Um, yes.
Say hi to our first contestant, N. E. Richardson, whose specialist subject in the first round was his own navel.
Neglectis urenda filix innascitur agris, as we say around these parts.
You can read about the real "Yes/No Interlude" here.
And because I too have no shame, here's my Amazon wish list.
Oh, and here's the rarely used Atomz search box:
"The City of Austin's Mayor's Office and the Austin Public Library invite you to participate in the first annual Mayor's Book Club, What if All of Austin Reads the Same Book? The campaign encourages all Austinites to read the same book and then get together to talk about it. This year we have selected Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, 2001 recipient of the National Medal of Arts Award, a Presidential Award. During the months of May-August, 2002 we invite all of Austin to read. In September the Austin Public Library in partnership with the University of Texas Humanities Institute and area bookstores will facilitate and host discussion groups."
I hope it wasn't compulsory as all I've managed to read this summer has been the first chapter of Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Immortality, most of Paul Davies' About Time:Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, the preface to Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish and I finally finished off the bloody Stephen King novel I started on the plane over here. I used to read my own weight in books in a week when I was younger but these days I can barely get through Hi and Lois in the funny pages.... So, sorry, Mr. Mayor, I'll have to pass on this one.
It's funny how the Austin American-Statesman's music pages are far more to my liking than the supposedly alternate Austin Chronicle, which rarely pays much attention to anything that doesn't feature acoustic guitars and whimsome songstresses. Last week or maybe it was the week before, a piece in the Statesman that was supposed to be about the return of Yes instead turned into a rave about early to mid 70s albums by Soft Machine, Magma, Can and Pere Ubu. And today there was a four page article on garage bands that mentioned the Monks, the Seeds, the Sonics plus a bunch of local bands that I just might have to investigate....
It's good to see some proper rock 'n' roll writing in a grown-up newspaper, courtesy of Michael Corcoran:
Almost every night is Garage Night at Beerland, and on the last Saturday of every month the Fuzz Club congregates to genuflect at cheap, distorted guitars, when DJs spin the vinyl of such pioneers as the Sonics, the Flamin' Groovies, the Standells and the Remains.
Austin has been lousy with the basic three-chord rock of garage since a 17-year-old Roky Erickson sang "We Sell Soul" with the Spades in 1965. But the scene has never scorched like right now, with such Red River Street clubs as Room 710, Beerland and Emo's catering to the kids in black Converse tennis shoes and hot-rod cartoon T-shirts.
"Nobody slamdances anymore," a woman complains to a friend as the crowd lightly bobs to the frantic beat of the Suicides. But there have always been rules in garage rock. Thou shall not engage in physical contact. Thou shall not use Iggy's name in vain. Thou shall not drink a brand of beer that costs more than Lone Star.
They're nothing new, these songs of "gimme," "c'mon" and "Hey!" What's new is that an ailing music industry is ready to get behind them. But are kids interested in buying a one- way ticket to the '60s? Maybe so: A few more ecstasy overdoses, and this'll turn out to be a real good time to go into the antique clothing business....
Oh goody - a new rightwing US magazine is being born: the American Conservative. The world's worst journalist and convicted cocaine smuggler, Taki, is one of the co-editors, so it should be just the thing to cut through the massed elitist ranks of the socialist, I mean "liberal-feminist", American media. And the other editor is Pat Buchanan....
US bloggers who got some sort of kick from scouring the English papers for signs of anti-semitism earlier in the year can now look closer to home as it was Taki who wrote the article in the Spectator in February that publisher Conrad Black described thuswise: "In both its venomous character and its unfathomable absurdity, this farrago of lies is almost worthy of Goebbels or the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jews, according to Taki, have suborned the US government, direct that country’s military like a docile attack dog, and glory in the murder of innocent or mischievous children. He presents the universal Jewish ethos as brutish, vulgar, grasping and cunningly wicked."
According to a professor of mathematics at Oklahoma State University, a giant airbag several miles wide will be just the thing to deal with any asteroids and comets heading dangerously close to earth.
