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...
Tory MP Ann Widdecombe, said: "Jesus Christ said suffer the little ones to come unto me, not that they should be eaten for public entertainment."
Equally ghastly, in Heat magazine readers' poll: Best Solo Artist: Will Young; Best Album: From Now On -- Will Young; Best Music Video: "Light My Fire" -- Will Young; Man Of The Year: Will Young; Former Pop Idol You'd Most Like To See Eaten On Channel 4 By A Chinese Performance Artist: Will Young....
Back from Houston, that epicentre of Bushist (Bushite?), corporate Texas. Austin feels so delightfully, provocatively quaint afterwards, a dreamy arbor, a secret gateway to another, kinder, weirder America. Of course I know I'm comparing this little patch of Austin, between Hyde Park and the University, where everything is extra-Austiny (example: there's a Starbucks within walking distance, but to get there you would pass four independant coffee shops, two with wireless internet and one that has an extensive selection of European beers for when you need to counterbalance that 3rd double latte), with the Houston we saw through the car windscreen on Xmas Eve, traffic lights out after the previous night's storm, fallen mall signs shattered across the roads, garbage spilled and blown everywhere and just about every angry human in the city growling behind the wheel of their SUV as they tried to get to Nieman-Marcus or Dollar King to get that last special something in the last shopping minute before Xmas..... But Houston still feels wrong to me, the scale of the place is all skewed, not so much out of control as in the control of something vast and inhuman, some giant, quivering pseudopodial thing with a top hat and monocle.... Turn a corner from some wasteland where a 20 screen cinema has been demolished so a 30 screen mega-multiplex could be built half a mile away and all that remains is a beat-up taco van with its sad gathering of "economic refugees" waiting for whatever comes along -- and the sky is blotted out by a gilded, towering, grind-it-in-yer-face monument to extreme capitalism.... I dunno, I spend a few minutes stuck in traffic in Houston and I get all William Blake-y, seeing satanic visions in amongst the strip malls and corporate HQs....
But... tatty notes to self, unedited, third chunky tumbler of Jaegermeister and ice to hand... why does Strummer's death affect me more than Mary Hansen's, whose music with Stereolab I've listened to a thousand times more often than anything by the Clash and has pretty much been the soundtrack to my life for the last seven or more years? That was sad and terrible in the way that the loss of any creative, good human being is, but it didn't really have any emotional impact on me. I meant to write something about her death but couldn't think of anything to say, besides than the obvious. Maybe it's because Strummer was part of my late adolescence, the last period I suspect when non-personal attachments can form and set in permanently. His was a voice that was shouting when I was most eager to listen, when I needed shouting at. And also with his death I feel the chilling backdraught of the Grim Reaper doing his usual business, the heart y'know, the fucking heart, something guys our age have to watch out for. I came to Stereolab as an adult, a CD put on while the wine was selected and thirtysomethings talked about mortgage rates, as a calm mature pleasure, music qua music rather than a revolutionary leaping-around-someone's-kitchen when "White Riot" was played on Radio Luxemburg.
"I don't want to look back, I want to keep going forward. I still have something to say to people."The news that Joe Strummer is dead brings a bit of cold winter to this warm, thundery Austin day. I never really loved the Clash, but for a while, during the late 70s, the fact that they went on doing their own thing in their own stuborn way, as the music scene splintered in a million post-punk ways, was enough to make them important and necessary -- they were the stern, bossy bedrock, the stuff you felt would always be there. They were a mess of contradictions, switching from two minute singles to three disk albums, one day sourly criticizing the very thing they would take to their heart the next, but they still managed to go on being special, even after they split up. In 1977, the Pistols made you feel like getting wrecked but the Clash made you want to take a look at the world beyond your own mess and feel angry about it and maybe even feel that your anger ought to be directed somewhere useful. Even though their music sounds as quaint and otherworldly as Flannigan and Allen to me these days, the very fact that so many people got upset about the recent use of "London Calling" to advertise luxury cars says a lot about what they achieved in their brief lifetime. I never loved the Clash (I didn't even realise they had made any albums after Sandinista!) and never got around to listening to any of the music Strummer made during the last two decades but tonight I still mourn his passing with Jack Daniels and silence.
