMFTML, "a regular act of genius for which, in this season of Thanksgiving, we are truly grateful".
Given to late November nostalgia I find myself reading some Harlan Ellison books for the first time in two decades. I'd just about forgotten all about him until I was wandering the modern fiction section of the PCL recently (being a Texas Ex by marriage has its privileges) and noticed they had a shelf of his works, which made me recall how I would have once given a vital organ to have access to all of that. Back in my teens I devoured what little of his work you could easily get hold of in the UK, having fallen prey to his self-created mythic image of the indominable, genre-spanning, ass-kicking, zeitgeist-surfing writer. He seemed petty heroic at the time, but this was me at my most nerdy, when I was in dire need of anyone who could focus my attention for more than a paragraph. It was easy to be captivated and captured by his writing, by the non-stop infinite ego, by his unstopable mix of tale-spinning, social commentary, outrage, self-aggrandisement and self-righteousness. For a sappy, introverted kid who only read SF it was something really special to have discovered an SF writer who promised to lead you into every other area of literature and life with a wise crack and an effective use of strong language.
Of course decades have now zipped by and I'm older than he was when he wrote the books that impressed me so, and those stories and essays that once seemed designed to inform young spuds like me about the world are now easily seen as being all about him and his disconnection from the world. It's hard to get through the dated babble, the sprawling self-regard and the peeved insularity of the guy, particularly in the 1973 essays that make up Harlan Ellison's Hornbook. They're still fun to read, but mainly as a self-portrait of a outdated rebel, frozen in the late 50s, someone who was so certain that everything about him was so perfect and right that he didn't ever need to listen to anyone else or adjust his philosophies as the decades went by. It's like watching someone drift away on an iceberg, bellowing that the world and everyone in it is wrong. I'm almost fearful of reading anything more recent by him. At 40 he was a grouch so he must really be pissed off at the state of everything now he's almost 70. I can't imagine him mellowing with age....
Why is it that when you get a magazine delivered you no longer feel the incentive to read it? Just transferring each month's Atlantic from the mailbox to the space at the bottom of the bookcase where unread magazines go seems to fulfil my requirement.
I still read Private Eye methodically when that comes, although it now seems to work as a register of how detached I've become from English life, or at least that section of it Private Eye wallows in. Who are these people? It's a strange perspective to view English life through the satire and parody, having to construct what went on a week or so ago by the jokes about it....
Marcello Carlin on the reissued Twenty Four Hours Of Throbbing Gristle, which is just that: twenty four hours of Throbbing Gristle playing live in the mid to late 70s. Will we be troubling Santa for that boxed set, boys 'n' girls?
(After all these years I'm still not sure about Throbbing Gristle. Part of me insists they were a joke in bad taste, jabbering about Myra Hindley and Charles Manson over the clumsiest electronic music ever, but another part suspects I might have missed out on the most confrontational, disturbing and significant art/music/performance of their era.)
Got a whole bunch of hits during the night from this topic board on the Tamil Film Music Page. I rather like the idea of every tedious and predictable top ten list of records being taken over by stuff we in the west know nothing about, regardless of origin, style or even quality, just to purge all the usual crap for a while. Besides, we need to be reminded that all these lists are horribly anglo-american. It can't be right that the only "non-western" music most of us will have heard lately will probably have been a sample on a Timbaland production.
Okay, this is it -- the Internet has finally proved itself worthy. For years I've been trying to figure out where the grotesque images I always find myself doodling come from and this afternoon I finally found them: the 1965 Topps' Ugly Stickers.
I don't even want to think what a full set of these would cost now. Seeing them again gives me a sudden flow of fragmentary memories, murky and uncertain. I mostly remember the Basil Wolverton designs -- the gnarled, wrinkled, veiny, almost genital bulges -- although they were all meant to look like his work....
The Norman Saunders site also has the American Civil War cards that I also remember collecting (and the replica Confederacy banknotes that came in each package). I remember them as being more gruesome than these pictures show, especially the infamous "Crushed by the Wheels" card, but they were pretty strong stuff for five year olds to be collecting. And the passage of time... well, it warps everything. Looking through them now I recall that it was actually the "Death Battle" card that creeped me out most, although I also remember being bitterly disapointed if the pack I bought didn't have at least one scene of near disembowelment....