Places in Texas I want to visit, just for their names: Bug Tussle, Dimple, Ding Dong, Gasoline... well, there's quite a long list. One that should be crossed off this weekend is Oatmeal as we're planning to go there for the Oatmeal Festival on Saturday. The idea of an entire festival devoted to oatmeal is weird enough, but to have one in a town called Oatmeal makes it twice as irresistable. I'm not sure what happens - there's mention of a "Run for Your Oats" Oat-a-thon, but that could mean anything.
I'm glad someone has finally got around to using the wonderfully evocative title, The Necropolis Station, for a novel. Ever since stumbling across an entry for the place in the essential, but long out of print, The London Encyclopedia I've always been fascinated by Necropolis Station, which was built to the east of Waterloo Station on Westminster Bridge Road in 1854 with a direct line to Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking. There were only two stops - the Anglian part of the graveyard and the non-Conformist. Operated by the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company (whose seal contained the skull and cross bones device), the special funeral trains carried coffins and mourners 25 miles out of London once, twice or 12 times a day depending on which website you read. Although it was destroyed during the Blitz, parts of it are still visible today.
While it's okay for University of Texas students here in Austin to pose naked for Playboy, a fraternity at Baylor in Waco has been suspended for appearing in it fully clothed.
Blogging from a darkened room. Woke in the nauseous throes of a migraine headache, my brain feeling like a particularly brittle walnut in a giant pair of nutcrackers. So don't expect the usual meatly slabs of well-researched polemic today. Maybe a link to some nice pictures of kittens if you're lucky....
I was going to link to the fawning Ann Coulter interview in the New York Observer where she said "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building," but everyone else got to it before me - and by the time my laptop stopped crashing long enough for me to read the damn thing any comment would have been about as timely as an "all your base are belong to us" reference. (Although I'm surprised no-one was tempted to quote her astonishing boast about how she “worked in one of those mines as a summer job.” and tagged on "What as? A pit prop?")
But the latest drool-flecked billet-doux in the Wall Street Journal deserves some kind of award. Not only does it give a glimpse of how the mind of a Coulterfan works ("...her long-limbed signature silhouette poised precariously aloft, riverine blonde locks riffled by the breeze and legs coltishly pirouetting..."), it also explains that it's okay for Coulter to say whatever she wants in whatever inflamatory manner she wishes (aka "blistering free speech") because it's "a kind of 'what if' political theater, a tongue-in-cheek agitprop". It's only when nasty lefties use such talk that it's bad - because being nasty lefties they obviously mean it literally and should be stomped on hard. So as long as you've got some sychophantic jerk who can't even get his Dr Johnson quotations right to say you're only being figurative, then "everybody laughs about it afterwards and the country is none the worse for wear".
I don't really mind the latest slice of anti-Americanism in yesterday's Guardian as the American John Sutherland was being anti- was the ludicrous TobyKeith, but whoever subbed the piece could have been a bit more consistent with Peter Jennings' name. Calling him Paul Jennings in two of the three mentions was even sloppier than usual Grauniadpractice.
The temperature hit 100F yesterday, which was a big deal. One of the thousand unprepossessing local weathermen said it was 364 days since the weather in Austin had last reached the century mark. Back in Leeds it is early afternoon and a mighty 64F as I type this.
The Yes/No Interlude - discussing the big issues of the day so you don't have to.
Found this site, Cosmic Dreams at Play, while trying to find information on Sergius Golowin, the writer/poet/painter/politician(?) who recorded the utterly mindblown spaced-out masterpiece Lord Krishna von Goloka in 1973. If you're a sucker for ultra-obscure German rock of the 60s and 70s this is some sort of grail....
I dunno if I'll ever acquire the true Austin spirit - the very notion of holding a hot sauce festival outdoors (tomorrow afternoon) when the temperature will be touching 100F (and this is a notably cool August, I've been told) strikes me as a little perverse.
All our worldly possessions arrived yesterday, 29 big boxes that almost filled the living room. So yesterday and much of today was and will be taken up with unpacking it all and finding somewhere to put it. Which means no time for my usual incisive and bi-partisan hourly blog entries on the state of the world, the meaning of life and links to good stuff.