I drifted away from The War Against Silence as 75% of the music Glenn McDonald was writing about was stuff I had so little interest in that even having it insightfully and calmly apraised and deconstructed didn't do a thing for me, but his piece on Shania Twain's Up! earlier this month makes me release I ought to go back and read everything he's posted. It must be noted however, that he is one of those rare online music pundits who will use a line like:
The fast songs, thus mutilated, are like trying to enjoy a roller coaster on a full bladder in a lightning storm, and the slow ones are like bubble tea in which the tapioca has been replaced by little balls of squid-ink-dyed wasabi.
Get into the festive mood with Go Home Production's Christmas on the Block - JLO vs Paul McCartney, two silly songs mashed together to make something as cute as a kitten playing with a bit of ribbon while grandma snoozes in front of the telly.... or something.
Managed to download some of Sir Simon Reynolds' Fave Singles of 2002, which was a surprise as I've never had much luck with the old P2P malarky. I know -- it's my own damn fault for being so poor that I have to use dial-up, and by the time I've managed to download the first 0.03K of "I'm Going Shopping (For My Mum)" by the Tooth Fairies (7" heliotrope vinyl on the Wrap Up Warmly label, Edinburgh, 1987), Little Jimmy Filesharer has had his computer shut down and been carted off to prison. Of course the paradox is that if I could afford broadband I could probably afford to buy the records and CDs I wanted and wouldn't be spending hours getting "Search finished without any result" whenever I'm looking for anything more obscure than, say, Radiohead. But I've now managed to hear a sampling of the likes of Dizzy Rascal and Platinum 45 so I don't feel totally out of the loop -- just 97.9% out of it. (To be continued....)
Punk77 is messy, sprawling but well worthing the effort of digging through, especially if you want to be confronted with what punk was like rather than how it's subsequently been re-imagined. It wasn't all sexy situationists trying to channel the spirit of autonomous free jazz or whatever people like, uh, me would have you believe....
Isn't it about time for a resurgence of interest in the Adverts? The latest reissue of Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts contains just about everything worth hearing by the band, but if you need it all encapsulated in one song, go find a download of "The Great British Mistake". This, rather than anything by the Pistols or Clash, is my punk madelaine, with its shouty slogan in lieu of a chorus and its murky fearless rush towards a cacophonic climax that looks forward to My Bloody Valentine and makes the Pistols and the Clash sound like retro traditionalists. I could never figure out fully what TV Smith was singing at the time, but that never really mattered even though his voice and delivery were what made the band so special. "The great British mistake/ was looking for a way out/ was getting complacent/ not noticing the pulse was racing...." was about as far as I ever got with that particular track. It was the sound of a man uncertain of whether he was exorcizing or embracing the demons of ordinary life but possessed by the need to say something, to seize the fevered urgency of suddenly finding a voice. (And one can always read the full lyrics 25 years later.)
Hearing that sound takes me back to my first punk gig, late Spring 1977. The previous night I had seen Television and Blondie -- both sadly disapointing -- and bought the latest issue of Sniffing Glue. I got out more then. The Adverts supported the Damned but they were the ones who won my heart and proved to me that punk meant something, that the media depiction, even in the NME, denied the raw, electrifying, demotic, life-affirming immediacy of something that went so far beyond leaping around to noisy music it would be years before anyone could put down on paper what it was really all about.
Say it ain't so... The Church of Me closes today. No other music website, blog or otherwise, sparked my interest in new or forgotten music past, present and unimagined, got me to drag out those old Bonzo Dog Band albums or install KaZaa so I could try to track down this morning's latest micro-development in what the young folk are getting down to in their frightful "disco" clubs....
Clicking through the music channels (an idea stolen from No Rock 'n' Roll Fun) to kill a few minutes while waiting for the exterminator lady to show up...
Let's start with VH1....
3 Doors Down -- When I'm Gone. Proper man-rock and thoroughly without shame, all biceps and backwards baseball caps. Filmed on an aircraft carrier cut with footage of US marines saying goodbye to their loved ones before being shipped off to see this bunch of commercialised Pearl Jam wannabes. With explanatory text at the start and end just in case you didn't realise how much 3 Doors Down support our forces. They should show this to Saddam and then he'll be sorry.
Dave Matthews Band -- Grey Street. Generic arena footage of the sort of grown-up frat-rock you can imagine a regional sports presenter getting down to after driving home from Home Depot and putting up some shelves.
Clicking over to CMT....