It's hard to say anything about T.A.T.U and their single "All the things she said" without it coming across like prime Googlebait. I mean, I can see the contents of my referal log now: Russian schoolgirls. Lesbian teenagers. Rainsoaked school uniforms. Video of girls kissing. Probably best not to mention them at all. (Via Bitful.)
Whew, cutting edge stuff, trenchant swipes of the critical scapel -- Caroline Sullivan in today's Guardian derides Princess Diana's taste in music. (But it's true -- you never saw her in Rough Trade checking out the Dr Alimantando imports or limited edition Pooh Sticks singles....)
Ah, the Gang of Four thing was yesterday. But I could still make it to "Raw", "Frantic" and "Honest": Authenticity and the Garage Punk Revival. Although the abstract mentions September 11th, which is usually a sure sign sign of hackery and hokum in the context of popular culture, don't you find?
I'm tempted to attend the Gang of Four portion as I've been meaning to write about them for a while seeing as they were the original "northern post-punk angular guitar curmudgeons" and I've been listening to A Brief History of the Twentieth Century a lot lately, but I have a mortal dread of academic approaches to the culture that helped shape me, and I fear I might be escorted out by security for blurting "that's not what it was like in Leeds in 1979, you preposterous nincompoop!" when things get analytical. More on this later, probably.(Via Prentiss Riddle.)
All states have an official state bird, rock, animal, plant, folk dance, sub-atomic particle, etc -- but apparently only Utah has an Official State Snack: Jell-O. However, last week State Rep. Kino Flores (Dem.) submitted a bill to make tortilla chips and salsa the official state snack of Texas. (The existing list of Texan state symbols is here.)
Here's a fine 'n' dandy blog -- if you've got a place in your heart for long rants against the NME by "the Guardian Student Journalist of the Year 2001 and Runner-up in the last series of Channel 4 quiz show 15-to-1" -- It Makes No Difference.
Ah, the NME, the NME. I can't remember when I stopped reading that damned thing. It was one of the few things that sustained me from about 1973 until the mid eighties or whenever it was that I decided I was too old for that kind of adolescent nonsense. When I realised a few years later that I needed more than the monthly Wire to get my rock/pop/whatever buzz from, I tried to start reading it again but it just didn't seem the same. No-one was trying to slip out-of-context snippets from Derrida, Lacan and Foghorn Leghorn into reviews of Monochrome Set and Felt albums or implying that if you didn't buy the new Three Johns' EP you were heavily complicient in Thatcher's attempt to crush the miners. Instead the new writers rarely got beyond acussing you of smelling of wee if you didn't think the Cutesy Poppets' new single "Don't Forget To Put Your Hood Up, Lawrence, It Might Get A Bit Nippy Later" was the greatest thing since sherbet. The music just seemed to exist in the context of its sulky, insular self without reference or connection to a real or imagined world beyond. The preening self-regard and pretense of the old NME had gone but so had the gloriously over-ambitious, all-embracing reach for new ideas, philosophies, thrills and spills. The immediately post-punk NME got me listening to all sorts of music, reading all kinds of stuff. I could list a few dozen albums I went out and bought simply because certain NME writers said I should. Until I developed my own critical sensibilities I relied on those guys. I made friends with people simply because they read it. When I was unemployed back then I'd buy it on the way home from the dole office and take a detour to the record shop or bookstore if anyone I trusted was suficiently fervid about a new record or mentioned a book that was required reading if one wanted to understand the universe -- or the latest Fall album. Ah, those were the days....
I didn't watch the hour-long bra and pants ad on on K-EYE or CBS or Channel 42 -- or however you refer to TV stations over here -- last night, aka The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. It was obviously some kind of evil brainwashing conspiracy to desexualise lingerie -- well, how else do you explain the presence of Phil Collins? I may not be speaking for all of mankind here I realise but I suspect that if I caught one tenth of a second of that dreary creature's pablum in the context of strutting waifs in push-up bras, gauzy bustiers, garter belts, spike heels et al, I would need decades of extensive psychiatric treatment to return me to any sort of normality.