"Indeed, we were astonished to learn of the existence of such a large group of individuals, who are under the belief that they, as mere, although, extremely valued, music fans and record buyers, could even, imagine having an honest justification for, aggressively, challenging a, fairly, routine creative decision, made by people who have been, enormously, successful at making sound creative decisions, for more than three decades."
"While not, in any way, intending to promote racism, we must concede that we are also, quite, amazed that such a large group of individuals, undoubtedly, mostly African-American, can be provoked toward such vivid expressions of disrespect and hateful speech (against a young, Black recording artist, as well as Soul Train), under the leadership of an individual whose foreign-sounding name (Rommel Zamora), may be an indication that he is not African-American." That'll teach you not to vote for Ashanti, mere "music fan"!
Ah, this takes me back: Disused Stations on the London Underground. I was never a trainspotter or had much interest in the mechanics or operation of the underground when I lived in London, but there was always a romantic spookiness about the ghost stations, the sheer otherworldiness of abandoned architecture deep under London. (via Nick Denton.)
Stacey is rather taken by Punk Rock Baby, a collection of punk "classics" done in Raymond Scott Soothing Sounds for Baby style, after a belated feature on the album and its creator on K-Eye (or one of the other practically identical Austin TV news shows) on Tuesday night. The Guardian covered it back at the start of June and Jonathan Ross had it on his radio show in May, but it slipped our attention until now. Stacey is already being driven mad by the dreadful tosh that's supposedly suitable music for one year olds and she's looking for something she can listen to approximately 400 times a days without being driven insane.
I miss Jonathan Ross's radio show. He can be the most annoyingly and offensive twit on TV, never able to finish a sentence without three knob jokes and a kneejerk anti-American jibe (which is all the more weird because he's married to an American and has a genuine love for American culture), but his radio show was one of the few things that was aimed at guys like me. He'd play Doris Day, Alice Cooper, X Ray Specs, Aretha Franklin, the Buzzcocks and Barrington Levy - and that's just from last Saturday's show. It's not the sort of music I listen to every day but it's my nostalgia music, the stuff I can get misty-eyed about when the conditions are just right. But of course I can listen to it online - if I can get my arse in gear and fix the drivers on my sickly laptop....
"...the general primitivism makes you realize you’re a mammal again and glad for it, licking your chops." Lester Bangs, reviewing Patti Smith's Horses, Creem, February 1976. The rest of review is here. Hadn't read this before - guess I was lulled by the authoritative heft of the Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung collection all those years ago into thinking everything left out must have been mere chaff and swarf....
Our shipment is due to arrive on Thursday, about ten weeks (which was their estimate) after it was packed, crated and taken away. I hope we've got room for twenty nine boxes of, er, whatever it was we thought we wouldn't be able to live without when we left England. Somewhere I have an Excel spreadsheet listing all the books, CDs and records, but I know there's stuff we've both forgotten about, little things like cocktail stirrers with fez-wearing monkeys on the end, phrenology heads, family-size bags of Twiglets and quite possibly a CD with that aforementioned Excel spreadsheet on it....
Got a response from an agency about a technical writing vacancy that had just come up - but it was like no technical writing I'd ever encountered before. Not only didn't I have the qualifications and skills required but I didn't know what they were. Even on a word by word level I couldn't decode the job requirements. I could understand one word, maybe the next, but the third scrambled everything and by the fourth it might just have well have been something churned out by a random sentence generator. And not one programmed to be syntactically valid. Maybe technical writing has a different meaning on this side of the Atlantic and what I do is called something else. Maybe it's one of those lift/elevator, pavement/sidewalk, braces/suspenders things that I'll chuckle about later....
There are millions of blogs and websites that pontificate, agonize and bluster at great length about the legitimacy, tactics and morality of declaring war on Iraq, but look who's number one right this minute on Yahoo if you ask the question: invade iraq yes or no....
(Update: now this entry itself is the one pulled up by this query, which is a bit too self-referential for me.)
Pot Noodle TV 'slag' ads banned. "Pot Noodle's controversial adverts using the line 'The slag of all snacks' have been banned from appearing on TV after more than 300 viewers complained. The independent television commission ruled today that the word 'slag' was so offensive to women it could not be used on TV, even after the watershed."