Faith Hill -- Cry. Meatloafesque, bludgeoning pseudo-operatic guff that wouldn't work without the "all passion spent" video of rain, elaborate decay and heavy-handed memories. I trust that whoever discovered that dumping several gallons of water over a woman in a flimsy dress signifies an almost elemental sense of remorse while at the same time showing off her boobs and butt to fetishistic advantage has been honoured for his sterling work.
Steve Earl -- Jerusalem. Grizzled "Eve of Destruction" style plod-country with Earle coming on like Billy Bragg's grandad with a harmonica. Layered with rather predictable religious images of strife and significance to punch the message home. Heart in the right place, but dull.
Reba McIntyre - didn't catch the title. "Where is the tenderness we sacrificed for progress?" she wants to know. You tell me. More stock footage of war, starvation and a world gone crazy, while mumsy Reba and a warehouseful of gospel singers belt out the usual toothless pabulum about making it if we try, without really making it clear what "it" is or what we're supposed to "try". But smiling foreign kiddies in costume shot in sepia prove her point.
Then across to BET:
Missy Elliott -- Work It. Oh, I think you know this. The best record since Faust's "The Sad Skinhead" to feature elephants, although like the video it does seem to want to cram every hiphop nuance and trope into one four minute showcase. But does it make me a bad person if I always find myself thinking of Alexis Sayle's "Hello John, Got A New Motor?" when I hear this?
Mariah Carey -- Miss You Most (At Christmas). The queen of unnecessary melisma slips into a (decidedly non-Fredricks of Hollywood) Santa outfit while a funereal electric piano tinkles and faked 8mm footage of Xmases past flicker by. Looks and sounds like an obituary. "I miss you most at Christmas, because I don't have a car and there's no public transport," she doesn't sing. "And all the shops are shut and there's nothing on TV either."
Back to VH1:
Uncle Kracker -- In A Little While. Chubby guys with goatees seem to feature more prominently in the US music scene than back home. I have no more to add about this record or video.
Foo Fighters -- All My Life. All Foo Fighters records sound the same to me, likeably dynamic but undistinguished. But seeing this video was oddly reassuring, like stumbling across a pub on a Sunday afternoon where there's a trad jazz band playing in the back room. It's nice to know someone still cares.
Over to CMT:
Dixie Chicks -- Landslide. Shown every twenty minutes on CMT in between documentaries about the band and their other videos, this is pleasant enough in a restrained, wholesome, reflective, Sunday-afternoon-as-the-sun-goes-down way, although it does looks a bit too much like a commercial for hair products and pregnancy wear. Apparently this is a "Sheryl Crow Remix" which sounds like a real trip to the edge of sonic exploration.
Back to VH1:
John Mayer -- Your Body is a Wonderland. Why thank you, young man. But have you noticed this bit here? Breathy non-descript acoustic strummer for people who think David Gray is just a little too hardcore. Video shows Mayer in a perfect loft apartment scrutinising his perfect girlfriend's epidermis for moles with a super-8 camera. You expect a pillow fight to break out at any minute. It could be a commercial for Internet banking except for the obligatory live footage of the fella strumming in front of an adoring crowd to show he's a serious musician and not just some pretty boy.
And on MTV:
Justin Timberlake -- Cry Me A River The pliant Justin, apparently the unholy spawn of Michael Jackson and Eminem, goes all falsetto while watching a Britney substitute take a shower. Further investigation advised before you contact the appropriate authorities. Not the Julie London number, which would really be something.
And VH1 again:
Norah Jones -- Don't Know Why. This season's Sade, smooth and "jazzy" for people who like to have something pleasant and blatantly "sophisticated" to listen to while ironing or pleasuring themselves or reading a Nigella Lawson cookbook. (Imposible to hate although it does fill me with a guilty listlessness akin to lying on the bedroom carpet in a patch of warm sunlight when I should be scouring the internet for job leads.)
Over to CMT:
Alan Jackson -- Let it be Christmas. Well this is just wrong. A sopping slab of unspeakable and eldritch muck snipped from some yuletide special that was probably filmed in August. Filled with self-hate and an almost sufficating sense that he has betrayed generations of country musicians too numerous to mention, Jackson -- wearing a double-breasted red jacket and a pristine white Stetson, sporting a guitar he doesn't touch and a mullet with matching toilet brush moustache -- brings on his wife and kiddies and begs them to thrash him into bloody unconsciousness with his own intestines. A man can dream.
Tim McSomething - She's My Kind of Rain. For some reason Tim replaces his black Stetson with a knitted skullcap and trolls around the tourist spots of London proclaiming that "she" is his "kind of rain", which is evidently some kind of metaphor or something. Crazy.
