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.
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Half-watching the American Music Atrocities or whatever it's called, I see that Britney's costume designers have almost completed their task of unsexing all of the major kinks and perversions in existence....
(During Madonna's Sex/Erotica period she appropriated a whole bunch of S&M and fetish stuff but -- and this is hard to believe in her current, desperate, soil-everything-she-touches-mode -- it all retained its erotic, sleazy, transgressive power... as long as you skipped the bits with Vanilla Ice pretending to slip her one where the sun don't shine.)
When Britney appeared in some sort of rubber stockings/thighboots and corset ensemble, whole categories of fetish were suddenly defused, made silly, turned into the equivalent of mere dance outfits, leotards, aerobic gear. The more depraved she tries to look, the more desperately and uninterestingly stolid she becomes. It all starts to look too much like hard work -- like nothing but hard work....
(I suspect the reason the "Justify My Love" video was so hot was become everyone in it was just languidly draped around beds and hotel furniture, supine and woozy, looking drugged or fucked or both.)
The things other bloggers have written about the intense sexlessness of the likes of Beyonce seem even more appropriate for Britney -- joyless exertion is all that comes across, strenous tasks accomplished. It can't even be described as mechanical and robotic as, having watched the video to Bjork's "Full of Love" earlier today, robots and androids are calm, sensual creatures compared to the hyperactive purposeless intensity of a Britney or Beyonce routine. There's something distinctly insectoid about these grim-faced, unwavering, regimented dance numbers -- it's like watching some crazed, needlessly complex game-play or ritual that you suspect once had some sort of meaning behind it but has been repeated so often that no connection remains to its original purpose.
Jeez, once the words "girl singer in rubber" would have got me all hot 'n' bothered. I guess I'm cured of that pervy nonsense now. All they've got to do is get her and Christina Aguilera to wrestle in chocolate pudding and I'm be as wholesomely mainstream as Tony Blair.
Rented the Chris Cunningham DVD. It comes across more like a sampler than a collection, especially as Cunningham fans seem to be obsessives who are going to be dissatisfied if even a half-second shot is missing. It's all the usual stuff with only five minutes of two art installations/video pieces Flux and Monkey Drummer that are really new. Most of his old stuff, material done for bands that are no longer hip (if they ever were) is missing, so really it's just a chance to see "Come to Daddy", "Windowlicker," "Full of Love" and "Only You" again/in full/for the first time. (And "Frozen", which is a sad reminder that for a while back there it did look like Madonna had it in her to make a creative comeback...)
Of course, now that I'm not supposed to use the web at work for non-business purposes I'm really losing touch with what's going on back in the UK. Without half an hour each morning to browse the Guardian and Telegraph -- I'm so balanced, or I would be -- websites my out-of-touchness grows. I'll soon start believing that England really is like a Richard Curtis movie....
Caught some good stuff on KOOP this week, culminating this morning with The Doctor's Office guy playing John Coltrane's "Om", complete with pause in the middle when he had to take the album off the turntable and flip it over. First half of the show had been all reggae, then this 29 minute slab of free blowin' jazz. The main reason he played it was because Carl Smithand his band, ECFA, are doing their version of it at The Church of the Friendly Ghost next week. On my birthday, even.
Earlier in the week, the substitute host on Livebait played a bunch of local girl punk bands like the Applicators and the Winks instead of the usual glam metal that "Crash from London" plays, and I have to admit that if you asked me what I wanted to hear on the radio at work then "reggae, girl-punk and free jazz" would be my answer.
Why does everyone mock Sting? What a silly question. You might as well ask why everyone breathes air. But appearing on the CBS's hour long Victoria's Secrets commercial next week should boost his credibility shouldn't it? (Insert "tit" or "ass" joke as appropriate.)
"This, so I have argued, is the primary project of our counter culture: to proclaim a new heaven and earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw in the presence of such splendor to a subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men. To create and broadcast such a consciousness of life entails nothing less than the willingness to open ourselves to the visionary imagination on its own demanding terms. We must be prepared to entertain that astonishing claim men like Blake lay before us: that here are eyes which see the world not as commonplace sight or scientific scrutiny see it, but see it transformed, made lustrous beyond measure, and in seeing the world so, see it as it really is. Instead of rushing to downgrade the rhapsodic reports of our enchanted seers, to interpret them at the lowest and most conventional level, we must be prepared to consider the scandalous possibility that wherever the visionary imagination grows bright, magic, that old antagonist of science, renews itself, transmuting our workaday reality into something bigger, perhaps more frightening, certainly more adventurous than the lesser rationality of objective consciousness can ever countenance."
-- The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak (1969)
Entering minimal blogging phase. Right now a single sentence takes me all night to write -- and a week to re-edit. Expect little more than silence and the ocassional photograph and unrelated quotation for a few days....
The official tagline of the internet really should be GET OBSESSED AND STAY OBSESSED. Like this, for example, an entire site dedicated to photoshopping women's noses -- to the extreme!Pinocchia. (Via Fleshbot)
Organizing experience into meaningful patterns implies that experience itself has no meaningfulness, that the organizer creates or imposes or donates the meaning... that it is a gift from the knower to the known. In other words, 'meaningfulness' of this kind is of the realm of classification and abstraction rather than of experience... Frequently I sense also the implication that it is 'human-created', i.e. that much of it would vanish if human beings disappeared. -- Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science
My output is in decline I was burned out after Thatcher.... And so, at this advanced age, I find myself joining The Tribe That Quotes Belle and Sebastian Lyrics In Their Blogs...
Meanwhile, this is what I've been after for years: Nutty, a lounge band whose cover versions of rock classics sound more authentic than the originals, especially "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "The Boys are Back in Town". Some things are indeed timeless -- and a world where Frank and Dino sing Thin Lizzy and Blue Oyster Cult is where I want to drink martinis forever....
When I do my A-Z of Austin it'll probably start with the Alamo Drafthouse. If there's anything the cinematic world can offer that's better than a moviehouse where waitpersons will bring you buckets of beer and amusingly named pizza (try the "Poultrygeist") while you watch a season of Godard or redubbed Mexican Wrestler Sci-Fi movies ($3 discount if you wear a Mexican wrestler's mask) I'd like to hear about it.
What was I saying? I dunno. Blah blah post-punk... blah blah prog... blah blah grime... blah blah some old geezer with an acoustic guitar... Writing about music suddenly bores me, as does reading about it -- especially when it's guys who should know better getting all excited about the mutterings of some kids who have discovered other music than hip hop and garage exists. Wheeeew. It's so head-pattingly patronising, so like those NME writers back in the late 70s who wet themselves because Paul Weller had heard of Shelley or Johnny Rotten approved of Peter Hammill. Ooh, my heroes are nearly as smart as me.... Suddenly a couple of clunky eastern samples that would probably have been dismissed as cliched if Severed Heads had used them in the mid 80s are elevated to genius level.
But what do I know? I've only just discovered Roky Erickson and the Aliens' The Evil One from 1981....
So if writing and reading about music bores me, will listening be next? Probably not.
Was going to see to see Belle and Sebastian on Saturday night but it was $40 a ticket. Add a couple of beers and that would have worked out at about a hundred bucks for the two of us. I can't think of anyone I'd pay that much money to see, not even a gathering of dead superstars reincarnated for one night only. When did it start costing more to see a band live than to buy all their albums?
(Their new album is a cracker though, even if I can't detect the slightest trace of Trevor Horn's input.)