I'm still getting used to the Austin American-Statesman, especially the Sunday edition that people only seem to buy for the coupons. One of the scant half dozen or so articles hidden amongst the three pounds of advertising material doesn't exactly fill me with confidence about my job prospects here:
Tech tumble took high- paying jobs. "In 2001, the Austin-San Marcos region lost nearly one of every five of its 85,000 high-tech jobs."
"It used to be that you could just send out a resume and just wait for the return phone call. That's gone," said Baker, an Austin native who returned from Dallas late last year, and has found and lost two jobs since then. "A friend of mine just got a technical program-management job and said the company told him there were 2,000 resumes for that one job."
That's really what I want to read as I prepare to spend another day sending out 2,000 resumes....
Go read The Baffler's Thomas Frank Talking Bull on "the media pundits and business gurus who have been so recklessly hyping the New Economy for a decade." And why they are "still riding high, seeking out scapegoats for the collapse instead of taking a long, critical look at the almighty market itself." In a more sensible world, all the supposedly leftwing blogs would link to this, and just about any article by Frank they could find. There's a paucity of writers like Frank around, who have his cool focus and verve and ability to skewer the blowhard gods of the right with a single sentence. Too many on the left write as if they feel they have to address all the world's wrongs simultaniously and end up drowning in their own sense of quixotesque righteousness. Frank is methodical, locking onto his targets one at a time rather than flailing ineffectually in all directions, but when he delivers the killer blow he delivers....
"New Economy theory was less an objective assessment of our situation than a world-class hustle by a political movement that believed it was very close to winning the game. It was the flower of decades of libertarian thought and argument; of lavish irrigation by rightwing billionaires and corporate donors; of careful cultivation by a hundred thinktanks and kept magazines."
"This is also why there will be no downside for the New Economy gang, even if the Dow should plummet all the way to 3,600. Workers, executives and ordinary stock analysts lose their jobs in such circumstances, but for those who fund and publish the great public thinkers of the 1990s, objective wrongness doesn't matter. Propaganda does. Money walks while bullshit just talks and talks and talks."
"For most of last year's gurus, the battle has simply shifted. Now it is a matter of blame and they are on the defensive, fighting to rescue their beloved free market with even more zeal than when they were talking up the Nasdaq back in '98. The crash has brought the consequences that crashes always bring: a return of the regulatory state, demands for the end of excessive CEO pay, public anger at businessmen rather than liberal college professors, and - who knows? - maybe the resurgence of labour unions and the estate tax. For the business class, the stakes are huge, and the job that confronts their army of economic commentators is weightier than ever."
The Hobohemians - On the rails with the new freedom riders."...a vision of freedom as old as the nation itself, an America of movement and self- reliance, of mythic vastness and silence, of discovery, escape, rebellion. It's an America that was offered long ago and never delivered, that we're all supposed to love but not allowed to look for, that's just around the corner and always out of reach...." The spirit of Vineland and Stone Junction lives. Shame I've hardly left the apartment for two weeks.... (via Weblogsky)
People in Austin are generally proud of the music scene here and each week in the Chronicle there'll be at least twenty pages of listings for shows. But very little of it appeals to me and at times it feels like I've gone through a time warp. Take this piece ("Spreading the Word - Six 'New' Acts for People who Appreciate Good Music") in today's Chronicle. Overlooking the prescriptive, school ma'am tone of the title, I'm sure they're all nice people, accomplished musicians and make their audiences very happy but I can't help turn enviously to this article from the brutishly fashionable The Vice ("...here are 15 other bands that combine slick style, pretentious fashion, a sense of humor, choreography, stage shows, computers, 80s electro, 70s punk and new wave into a cripplingly great new phenomenon that has made New York City the center of the universe once again."). Now that sounds more like what I want to hear. I suspect I'd prefer Creme Blush to the South Austin Jug Band without hearing a note.