And MTV:
Jimmy Fallon -- Snowball. Ah, comedy. Twenty odd years ago the Dickies thought that singing any song loud, fast and aggresively was both punk and funny. Not so. But Jimmy, sweet Jimmy. Once he leaves SNL, he could be an American Hugh Grant, bumbling, sweet, rather annoying and box office gold, if he gets the right film role. But if he follows the rest of the ex-SNL crew he'll probably end up wearing a giant diaper, drinking bull semen and punching old ladies.
Good Charlotte -- Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Ah, comedy. These guys must really give the grannies a fright down at the Mall. If Avril Lavigne is the new Toyah then these guys are the new Split Endz. Hot Topic will never die!
Pink -- Family Portrait. Oh please, being the anti-Britney is just not enough. Pushing all those "I was a traumized youth and didn't get the free gift in the Cheerios packet and everyone hates me but I'll show 'em" buttons yet again. Wailing like a kid who's just stopped trying to hold her breath until she turns blue. First time it was a jolt, second time an irritation, third time a bore. Pink really ought to cheer up and get back to being feisty. If she wakes up one morning and finds that Kelly Osbourne has taken her place as the new Cindy Lauper she'll only have herself to blame.
And to end on CMT:
Travis Tritt -- Strong Enough To Be Your Man. The goatee, pale blue eyes and the Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman hair suggest a Kenny Rogers for women of a certain age who like foot rubs, but the song just dribbles by. He probably is strong enough to be your man, but was that what you really wanted to know?
Cletus T. Judd - Christmas. The deepest pits of Hell are not deep enough. Really. I could be listening to Lol Coxhill or the Spontaneous Music Orchestra right now, you know....
You may have noticed that this is one of the few blogs in existence that does not have a list of the best 10, 20, 50 or 200 records of 2002. I haven't heard enough music this year to judge. I probably haven't heard half a dozen of this year's albums all the way through. I liked the Boards of Canada, Ladytron and Streets albums, but a list entitled "3 Albums I Bought This Year and Liked Quite A Lot" doesn't carry much critical heft.
As I'm feeling so utterly floopy it doesn't feel like a waste of time to have spent the afternoon doing my Self Assessment for 2001/02, especially now that you can do it online at the Government Gateway. Looks like I owe the Inland Revenue £0.08, unless I've slipped up. What a bigshot I was back in those days....
What I've got is almost certainly cedar fever, Austin being pretty much Ground Zero for the pesky Juniperus ashei pollen. A count of one thousand grains of pollen in a cubic meter of air is considered high and yesterday it hit 1,908. Which sounds bad until you discover that for three of the past four year it has reached 7,000. My immune system has gone into overdrive, releasing histamine by the bucketful. This is the penalty for moving to a place where the temperature is in the high 70s in mid-December. To quote from the Texas Monthly article linked to: "...an insidious malaise sets in, making it hard to do anything but stare vacantly at the wall, while at the same time a nagging little voice says, 'Get up. It's just an allergy.' That's how I feel and why there isn't much blogging going on here. Now fetch me a six-pack of Dr Brown's Original Cream Sodas and some Claritin and maybe normal service will resume later.
Did I mention that at the weekend we babysat for a Republican couple who had named one of their cats after Margaret Thatcher? I feel so unconnected with American politics that this sort of thing barely feels surreal, not even when followed by Al Gore on Saturday Night Live. I know that just because I'm not a citizen here and can't vote doesn't mean that I should regard everything political as mere spectacle but sometimes it feels like the only logical thing to do.
If you grow weary and ashamed of using the internet for blogs, porn and mp3s, why not get all antiquarian and download pdf copies of first editions of:
Whatever it is that's going around, I think I've got it. Symptoms: watery eyes, watery nose, watery brain; dull aching of the soul, non-specific headache and a general sense that the entire universe from the sub-atomic to the deep structure of galactic clusters is entirely wrong and designed to make me want to stay in bed all day....
LATER: Looks like TMFTMR has got it too. Blogging can be hazardous to your elf.
EVEN LATER: Oh, yeah -- and feel free to advertise your forthcoming Austin shows in the comment box, all you local theramin-manglin', Sun Ra lovin' feedback-freaks....
