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.
Monday, April 29, 2002
Ding dong! The old Lileks is back, for one night at least. Instead of the ludicrous preening swagger he's been adopting for the last few months, he's returned to what I hope is his natural voice, the decent nerdy guy with the agreeable middlebrow life and values, happier to chill with his MST3K DVDs and Simpson collectibles than strut and bluster for the approval of the smug, reptilian farts at warblogger HQ. I'm hoping he's burnt out that weirdly masochistic streak he was exhibiting recently where he seemed to be calling down further terrorist atrocities just to be able to predict how callous the European response would be, getting a disturbing frisson from the prophetic rottenness of it all.
Timely article on Shirley Collins in the latest Wire - the sort of piece that makes me realise why this is the only music magazine I buy any more. I regret only discovering Shirley and Dolly Collins' work a couple of years ago with the reissue of Anthems in Eden. I had wanted to investigate British folk music but it was one of those things I'd always put off as what I'd heard was usually risible, ridiculous or a sort of rustic version of pub rock. I'd been reading stuff by people I trusted who had embraced folk in the same way as the latest freeform jazz, electronic glitch splutter or howling mad Japanese noise, finding in it something authentic and true, a working class voice of affirmation and dissent that connected with something spiritual and unembarrassingly British, etc... but nothing I'd heard even hinted at that, instead being the soundtrack for arran-sweatered ninnies comparing beards and specific gravities at real ale festivals, all "Lord Jasper went a courting-o with a hey nonny nonny non/fair thee well, pretty maid, and a codpiece for my master". Only when I heard Shirley Collins' amazingly unsentimentalvoice did I realise what they were on about. Unfortunately, except for the first side of the Incredible String Band.s Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, no other folk music has had the same impact, and Anthems in Eden (1969), along with the later, extremely melancholic and even betterLove, Death and the Maiden (1970) remain the only folk music in my collection to date....
One of the reasons why fans of the most freakish electronic music are initially drawn to Shirley and Dolly Collins' albums could well be the unorthodox instrumentation. The sackbuts, crumhorns and pipe organs have the same buzzy, wayward warmth and lack of lousy rock 'n' roll baggage as the analogue synths we old school electrogeeks go for. (I have a suspicion that in prog rock's darkest hours some bunch of gandalfs tried to marry medieval instruments with rock - the name Gryphon springs to mind for some reason - but I don't want to think about that let alone investigate.)
It's late in the day, but I just stumbled across this: The CAAT report on The UK Arms Trade to Saudi Arabia, something I need to read right now. The US wouldn't sell the Saudis arms in the mid to late 80s so Thatcher and her gang did, happy to close their minds to any of the consequences in order to get "the biggest sale ever of anything to anyone".
Right - the layout of this thing looks okay to me now, the 2001 archive pages are up and most of the links seem to be working. So I can start this thing in earnest now....
It may not be the most dependable blowhard detector in existence, but I find that anyone who uses the term "chattering classes" can usually be dismissed as a pompous fool and their opinions safely ignored. It's a term I hadn't seen used seriously for decades, cropping up only in knockabout parodies of gin-sozzled Daily Telegraph reading colonels in bathchairs and the spittle-flecked rancid rants of the Sun's ludicrous Richard Littlejohn, until I started reading warblogs. Nuff said.
Just phoned the electrician to see if he could do any of the jobs he was supposed to do months ago and explain why the shower went bang yesterday morning and he sez he can't do anything just yet as he's laid up with the gout. I supose the class system in this country can't be so bad if electricians can get such an aristocratic ailment as the gout.
Ill again. Felt like death last night, and spent most of the evening in a hot bath, shivering like crazy when I got out. Why? Emailed in sick this morning as I'd woken up in a mansize puddle of cold sweat with a temperature of over a hundred. I've been feeling listless and headachy all week, but now I think I definitely have some form of ague, or maybe the grippe. Pray for me.
But it's a lovely day outside. Not a cloud in the sky. The old geezers across the road are stripped to the waist and already lobster-red, broiling themselves in deckchairs....
A new countdown: 57 days (aproximately) until we leave England and start a new life, or two new lives, under the baking Texan sun. All the paperwork is done and my immigration visa is filed away with my chest X-ray, passport and vacination record after our mostly painless visit to the US Embassy in London last week. 1,400 years of accumulated books, records, CDs, magazines, videos, kitchen utensils and clothes now need to be whittled down to fill my portion of a reasonably sized shipping crate. Fortunately I don't have much attachment to mere stuff and the only thing that stops me from chucking everything out for the binmen is the thought that someone might pay big money for it on eBay.
57 days - barely time to steamclean the carpets, fix the shower and find a new home for the chipmunks. And I'm sure there's a list of 100 Things To Do Before You Leave England somewhere - and I've only done 7 of them... all those folk customs unexperienced, lordly follies unseen, lighthouses unclimbed, awardwinning countryside toilets unvisited, local delicacies untasted. "Eeh, lad, yer won't get a plate o' pickled cow's cheek like this abroad!"