Maybe it's my dislike of Alan Titchmarsh or my gut reaction to the way everything has to be validated by celebrity participation these days that makes me uneasy about stuff like this."The Ground Force garden make-over show has transformed a public space in New York as a memorial to mark the tragedy of 11 September."
Future Sound Of London say they paved the way for boy bands. " I've done some really obscure music, which made the top 10. People reacted against that, they wanted something simple, so along came boy bands. Now though, there's a subconscious desire for things deeper. Culture is ready for exploration - the boybands are creating me again," sez Gary Colbain.
Bacardi accused of campaign to oust Castro - Rum company boss 'bankrolled CIA mission to kill Cuban leader' . "The Bacardi rum company has been engaged for more than 40 years in clandestine attempts to overthrow the Cuban government by both violent and other means, according to a new book." (Bacardi, the Hidden War by Hernando Calvo Ospina, translated by Stephen Wilkinson and Alasdair.) "The company is accused of bankrolling extreme rightwing groups and American mainstream politicians in an effort to remove Fidel Castro and re-establish its profitable empire on the island."
Amongst the "wacky" section (about the only part of the site you can safely view at work, unless your company has an easy going policy on all-nude schoolgirl bondage) of J-List, your one stop online store for unusual Japanese stuff, are such delights as Sante Hard Minty Eyedrops - "they will wake you up indeed", sock glue, dog toilet paper and a "Respect the Emperor, Expel the Foreign Barbarians" t-shirt. (via Pop Culture Junk Mail, of course.)
Decided to re-organising this whole site - there are five years of archives waiting to go back up. For now here are two pages of blog entries from mid 2001 (June 10 - July 21 | August 1 - 31), the highlights of which are surely the links to two collections of Jim Flora LP covers here and here - y'know the world would be a far better place if all albums had covers like this.
Ummm.... haven't felt like blogging lately. Been trying to get myself in the right frame of mind to send off my resume to various Austin job agencies, having spent last week converting it from the scrappy English-style CV that has resided, untouched, on my hard drive for a couple of years. I've only just got around to adding my last contract. It's taken me all this time to think of a half-decent job-title for what I spent 20 months doing in Newcastle and take all the "sort of"s and "kind of"s and other vagaries out of the sprawling description.
The biggest and most troubling differences I can see between my grubby old CV and the delights Google fetches up when I search for "technical writer"+"resume" are that resumes have punchy, confident Objective and Summary sections at the begining filled with dynamic hyphenated qualities like goal-orientated, process-driven, quality-motivated, product-championing, self-actuated, milestone-felching, team-modulated, enterprize-combobulated, customer-osculating, snood-implimenting, task-pullulating, chad-dimpling, jargon-perpetuating and so on, which all look fine and dandy on other people's resumes but bring about a fit of the unmanly giggles when I try to apply them to myself....
What amazes me isn't that I'm number 158 if you enter "www.topless" and select "UK only" at the Freeserve main page, but that someone - on a Friday night, no less - probably slogged through the 157 higher ranking sites before clicking on this old diary entry. You know, there are so many easier ways to find bare boobs on the net. Like clicking here, for example.
Oh wow. Should have gone here first, obviously - where else but www.cocktailshakers.com? Lady's leg shakers galore and only a thousand or so dollars each. (Ah, another hobby for when I'm older....)
I surrender: totally overwhelmed by The Church of Me. No one else could (a) make me want to go out and buy a Gang of Four compilation by namedropping Derek Bailey and Gary Kemp in the same sentence (Observe the latter's astonishing Bailey-style plectral sideswipes which finally overwhelm "At Home He's A Tourist," alternating with the most deliciously oblique chordal guitar backing since Ray Crawford on Gil Evans' "La Nevada" or Gary Kemp on Spandau Ballet's "Paint Me Down"), (b) compare a track on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 to "Sunday afternoons wandering through deserted Westminster back streets in search of Dr John Dee's spare change." or even remember "long-lost Dutch minimalist metal instrumentalists Gore". Lovely.
Oh yeah - he also quotes a line from August Strindberg I was trying to remember when I said I was getting bored of politcial/warblogs last week:
"God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution."
Although maybe you need to replace "learnt from books" with "linked to in their blogs"....