Most of the things I miss about England are things I didn't do when I was there but that have crystalised from half-hearted enthusiasms and stuff I was always putting off into lump-in-throat-inducing false memories. Like Sunday morning in bed with the papers. Coffee, croissants, orange juice, appropriate music and half a dozen sections from the Observer spread everywhere, cloud-dappled sunlight through the half-drawn curtains and the occasional intrusion of church bells.... Never happened in real life, of course, even if it does sound like the simpliest and laziest thing in the world right now. And it can't be replicated here, although we've got everything to hand but the newspaper. The Austin American-Stateman really doesn't cut it. When you have to plough through about four and a half pounds of adverts for Randalls, Best Buy, Mattress Firm and 35c off Scrubbing Bubbles Fizz-Its toilet cleaner coupons just to get to a review section that contains about three book reviews, a Frosty the Snowman colouring contest and a Dave Barry column you're sure you're read three times before, the languid mood has gone. And while I'm infinitely grateful for the online versions of the Guardian and Observer, it feels like work to be at a desk reading them -- and it's hard to get the true slobbering voyeuristic appreciation of a Nigel Slater article on what he's going to do with a goose this Xmas when there isn't a full page, full-colour photograph to go with it....
Uh, it sort of slipped my notice but I haven't written anything about AMN -- the Austin Music Network, which is "the only independent music channel in the world" or so they say. It's not something that has weighed on my mind, however, as I was only really reminded of the channel's existence when I read a couple of articles in the Statesman today about whether the $675,000 it gets from the city council each year is money well spent. I've never really sat down and deliberately watched it -- I might be flipping channels, catch a few seconds from a bunch of rowdy whelps like the Ends doing their Rezillos impersonation at Beerland or maybe a Spoon video and think hey, this could be good, but next up is inevitably half an hour in the company of some Van Morrison wannabe strumming an acoustic guitar at the Shady Grove.... There doesn't seem to be any schedule, just 24 hours a day of.... mostly dreary guitar-based music, n-th generation retreads of stuff that has long since had any passion, excitement or immediacy washed out of it. It all seems designed to reaffirm that there are a million bands in Austin and very few of them want to try anything challenging or new or even simply novel for the sake of it.
Predictable elitist music snob punchline: I guess I'm more AMM than AMN....
The 37thStreetXmasLights are now up in all their "keep Austin weird" glory. There's something deliciously mad about them, something that no official or municipal display could hope to match. This isn't a bunch of tired decorations dragged out of storage every year by the council and switched on by some Pop Idols reject -- like in Leeds, where Darius got to throw the switch this year. This is folk art with the usual whimsy and sentiment replaced by raw electricity and wildly over-the-top creativity. Each year it gets bigger and more inventive. Everything is covered in lights, houses, trees, cars, stuff you'd normally find in a garden, stuff you'd only find in a garden in Austin, stuff that has no reason being in a garden anywhere, all wrapped, draped and layered in thousands of psychedelic lights. It's a bit like an insane firework display where everything goes off at the same moment -- except that moment is frozen for a month. This year the display is dedicated to Roky Erickson, whose trust will benefit from donations.
(There's a long, rambling, near-estatic Austin American-Statesman article from 1999 here about the whole W. 37th Street spirit, which may also explain why I'd like to stick around this part of the city when we get around to buying a house.)
I've been neglecting the This Week's Fetish spot to the extent that it doesn't actually exist, but here's something that may or may not be the answer to all your submerged and repressed desires: Mellyloon.
The best site for balloon fetish popping pictures and videos. These girls like nothing better than to spend their time blowing up, overinflating and bursting their playful balloons.
The devotees have their own special language, of course:
Our first picture set has our old time favorites; Sherie, Mel and Trisha overinflating 24 inch Qualatexes and sitting on a 36 inch. Our next photoset has Lacyn putting the squeeze on a Unique. Lastly our Quicktime showcases Lena overinflating her Uniques in some unusual positions.
I wish, by the magic of the internet, that there was some archive of John Peel shows from the mid 70s to mid 80s. I'd love to hear some of the pre-punk stuff, back when the sessions were by wayward eccentrics like Ron Geesin, Lol Coxhill and, um, Elton John. I still remember the night in 1977 when he played nothing but punk, which seemed like a big deal at the time -- and I remember thinking Can he do it? Are there enough punk records to fill two hours? I wish I had that show on tape. I'm sure someone, somewhere has. God, that was 25 years ago.