Lawks a'mercy, here's yet another top ten singles list -- but this time it's being voted for by BBC World Service listeners, most of whom seem to be responding from India. Which means "Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu" by S.P. Balasubramianam and Swarnatha is currently at number one, ahead of Cliff Richard, Cher, John Lennon and the dreaded "B*h*m**n Rh*ps*dy". You are warned that if you go this this page you'll be faced with a "comically bemused" picture of Steve Wright, who reckons "The Birdie Song" is the greatest -- the wacky 'n' zany scallywag! -- but this is offset with a soundclip of John Peel's favourite Lonnie Donegan track. (Via XRRF.)
Alex in Close Your Eyes talks about Margaret Mary O'Hara's Miss America. I wonder if anyone has this album and isn't fanatical about it and prone to making rash, phantasmagorical claims for it?
Duh -- it came to me late last night what the person searching for "naked iraq war protesters spell peace" was looking for. I'd seen it but hadn't consciously realised what the hell it was in Prentiss Riddle's blog at the weekend: West Marin women strip for peace. Some times my attentiveness gets so difuse after just a few minutes online that I don't realise I am looking at fifty naked women spread out in a field to spell the word "PEACE". Of course none of them were supermodels so it's just and proper that neither they nor the purpose behind their action registered....
Someone got here via the AOL Search doohickey by entering naked iraq war protesters spell peace. Someone else came via Google looking for naked policewomen. But no matter how many words I churn out on the crucial issues of this modern world, no matter how many links to innovative and life-affirming webpages I unearth, and no matter how many forgotten mid-80s northern post-punk angular guitar curmudgeons I lovingly bring to your attention, the bulk of people coming to this site still seem to be looking for those fricking Ch**ky Girls....
You've got to love the tradition of free drinks on your birthday. I don't know how many places do it,whether it's local to Austin, Texas, the USA or the entire world outside of Leeds and London, but if it's your birthday and you've got proof of it, your first drink is on the house at Trudy's. I don't know if I could have got away with asking for a top-of-the-range tequilla, but a Mexican Martini was just the right thing to round off the first day of my nth year on this planet last night.
Even more so than switching on Telemundo or Univision it's CMT, the world's whitest TV station, that really gives me the sometimes scary but peversely delicious feeling of being a stranger in a very strange land. That Toby Keith ass-kicking anthem was the first to zap me on the "What the fuh?" spot when we got here and the very sight of Travis Tritt gives me the giggles, but right now it's Montgomery Gentry's "My Town" that makes me feel entirely disconnected to a mightly slab of US culture -- and glad about it.
Apparently a "boundary-defying duo" with an "indefinable but irresistible brand of authentic honky-tonking country music", the beefy duo of "Eddie Montgomery and Troy Gentry are always operating at full tilt", "whether tearing it up on stage with their hard-driving harmonies or cutting up backstage with anybody primed and ready to have a good time". This is hard to believe from "My Town", a smug, formulaic anthem to the lowest common denominator insularities of small-town life, embracing all the things that generations of singers -- even goodnatured wimps like Simon and Garfunkle -- have picked up their guitars to bewail. If you just read the lyrics you could picture it in the same sting-in-the-tail mode as S&G's "My Little Town" ("Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town"), but the video and the upbeat manner in which they perform it smacks of whupass triumphalism. You could imagine anyone from Stan Ridgeway to Bruce Springsteen making these the most sad and bitter lyrics in the world: "There ain't much goin' on here since they closed the mill / But that whistle still blows ev'ry day at noon. / A bunch of us still go down to the diner. / I wonder if that interstate's still comin' through. / Come Sunday morning service, at the Church of Christ / Well there ain't an empty seat to be found / And this is my town. But these two whoop and wink their way through it, making it about as thoughtful and heartfelt as Fat Les's "Vindaloo". I know that finding something new and meaningful to say about the plight of small, rural communities is more in the remit of the Great American Novel rather than TV-friendly country-pop but this is just about the silliest thing I've seen or heard on any continent.
Hey, to mark my birthday it's National Ammo Day! I really ought to head on down to Just Guns and "celebrate the Second Amendment by buying an extra 100 rounds of ammunition". Hell, just because I ain't got me no gun don't mean I can't join in the gosh-darn celebrations, ya tree-huggin', liberty-hatin' sissies....