No Rock&Roll Fun is becoming my favourite site. Not only for his 1,342 essential entries a day but for his weelky precis of all the English music papers (thus saving the half-hour wait, three system crashes and two nervous breakdowns it takes to get nme.com to load). And links to stories like this: EasyInternetCafe faces fines over music burning which boils down to the British Phonographic Industry (warning - Flash and frames - truly an ugly site on a 800x600 monitor) wanting one million pounds from EasyInternetCafe for having had CD writers on their machines.
EasyInternetCafe refused to pay £1,000,000, and the two parties are currently haggling over how much should be paid. If agreement isn't reached soon then the matter could yet come to court, although both sides are thought to be keen to avoid the cost of litigation.
According to EasyInternetCafe, the problem arose because its high street Internet café's gave users access to CD writers. "In the early days, customers could burn CDs at EasyInternetCafes. Our terms and conditions didn't allow people to make illegal copies, but even though we didn't allow the burning of MP3 files onto CDs it was happening," the EasyInternetCafe spokesman said.
EasyInternetCafe claims it offered the BPI its full assistance once it was confronted about the activity.
"We let the BPI see our hard drives so they could assess the extent of the problem, and we have removed CD burners from all our stores. However, we don't believe their assessment of how much music was being downloaded and burned to CD is accurate," explained the EasyInternetCafe spokesman.
After seeing its proposed fine of £1,000,000 turned down, the BPI dropped the penalty to £100,000 -- still too much for EasyInternetCafe, which is offering just £26,000.
Way too generous - offer 'em £50 and a mix CD of Metallica songs, Stelios....
Although it's not exactly the most incisive and trustworthy paper in the world, the Daily Mirror sez the US will invade Iraq on November 6th. So I hope Andrew Sullivan, Mark Steyn and all the pundits and warbloggers have got their paperwork and stuff ready for their on-the-spot war reporting. Because surely they wouldn't have spent all this time and energy proslytising for war if they weren't willing to go out there themselves?
It's always puzzled and irked me - although not enough to ask anyone - but why is Bruce Springsteen called "The Boss"? I've always been immune to the guy, ever since a schoolfriend made me listen to his first couple of albums back in the mid seventies and have spend the last 27 years baffled by the pious devotion of so many people. But if I see another picture of him sharing a mike with that guy in the black bandanna, both of them pulling the same face as they have for 27 years I may gag.
The "Let's humiliate Iraq" blogger-meme is making my brain hurt, expecially when people are starting to dredge up the defeat of Japan as a shining example of putting an enemy nation on the right track with nukes and napalm. I need more coffee and Excedrin just to read the stuff, and by the time I do everyone will have moved on to something else - so you need to look elsewhere for sensible commentary and linkage....
Today Alexis reports I have slipped to 3,558,623rd most popular site on the web, which is quite a plummet. 3,344,499 places to be precise. Was it something I didn't say?
I might sometimes be shameless enough to play the Jolly Old England Of My Youth card (IRA bombings, the miners' strike, Vesta curries, the Val Doonigan show, etc) but my school was never like this:Wymondham College Remembered. (Like 137% of my links, from MetaFilter.) We never had a matron at all, let alone one nicknamed "Scrotum"....
As someone who didn't buy any Sonic Youth product after Daydream Nation and will always regard a show they did around the time Sister was released as one of the only truly awesome rock gigs I ever witnessed, this review in the Austin American-Statesman of last week's show at Stubbs makes me wish I'd gone:
"There might have been a message at Sonic Youth's Friday show at a packed and stifling Stubb's, and that message might have been 'Sonic Youth are sorry about the mess they made in the '90s. Feel free to forget about it for an evening. Thank you.'
"The band opened with the lovely 'Kotton Krown' (from 'Sister'), gave 'Daydream Nation' keepers like 'Candle' and 'Silver Rocket' a thick, three-guitar treatment and made sure that true oldies like 'Making the Nature Scene' and the brutal 'Inhuman' sounded as freely blasted as ever."