Listening to a Kim Wilde compilation I picked up on e-bay for a couple of quid. It's her first two albums from 1981/82 with just the slightest rejigging in the running order and lacks the anticipated 20,000 word essay by someone like Greil Marcus or maybe Paul Morley explaining the dislocated poptastic anomie of the pouty one.
Hey, even from over here I can tell that it's that time of year again: John Peel's Festive Fifty. The last of these l*sts that makes me feel fondly nostalgic is from -- yikes! -- 1993. After which I either don't recognise the songs or have a recollection of not liking them one little bit. I guess me and current indie pop started to part our ways at that point. I went on listening to Peel but what he played and what got into the Festive Fifty didn't have that much in common unless it involved Mark E. Smith or David Gedge. I only recognise six titles from last year's list and that's only because they got stuck in my head by being so annoying.
We got a CD writer at the weekend, a remanufactured Iomega 16x10x40 USB/Firewall, which cost about as much as the cable did for my last burner a couple of years ago. Had to download a 14 megabyte patch so it would play nice with Windows 98, which was a chore seeing as we happen to be the last couple in America using dial-up and it took three attempts, each lasting more than an hour. It does seem that if you haven't got broadband here you're asking to be pointed out for ridicule and jeered at in public.
And rightly so, I'd better add, just in case refusal to go into debt to buy into the latest technology is regarded as detrimental to homeland security....
A chore. A post. A chore. A post. I'm not sure whether this regime has resulted in writing more entries or doing more chores, but it seems to be keeping me from lapsing into my usual mid-morning stupor, where the inability to decide what CD to play next leaves me in a whimpering, defeated heap.
But does tweaking the CSS for this page and sorting out the archives count as a chore?
I think the new year will be a good time to start an online diary again. Keep the blog for links, snippets and stuff that happens out in the big wide world to other people, with the diary in the background for my overblown sulks, half-arsed essays on the of being me and all the other loose baroque ramblings that the blog format tends to discourage.
Also I’ve dumped my counter/referral log doodad. I was spending far too much time fretting over the lack of visitors to this page, particularly the way the number of hits seemed to have drop by about 75% last week. It was always fun to boast of a 75% jump in visits but a 75% fall? Where's the fun in mentioning that? Was it something I said? Or didn't say? Was it because I didn't come up with anything wacky to write about Michael Jackson dangling kiddies off the balcony? So now I've scrapped that and am no longer affronted by the sheer indifference of the online world to my fine words and acerbic wisdom. I now have the freedom to feel that I am addressing thousands or devotees or just gibbering into the void as takes my fancy.
From the rough note towards my abandoned "An Ungrateful Limey's First Thanksgiving In America" booklength essay:
Thanksgiving... oh yeah, I was going to write about Thanksgiving, wasn't I? My first, a subject fit for mythic retelling. Gather round me, ya young pups, an' grampappy'll tell y'all the story of how he came to Americky an' feasted on pumpkin pie, candied yams and Fiddle Faddle. We hired the last thing with wheels at the local rental place on Wednesday morning and merged into the dense sea of SUVs on the route out by the airport and past Historic Bastrop and Smithville whose only claim to attention is that Hope Floats was filmed there (as they declare on billboards), through La Grange (another filmic reference, as this was where The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was located), crisscrossing the Colorado on State 71, then joining Interstate 90 at Columbus. But the trip from Austin to Houston no longer seems like some cinematic adventure to me now that we've done it several times. Eventually even the most impressionable of Englishmen will eventually tire of roadkill and buzzards, KFCs and IHOPs, churches the size of football stadiums and amusing anthromorphosized watertowers. Instead of the glories and strangeness of a new world all I see is a relentless succession of identical strip malls, flat and featureless with their identical Payless Shoes, American Nails, Radio Shacks and chiropodists, rolling by like the repeating background on a cheap cartoon. Stacey keeps nudging me awake because it's my job to keep her awake, to be more than just an inert lump in the passenger seat....
