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.
Friday, January 31, 2003
I wonder how many of us who like -- or at least don't run screaming from the room when we hear it -- modern classical music (you can put any of those words in quotes if you're so inclined) were introduced to the concepts of atonality, discord, lack of conventional resolution, electronics and generally weird sounds by science fiction movies from the fifties and sixties? 2001's use of Penderecki and Ligetti, Planet of the Apes' Varese-influenced score by Jerry Goldsmith and Louis and Bebe Barron's homemade synthesizer work on Forbidden Planet doubtlessly opened up more ears than any amount of early exposure to Stockhausen, Boulez and Cage. If this is true, the current preference for gawdy, predictable orchestral bombast by the likes of John Williams, James Horner and Danny Elfman is bad news.
Do I feel a rush of heady nostalgia reading blogentriesabout London being brought to chaotic standstill by snow yesterday? Of course I do. The weather's going to hit 70F here today and it's hard to remember what a real winter feels like unless I open the icebox. Do I miss it? Not exactly. I sometimes find it hard to explain the difference between feeling nostalgic for something and missing it. I can wallow fondly for hours in memories of times that would bore me to tears if I had to relive them. But there is something appealing about trudging home through a frozen city as night falls, something heroic and elemental. If there's no-one around the boredom and solitude can induce hours of deep, uninterupted thought. If there are people about then there's the rare chance for communality. Nothing opens up the British to strangers like weather-based adversity. I'm sure there are shy guys all over the UK who treasure the arrival of "artic conditions" because it means they might just get the chance to exchange a few words with a pretty girl at the bus stop after they've been freezing there for three hours....
Last week's Private Eye -- the issue that arrived here today --turned up Psychoderelict, a mostly forgotten concept album by Pete Townshend from the early 90s that centers around a faded, jaded rockstar and his long distance relationship with a 14 year old girl who sends him letters and nude photographs that reveal she has four nipples. It turns out the girl is actually a scheming journalist -- the pictures were of her when she was 12 -- and the whole thing turns out to be a plot to "out" him as a monster in the tabloids. However it also revives his career. (There's also some nonsense about a future virtual reality network called, as it always was in those days, the Grid, and some sort of revelation about the universe being made up of harmonics or something like that.) You'll find the dialog and lyrics here and the storyline here. It's all rather tragic stuff in every posible way.
Most reviews of the album at the time didn't mention the paedophilia aspect -- Christgau lumped it in with other dopy "cyberpunk" albums of that year like Billy Idol's Cyberpunk, and Rolling Stone -- gosh, whoddathunkit -- gave it a respectful three and a halfstars.
On the album, the faded rockstar's career is revitalized. In real life you can get Psychoderelict for $2.57....
You don't think there are enough magazines about the lovely world of celebrities to read while waiting at the supermarket checkout? Well, here are some new ones that might be coming along: Snap, Cottage, Haven, Flash and Wink. I'm sure all these titles existed in the 50s (Wink certainly did) and either had some Bettie Page lookalike on the cover looking bemused as some incident with a puppy, kitchen appliance or clumsy workman exposed her stocking tops or else contained the sort of vintage muscle photography that is still getting Pee Wee Herman into trouble.
Being a newcomer here, a shiny-faced immigrant to the land of the free, I didn't have a clue what to expect of the president's State of the Union address last night. I did however have a suspicion it wouldn't actually be about the state of the union. I managed to stay conscious all the way through and realised by the end that it was just the same old guff you'll always get when you give a politician in power the chance to speak uninterupted for an hour -- a few excuses for why the things he said would be achieved last year weren't and a list of things he says will happen in the future but probably won't. Well, Iraq will probably be invaded and there'll be tax breaks a'plenty for the rich but hydrogen-powered cars? I can see Bush's oil baron buddies having a good chortle at that.
Being from a tax and spend culture I need someone to explain to me how all the good things he promised, like fighting against pollution, AIDS in Africa, soaring health care costs etc are going to be funded when the mythical "family of four with an income of $40,000" will "see their federal income taxes fall from $1,178 to $45 per year". And there's a war and maybe ten years of occupancy in the Middle East to pay for as well. Am I missing something obvious? Is there a magical money-making machine in the basement of the Whitehouse? Is it somehow accepted practice to saddle future generations with monumental debts to boost rating today? Or am I a simple gullible clod fresh off the boat for thinking that any of these promises will be delivered? "Because of those tax breaks, the faltering economy and the war on terrorism, some economists estimate we’ll have deficits of $300 billion a year for the foreseeable future," says TomPaine.com. And that was before the anti-pollution, anti-AIDS announcements were made.
I'm still bemused by the strange rules of what can and cannot be shown or said on American TV. How come you can show young women eating a foot and a half of horse's rectum at 7.30 in the evening but bleep the word "asshole" even after midnight?