This week I am getting into the swing of being a househusband as Stacey is now working at a local child development center as lead teacher (that's lead as in lead guitarist rather than lead poisoning). At least I'm trying to. I spent most of the last two years wondering what it would be like to be a kept man, thinking of all the wonderfully creative and/or diverting things I could do if I didn't have to travel a couple of hundred miles a day and write often stultifying stuff about Windows financial extensions or child benefit rules for disabled polygamous crofters. But now the time has come I feel almost feverish with inertia, unable to do much more than read the news online, teach myself a few new Excel and Access tricks and take out the trash even if the bin isn't overflowing....
Been looking through some dandy music blogs this morning. But it makes me feel supernaturally ancient to find the only writers with anything like the freewheeling style, whizzbang enthusiasm and uplifting if crazed belief that there's something more to be said about any CD than "rocks my world, dudes!" or "great to sing along to when I'm driving to the office" of prime gonzoidal music critics of the past (blah, blah, Lester Bangs, blah, blah, Paul Morley, blah, blah, someone who had a review in Creem in 1973) are writing about Samantha Mumba and Daniel Bedingfield. Which is probably how it should be, but it leaves me feeling like some creepy old perve (although what other type of old perve is there?) peering over a playground wall. For example: - spizzazz - bleeding ears
There are more. Follow the links from these, then follow the links from those.
Great internet moneymaking schemes that have flopped - part 97: Remember when everyone was registering every word or combination of words as internet domain names in the hope that they could later sell them for a small fortune? Another dead dream judging from the millions of deleted domains on, er, DeletedDomains. Curious to see how many people thought registering domain names with "monkey" in them would be a good idea - 1,872 of these have expired, some of which ought to be snapped up right away - by anyone with a monkey fetish....
The Sun finds a new way to justify an allied attack on Iraq:
"If Bush doesn’t attack Iraq and remove Saddam, Israel will have to do so. What is best for the Iraqi people — many of whom hate Saddam as much as us?
"A nuclear attack from Israel?
"Or an Allied attack using conventional strikes?"
So it's for their own good. Ah, I do miss the English papers, even the super soaraway 20p Sun, the voice of couch potato Britain. Which today doesn't like George Michael - but (predictably) can't get enough of Inna Zobova.
I'm not craving anything from back home yet, but it's good to know that British Delights is there for when I run out of the two and a half pounds of Marmite we brought over. Their top selling list is amusing - or maybe disturbing. Lucozade, Maltesers, Walkers' Prawn Cocktail Crisps, Clotted Cream and Shortbread sounds like a stoned student's midnight shopping list.
Gosh, stop the presses, prepare to be astonished! Andrew Sullivan writes a New York Times bashing piece for the New York Sun! Who could have predicted such a thing?
Finally found a bunch of Peter Laughner's rock music reviews online at Plate of Shrimp. It includes the infamous review of Lou Reed's "Coney Island Baby" (Creem, March 1976) I've been trying to track down forever that begins:
"This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn't go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.) I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record. I came on to my sister-in-law 'C'mon over and gimme head while I'm passed out.' I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution..."
Now I'm not saying that sort of rock 'n' roll 'n' nihilism lifestyle is big or clever, and it couldn't have been a surprise to anyone that Laughner died a drugs-related death the following year, but there's always been something about early 70s gonzoid rock writing that always gave me something more than a cheap thrill, that promised to lead me towards a mental rush so liberatingly unhinged and at the same time cosmically wise that rock music itself - certainly the rock music of the time - could never do more than hint at. If ever I had unrealistic dreams of teenage overambition back then (beyond owning a fireworks factory) it was to be a rock writer rather than a rock star. Which in hindsight is understandable - that era was the doldrums of mainstream rawk and anything that has turned out to have any worth from back then was then either too obscure or just plain unobtainable to a workshy 15 year old in a northern town. (I saved my pennies but still couldn't get Patti Smith's Horses when it came out and had to make do with a live double Blue Oyster Cult album instead.) But you could get the New Musical Express in any newsagent's on a Thursday morning on the way to school and read Lester Bangs, Mick Farren, Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and others churning out their dirty phantasmagorical ravings about what was wrong with music, why the likes of James Taylor deserved to die and how the world would be a much better place if only everyone listened to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges three times a day....