And so I enter my 1,970,000th week of unemployment, Austin-style. I'm still waiting for my accountant to shut down my company back in England so I can get the last ten grand out or whatever remains after the usual parasitical gnawings. Fah, phooey and bah. It's been raining all night and the festive lights around the window keep falling down. I managed to slice my nose while shaving on Saturday and yesterday had to deal with a roach the size of Drew Carey in the kitchen. And yet, and yet, and yet. I'm only a gnat's-pubic-hair-width away from total happiness. Even though I'm making no money we're getting by, although don't think I'm not racked with guilt about Stacey working five 'n' a half days a week to keep us in crackers 'n' dry martinis. If I got a job that paid anything like what a technical writer with fifteen years experience should be getting (according to the Austin branch of the Society of Technical Communicators) we'd be laughing. I applied for one of the few senior technical writing jobs I've seen advertised since moving here last week and the salary was up to $75,000. Which was nice, just a bit about the average according to the STC report, except it has rather killed my enthusiasm for filling in applications like the one I picked up at Book People a few weeks ago for a position that paid $6.00 an hour -- and they weren't expecting to have any vacancies for a while. There was a time when I thought it would be pleasurable to use the move to Austin to "downscale", take a job I enjoyed and live a more simple, less materialistic life, but six bucks an hour? A grumpy teen would turn that down for babysitting. And I'm betting I'm unlikely to get an interview for either.... I'm feeling remarkably defeatist this morning, but sometimes a good wallow in self-pity is as good a start to the day as anything else. Might clear my head and get me in the right frame of mind to do something....
Lists, lists, lists. Could this be the end of all useless information? But would you otherwise have known that a "growler is an iceberg between one and 5 metres above water"?
Now listening to Busoni's Piano Concerto, which makes me think of two hugely overweight men in dinner jackets wrestling on top of a grand piano that is rolling down the side of a snow-covered mountain. At least parts of it does. Felt the need for some bombastic European stroke high stroke dead white male culture after soiling my mind with a few minutes of MTV. There's really no new way to say how wretched MTV is, how steaming, stinking and degrading each sloppy dollop of it is. Whatever extremes of denigration you can think up someone probably said the same, or worse, ten years ago. The language of dismay was exhausted long before Carson Daly, or whatever that streak of nothingness is called, was fished out of the replicant vat.
I look back fondly on the six months or so I spent with my mind closed off to yoof culture, back when I attended piano recitals and orchestral concerts at the Barbican and RFH in London, when the debate would be about the hesistant rubato of the string section at the start of the third movement of Snodd's Third Concerto for Orchestra and Garden Hose rather than whether Kylie or J-Lo had the hottest butt, when I removed the plug from my TV set so I couldn't watch it. I so wanted to be grown up back then. What happened?
Starting the day with Aphex Twin's drukqs, another set of triggers to all sorts of real and imagined nostalgic twinges. A misunderstood album, panned and discarded when it came out and overdue for critical reappraisal by brainer bods than moi, the mix of languid schoolhall piano noodling and skittering zillion bpm insectoid drill 'n' bass seems to work perfectly for me now and I can hardly understand why I shared the general feeling of disapointment-bordering-on-hatred that prevailed when it came out last October.
It's raining again and I'm listening to Scott Walker's Scott 3, imagining a world where Walker had gone on putting out numbered albums every year instead of a "difficult" album every fifteen years. He'd be up to Scott 36 or so by now and it would take me all day to decide which one to play whenever I felt wistful and withdrawn in the most solitary-adolescent-romantic of moods....
A weird thing happens when I listen to albums like Scott 3. As well as the emotions triggered by the music itself I also find myself teased by memories of when I first heard the music together with a dubious recreation of the milieu in which the music was created. So with Scott 3 it's the real, personal, rather depressing early 90s (I came to Walker late, via the Boy Child compilation) combined with a dreamy, melancholic version of post-swinging London, 1969. Add to that the overpoweringly regretful, pensive music and lyrics and it's a surprise I can get through the first few tracks without bursting into tears....
What is wrong with me these days? How come I feel more saddened and angry about last night's Buffy being a repeat than I do about the vile excuse for a human being, HenryKissinger, being put in charge of the 9/11 investigation?
Okay, slap me with a stinky fish. I've only just discovered there is more to Book Slut than the blog. Which you can take as a pretty high recommendation for the blog as it alone usually satisfies my daily cravings for stuff about literature.
Marcello on the Bonzos -- inevitable, irresistible, and I'm already having to rethink the Neil Innes tracks on Keynsham which always seemed too private and sad to be coming from a group that featured exploding robots, trouser presses and songs about Lord Snooty in their line-up. Indeed, if any pop album warrants a booklength study it could be Keynsham -- the very British answer to Smile, where even the most throwaway track seems to contain the essence of some part of English "pop" culture, past, present or future.