Bitful has a picture of Xmas lights on Carnaby Street, which makes me feel... not exactly homesick... but I do have to admit that I am missing certain aspects of English life, things that are hard to express coherently without it sound like I'm gearing up for some kind of fight. It's not an either/or thing -- I don't feel that missing some things about England means I'm putting America down, or that preferring certain things about Austin means I've traded my birthright for a plate of BBQ'd brisket with a side of beans. But thinking of those narrow, rainy streets festooned with festive tat and suddenly dark and cold English afternoons gives me a momentary ache, even though it's a decade or more since I lived in London (except for a month in 1998).
I don't know how long it's going to take me to get into the flow of the seasons here. The times of sunrise and sunset don't change as much here as the year progresses and by the afternoon it's still warm enough to go out in a t-shirt, sit outside a coffee shop, drinking an iced coconut latte. The new stamps at the post office look absurdly out of place. My body calendar still insists it is late June, that snowmen and Xmas and all that stuff (not to mention my birthday) are months away.
Good to see that Julian Cope remains as mad as a bronze age burial chamber filled with accordian-playing badgers, or at least continues to writes that way at Head Heritage, raving about wilfully obscure nuggets of "Stooges-on-late-night-radio-while-your-sister-blowdries-her-hair" style rock-noise in his own uniquely uber-droolian way. And if your Real Audio player works better than mine you can even take a listen to what he's raving about, if you dare....
Looking forward to Thanksgiving with a little trepidation -- and not just because it means relocating from Texas's fittest city to America's fattest city for three days. It's the most alien American celebration to me, even more so than July 4th. A celebration about being thankful? I can more easily imagine an English equivalent called Grudgegiving, where people sit around accusing everyone else of having more turkey than they've got, complaining that the potatoes are too cold and that they had to miss two episodes of Eastenders to be there.
In lieu of a proper entry, a list. My top twelve albums -- of 1970....
1. Stooges -- Fun House 2. Soft Machine -- 3 3. Amon Duul II -- Yeti 4. Kraftwerk -- Kraftwerk 5. Robert Wyatt -- End Of An Ear 6. Os Mutantes -- A Divina Comedia Ou Ando Meio Desligado 7. Velvet Underground -- Loaded 8. Syd Barrett -- Barrett 9. Shirley & Dolly Collins -- Love, Death & the Lady 10. Syd Barrett -- The Madcap Laughs 11. Tony Oxley -- 4 Compositions for Sextet 12. Caravan -- If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You
LATER: Forgot to mention that the inspiration for this -- and the inevitable nine follow-ups -- was Scaruffi's Best Albums of the Seventies. He lists something like 100 albums for each year, which is pretty mindboggling seeing how maligned the music of the 70s has always been.
Just exactly how many musicians are there in Austin? The Chronicle's Musicians' Register has 87 entries starting with the letter A -- and that's mostly bands rather than individuals. There are 95 bands in the "space-rock" category alone....
I really ought to start listening to some current local music before I dismiss it all simply on the grounds that the Austin Chronicle music review section is usually fairly hopeless in getting across what the music sound like, instead indulging in local references and namedropping. ("If you saw the Empty Scrotums triumphant performance at Ned Nosepicker's Spitoon Parlour around the time of Wayne Gumkuzzler's 39th birthday, you'll know that Chad "Cheeks" Bludwurmz is shaping up to be the best kazoo player this side of My Dog's A Commie-era Twitchin' Tobias and the Toenails...." That sort of thing.) And this looks like it might be a good place to start: Texas Internet Radio.
Meanwhile, I'm already taken by Patricia Vonne and Matson Belle. Vonne is a model and actress -- she played the tricky role of "rotting corpse found in mattress" in the otherwise forgettable Four Rooms, that segment being directed by her brother, Richard Rodriguez. Her music is straightforward Tex-Mex country-rock, but done with a rough, sexy confidence that reminds me of early 80s kd lang, back in the "and the reclines" days, circa Angel With A Lariat -- although that could be because I haven't heard much alt country, new country, country punk or whatever it's called since that cassette that came free with the NME about 15 years ago and don't have much to compare it with. A million miles from the simpering poop dished up on CMT at the very least, and well worth investigating, especially as she's still playing a lot of free gigs -- like at Central Market later this month.