John Scalzi has some horribly reasonable doubts about Eric Olson's free CDs for bloggers scheme. And he should know - look at the uninspiring stuff he gets sent for Indiereview. He's invested time, money and serious effort into setting up a website to provide informative, independent reviews and what does he get? Not an advance copy of the new Springsteen album with special promotional goodies and a free trip to LA thrown in for good measure, just three EPs of tepid country rock, frat-punk and shareware trip-hop noodling.
Yes, it's so much easier to see this as a fine, worldshattering idea that's time is right now if you view it from an eager blogger's point of view - "so I get dozens of great CDs in the mail each week and maybe write about one or two of them if they rock my world and I can't think of anything to say about The War Against Terrorism/various other threats to our way of life/other cool blogs/my cat/the bleak existential misery of being me... sounds like a sweet deal, dude!"
And next door to the ministry of silly walks: "Last month, senior civil service officials on a training day were surprised to learn that Pete Waterman, the Pop Idol judge and record producer, would be lecturing them. The man responsible for Will Young, Steps and Kylie Minogue had been enlisted to teach Whitehall mandarins how to spot and nurture young talent." One more from the Guardian.
"The crude anti-Americanism current in Britain today is surpassed only by the embarrassing need to seek American approval. We can't make up our minds whether to bow or look down. So, like someone from the ministry of silly walks, we jerk between both in a kind of lofty cringe." The Guardian does get it right sometimes, you know.
I felt obliged to fire off a quick e-mail to Eric Olsen at Tres Producers regarding the Free CDs For 100 Bloggers Project last night. I'm not much of a joiner and my last efforts at being an unpaid reviewer fizzled out circa 1985 when I couldn't think of anything clever to say about War with the Newts by Karel Capek (1937), but at the last minute the thought of one hundred other people getting free albums that could have been coming my way brought about a sudden, uncharacteristic spurt of reckless sociability. And I've been griping about my current sorry disinclination to write more than a couple of dopy, mundane paragraphs a week - half the time the only thing I have to write about is my inability to think of anything to write about. So what would be more of an incentive than FREE STUFF? FREE STUFF! I've always been a sucker for FREE STUFF. As a kid I used to write to every company I could find an address for after a teacher told my class it was a good way of getting FREE STUFF. I don't know if it's still true but back in the mid 60s a letter in childish but enthusiastic handwriting to the right marketing department would net you all sorts of goodies. They probably had whole teams of happy staff back in that golden age just mailing off FREE STUFF to geeky kids like me. In hindsight this FREE STUFF might not have been the sort of stuff that to satisfy a kid today (I seem to remember a booklet called "The Story of Flour" being one of the better scores) but getting anything in the mail was a bit deal for the 8 year old version of me.
And I've got to admit that music is one of the few things that gets me writing. God knows I want to write about current events, the state of the world and man's inhumanity to man but with all that is going on it still takes the reissue of an obscure French album from the early 70s that maybe half a dozen people heard at the time to get my fingers moving....
I just wish I'd sent something a bit more impressive to Eric than an unannotated list of what I'd (supposedly) been listening to that day. If I'd known he was going to use the e-mail I'd have spent more than sixteen hours laboring over it.... Put a couple of jokes in it, made a few inscrutable reference to Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs and Crocus Behemoth and claimed that my favorite record of all time was an unissued Tintern Abbey B-side.
But I need some FREE STUFF. We're still waiting for all our English possessions to arrive - 29 crates of books, CDs, LPs, cocktail shakers and those little paper umbrellas you put in cocktails - and our three Ikea "Robin" CD cases stand empty apart from an Alamo snow globe, two robot dinosaurs and a wind-up nun. Our shipping container got held up in customs in Philadelphia and not only was everything closely examined for a week or so but we're being charged extra for the privilege of having this happen. But I suspect I'd be accused of being an anti-American Euroweenie who wants to kiss Saddam's bottom if I complained so I'll let it go. Can always entertain ourselves by watching Toby Keith on CMT while we wait....