Made it to the Austin Diarists monthly thing on Sunday, seeing as it was being held about 2 minutes walk away at the Spiderhouse. Didn't contribute much to the proceedings. Drank my coffee and tapped my foot arhythmically to Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" and much of My Bloody Valentine's decade old classic, Loveless, which is always nice to hear, although I suspect I was the only one amongst the gathering who thought so.
I'm still not used to flesh 'n' blood people talking earnestly about stuff like Journalcon and the Diarist Awards, these being things I found to be pretty risible right from the start. But things were different then. It was fun back then to be part of the awkward squad, who sneered and scoffed and parodied the fledgling communality of diarists. I've always played at being the outsider, the antisocial curmudgeon who saw whatever was developing in the late nineties as something that went entirely against my modus operandi, whatever that happened to be that day.
The trouble is I'm not writing enough these days to get my personality across in the Yes/No Interlude and I'm floundering between diarist and blogger, putting out little squibs that are too diffuse and linkless to be blog entries and too gnomic for diary entries. To the three readers who came along after Countdown to the Big Four Zero and Lifestyle Tips for the Dead I must come across as a near-catatonic pipsqueak with delusions far above his station. But I was a bigshot once. Coulda been a contender. My online diary was mentioned in the New York Times Magazine, reviewed in Details and I was interviewed live on New Zealand radio. A Canadian university paid me to use the first month or so's entries as course material -- I still have the cheque somewhere as it hardly seemed worth the effort to get it processed. I was in the first half dozen members of Open Pages when it started in 1996. I was washing my dirty laundry online when you young pups were--
But I sat there, saying nothing, staring out of the window....
Spent half an hour perusing The Imbecile's Guide to Cover Letters or whatever it is whilst I was away and discovered that I am doing so many things wrong with my job applications I might as well be stuffing them up the bottom of an angry bear. Did you know that you are supposed to drop the name of a mutual acquaintance in the first paragraph? Like:
Dear Sir, You know that obnoxious, sweaty guy who just got fired from the mailroom of your Boulder branch? Well, I once ran over his dog.
Failing that, a snappy quote never fails:
Perusing Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historia (De Smoot's 1732 edition, of course) the other evening, I came across a curiously fitting aphorism that I feel will open your eyes to the magnificence of my resume....
And you should always have a punchy, pro-active ending:
Tell you what, dude, let's do lunch next week. I'll give that hot little receptionist of yours a call or maybe just drop by with a couple of tacos and some beers so we can finalise the paperwork and sort out whose office I'll be taking over....
Maybe I exagerate a tad, but it's all new and disturbing stuff to me. Back in the UK I was used to emailing my CV to an agency with a single, standard paragraph. And I rarely spent more that a couple of weeks between contracts. Have I got to learn a whole new way of doing things here, just to be turned down for jobs paying a quarter of what I'm used to? Isn't there an easier way to get into the US workforce? Is there a secret handshake someone can show me?
The new Fox "reality" show, from the people who brought you Temptation Island, is Joe Millionaire, in which 20 single women fly to France in order to win the affection of a handsome American they believe to be worth $50,000,000, has a twist in the tail. He isn't really a millionaire. He probably isn't even called Joe. Gotta keep piling on those extra layers of humiliation for the contestants. If only they could have worked in a way to dump the women in vats of maggots while making them eat their own weight in freshly harvested pig's intestines (or vice versa) they would have the ideal early evening televisual entertainment.
Remember the days of TV shows where even if you didn't win you came away with something? Remember consolation prizes? "You didn't win the washing machine or the glamorous hostess trolley but no-one goes away empty-handed on this show! You take home a year's supply of Snurple, the shaving cream that's good to eat and keeps away the devil!" Consolation prizes? What loser days they were, suckers! These days the only things you take home is a broken heart, a stomachful of once-living things God didn't intend to be eaten, the hatred and/or contempt of half the nation, diminished dignity, ruined self-esteem and maybe the discovery that the interest rate on all those debts you had dreamed of paying off with your winnings has once again been increased because you were too busy weeping and retching in front of sneering co-contestants and millions of pizza munchers to get your last payment in on time.
Not only is Blogger behaving like a *******-ing *********-covered, *****-slurping, *******-sniffing, ****-resembling, *****-filled ****-bucket this rainyswept morn but my copy of Opera keeps crashing, so I'm not a happy blogging bunny. This may be an incentive to do something else....
This week's reading list -- if the Austin branch of the capitalist system reckons it can do without me I might as well kickstart my brain again and ween myself away from 37 daily repeats of Will and Grace and other mindnumbing distractions:
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.