It warms the cockles of my once rotten heart to see Charles Stross getting nominated for a Hugo and getting lots of avid attention for his series of stories in Asimov's. I remember Charlie from the days when he would turn up at the Leeds SF Group meetings - or more accurately the drunken stupor of hypochondria, self-pity, complaint and ire that the Leeds SF Group had devolved into - looking for Interzone editors, assistant editors, editorial assistants or slushpile trawlers to berate. Once it was obligatory for science fiction fans to want to write the stuff but we were a determinedly perverse bunch of curmudgeons who not only didn't want to write SF but didn't want to read it either, and were pretty dismissive of science fiction fandom all together. So Charlie didn't really fit in and we took the piss out of his (and his curious acolytes) something rotten. But you had to admire his gall in cornering anyone connected with Interzone and demanding to know why his latest manuscript had been rejected. His persistence and self-belief were both heroic even when his stories were appearing in unbelievably shoddy fanzines and his name became legendary as the archetypal wannabe SF writer, churning out entire novels while his fellow aspirants struggled over dreary 500 word mood pieces. Even before he'd sold a word his name was being dropped in The Face by Colin Greenland as the future of science fiction and inventor of cyberpunk's successor, "technogoth". This was all quite a time ago and I lost touch with the whole scene for a while. Only when I had the whim to read some SF again recently and found two of his stories had been included in the (unfortunately named) Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14 and stumbled across his blog was I brought up to date with his progress.
It's an uneasy sensation when someone you know, or knew, achieves their ambition. Especially when you recall being routinely cynical about (a)that ambition, (b)their chance of achieving it and (c) their desire in wanting to achieve it. It brings up all sorts of re-evaluations, like your own ambitions, the ones you gave up on, the ones you still cling to, maybe even the ones you made come true and then realised were silly, wrongheaded or mere distractions....
Turns out I have an example of Ian Duncan Smith's sister's vocal stylings in my CD stack - Guido & Maurizio de Angelis's "Goodbye My Friend" from the film Il Cittadino Si Ribella and collected on the pretty damn great Crippled Dick compilation of 70s Italian cop film soundtracks, Beretta 70.
I've spent far too much time reading warblogs over the last few months, but now I think I'm over that masochistic and joyless fixation and can go back to reading fun blogs like everlasting blort, misterpants and bonnieblog. Yes, the blogging nu-right might think it's big and clever to blame Europe and/or Bill Clinton for everything, think Iraq and Michael Moore should be nuked and accuse anyone who doesn't think Arial Sharon is the world's nicest man of being a rabid anti-Semite, but who cares about them? They don't have links to stuff like this, this or this do they?
The title for this thing comes from a track on Hatfield and the North's 1975 album, The Rotters' Club, but it was originally a segment of Take Your Pick, a gameshow that ran on ITV between 1955 and 1968. The host of the show ("your quiz inquisitor", as he was announced) was the curious Michael Miles, whose name features in the lyrics of Hatfield and the North's only single, "Fitter Stoke takes a Bath". The Rotters Club is also the title of Jonathan Coe's most recent novel, a beautiful, tricksy and somewhat inconclusive work about 'growing up in the mid 70s. I may have to expand this paragraph as Hatfield and the North, Jonathan Coe and Michael Miles all need going into in a lot more depth.
Three good articles in three days on Israel and Palestine in the Guardian:Jonathan Freedman; Timothy Garton Ash;Michael Ignatieff. Must be time for a Seumas Milne piece or else the league of europhobic warbloggers will have to start looking elsewhere to have their kneejerk prejudices confirmed....
Bush sez Ariel Sharon is a "man of peace" and "Arafat did condemn terrorism". And some bozos in this country still say Americans don't have a sense of irony....
Pay attention: If you encounter Semi-naked women rolling around in paint and raw fish then it's the highbrow world of early 60s performance art, currently being revived at the Whitechapel. However, if it's semi-naked women are rolling around in paint and custard it's an issue of Splosh magazine and lowbrow perverted filth.
This temporary minimal blog replaces whatever else I was attempting to do elsewhere, and will probably run until we've moved to Texas and got ourselves sorted out and I have the time and inspiration to do something a bit more ambitious and grandiose.
I've also taken down my old site as it was showing up on Google under my real name - despite not having my real name anywhere on the site. While it's cool to know that I'm the number one Nigel Richardson, it makes my anonymous and anagramatic alter-ego, Nicholas Grinder, curmudgeonly online diarist, redundant....
A quote from Ricky Gervais in Home entertainment (Friday Review, page 23, April 12) which mentioned a Bob Dylan song allegedly entitled "If You See A Sailor" was mangled by an editing error. The track, from the album Blood On The Tracks, is called "If You See Her Say Hello".
You really need a plummy, affected accent to make "If You See Her Say Hello" sound like "If You See A Sailor". Or maybe just a thing about jaunty matlots....
Meanwhile: David Brooks' Among the Bourgeoisophobes in the Weekly Standard has to be the bonkers rightwing tract of the month for the spittle-flecked "Blame Europe" brigade. Subtitled "Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel", it pulls no punches in pointing the finger of guilt at... Flaubert and Stendal. By being a bit sniffy about "grocers and their ilk", these early 19th century aesthetes brought on everything bad that has infected civilization ever since, the bastards.