Matson Belle is a different kettle of whatnots, although she's a model and actress too -- maybe every female singer in Austin is. She was a finalist on Survivor, financed her first recordings with the money she won on another TV show and has a mostly horrible list of top ten favourite records, but her music is quite wonderful, an unexpected and dreamily innocent electro-pop, somewhere between Bjork at her most relaxed and the Cardigans at their most melancholic.
So that's two local recommendations, neither of which sound anything like I expected. Maybe I should listen to some unphotogenic guys before I start getting getting too enthusiastic about the Music Capital of the World....
As you might be able to tell from some of these posts I'm neither a Beatles fan nor a lover of tribute bands, so some might find it perverse that one of the few people to use my comments system is a member of Austin's Eggmen. I did hear them playing at Central Market back in August (and to my English readers, "playing at Central Market" is not the same as busking outside KwikSave -- it's a proper gig) and they were tackling the songs than most Beatles cover bands stay away from rather than churning out the easy, over-familiar stuff. I doubt if the Beatles themselves could have managed "Strawberry Fields" live. Judging by their dedication to getting the clothes and instruments exactly right, they've got the ability that I lack -- they can get past the cosy and deadening shroud of sentimentality and uncritical approval that to me smotherseverything potentially of worth about the Beatles. My loss, I know as there are some Beatles songs I have to try my damnest not to like.
I forgot to link to this last week, mainly because I tend to think of the Austin Chronicle as a component of the real world that I pick up at Wheatsville and read over lunch rather than part of the great web of information I can link to online. Counting Down the Greatest Tex-Centric Top 40 'Billboard' Hits of the Past 50 Years. I'm not usually a fan of the Chronicle's music coverage as it seems trapped in cringing deference to an early 70s ideal of local ethno-country-bluesy singer-songwriters, but this is a fun read, rightly putting ? and the Mysterian's "96 Tears" at number one.
I just found a backup of my links page from my 1995 website, which unsurprisingly contains just two URLs that still work -- neither of which deserves linking to. It does provoke rather glib thoughts about the transient nature of the web. Like "Whatever happened to Robert "Babes on the Web" Toupes?" Those were the days, when you could say "Jacking in from the 'Recurring Nightmare' Port" and it sounded coooooool and people didn't automatically assume that everything was ironic or satirical.
The number of hits this thing has been getting is probably going to decline dramatically now that halloween has been 'n' gone and all the grubby little oiks and ne'er-do-wells who were searching for "drunken sorority girls and the future trophy wives of corporate America dressed as slutty nurses or policewomen or nuns or catwoman or chambermaids or Wilma Rubble on 6th Street" have temporarily lost their inspiration. Things will no doubt pick up when they realise it will soon be the season for "sexy santas" and christmas lingerie.
One guy I used to trade zines with is now the Playboy Advisor. But as a penance to society he also does Dealdude, where you can find some pretty useful deals -- like getting a year's subscription to magazines like Interview, Rolling Stone and Wired for $3.95 each. Or American Cheerleader Jr. and Bassmaster if they're more like your idea of fun.
Despite the myriad wonders of blogs, online diaries and all manner of whatnots available on the internet, I still miss the wacky world of zines. It did seem like a natural step from the DIY world of zines to online publishing, and a few people have gone on to greater success online than on messy xeroxed pages, but a lot of the mavericks have dropped out of sight. Even the websites designed to keep track of the zine world have died or have failed to be updated for several years like Factsheet5.Com and Amusing Yourself to Death. There are still a few useful resources around, like Broken Pencil,Get the Word Out and A Readers Guide to the Underground Press, but searches for most of my old favourites draw blank after blank. I would have been a very happy monkey to have found a complete online archive of Pathetic Life - Diary of A Fat Slob, but only that small excerpt seems to exist. I may be fickle but today I'd trade a Pathetic Doug blog for all the smarmy boys going on about what some other blogger said about what some other blogger said about an article in the Washington Post about profiling....