So remind me -- all those lefties who said it was all about the oil were cynical, callous fools with their outdated litany of anti-capitalist drivel, right? Right? US buys up Iraqi oil to stave off crisis.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "all", "about" and "the oil", I guess....
Oh this is good stuff: this is the post-punk compilation (1978-82) I've come to yearn for over the last few years and now need more than ever. All the records I loved but never got around to buying because it seemed like John Peel would always be playing them, like the Native Hipsters' "There Goes Concorde Again" and all those I did buy but left behind somewhere (Scritti Politti's "Skank Bloc Bologna"). My golden age, when new music mapped my brain to the world and vice versa and I didn't feel the need or urge to write anything about music because it was all there in the music and didn't need explaining.
Don't try calling -- I've got some downloading to do....
It was a bit disconcerting today to look on the web for information about a company I worked for at the end of the 80s and find no trace of it anywhere except on an online copy of my old CV/resume....
I mentioned recently my regret that the Daily Mail didn't have a web presence, and how because of this I was being deprived of a regular encapsulation of everything about England I dislike. Oddly, the Femail supplement of the paper has a website, probably because the Mail regards the internet as something frivolous for the little lady of the household to dabble with when she's finished checking that the maid, au pair and cleaning lady have done their chores, and while hubby is down at the golf club setting the world to rights and chuntering on about the days when a fellow could stroll down the streets without being set upon by darkies, homosexualists and women's libbers. Even more oddly, the only link I could find to the old school Daily Mail content is an archive of Peter Hitchens columns. Peter Hitchens is the ex-Marxist brother of Christopher (who ought to be speaking to his lawyers about this) and quite deliciously bonkers, able to churn out stuff like this:
We are the victims of a silent putsch which has installed a Government and a state machine wholly alien to us, which does not like us or respect us, which views our morals, traditions and opinions as a quaint nuisance to be sneered at and suppressed.
by the yard. Unfortunately his outpourings alone aren't enough to stand in for the whole Daily Mail experience. He's too sincere and driven by his own weird vision of righteousness, and its only because the Daily Express was taken over by a pornlord that he has found himself at the Mail. He's weird, hateful and rightwing but not really representative of the the weird, hateful, rightwingness of the newspaper. In some ways he's too weird, in others not weird enough. He has a sort of internal consistency that ties all his feverish, paranoid pronouncements together into a worldview that is even more puritanical and rigid than the Mail's. What he thinks of being bundled online with Femail's Spring fashion guides, tips on losing weight and Zoe Ball and Fatboy Slim stories can only be guessed at....
(Olav wrotes about a couple of Hitchen's recent pieces on Friday -- but he doesn't have unique link IDs for his posts so you'll have to do a bit of delving.)
That's right, look impressed. I've just discovered through NTK that Richard Herring has a blog or online diary or whatever we're calling these things this week. Just been clicking through and it warms the cockles of my curmudgeonly heart. And there can't be many online diaries that can go from whining about having a fifty quid bike stolen to an entry about failing to make Elton John and Posh Spice laugh with jokes about autopederasty....
"That's the beauty of this country - the right to free speech, you can say what you want."
Tony Blair after a student was thrown out of a Labour Party meeting by officials and police for shouting "Why aren't you listening to the public?" at him. (Daily Mirror)
Another peek into the seething snakepit of this thing's stats shows that I'm getting about the same number of hits from people looking for pictures of Avril Lavigne's bare feet as for pictures of Dizzy Rascal. And while it's good to find people out there still interested in Mahogany Brain, Strawberry Switchblade and Jacques Brel they're inevitably outnumbered by those who think this is the place to come for all their Travis Tritt and Cletus Judd requirements.
Someone arrived at this blog by searching for "all the things she said" guitar tab. You have to admire the singlemindedness of anyone whose reaction to this song (or the video) is "hmmmm, I'd love to learn the guitar chords for this". But for all I know this could be a staple for the buskers on Tottenham Court Road underground station already.
Finally got around to reading the Brian Eno piece in Time: To this European, America is trapped in a fortress of arrogance and ignorance and find myself agreeing with most of it. (It's possible that this is the sort of thing Harold Pinter thinks he going to write when he sits at his desk - but when Lady Antonio gets back from KwikSave with the cans of Kestrel and baked bean pizzas he's kneedeep in spittle and bile and she has to get the mop and bucket out again.) I've been a bit dismissive of Eno ever since he stopped wearing eyeshadow and zebraskin platform boots and started producing albums with serious musicians (the presence of Phil Collins on his early, good stuff has always been a puzzle for musicologists) and regard most of what he's been involved with since the "RAF (Red Army Faction)" single he did with Snatch back in 1978 and the No New York album as a waste of his curious anti-talent, but this is the sort of thing left of centre celebs ought to start using as a template for their public pronouncements from now on. He doesn't say anything new, but he does get from the begining to the end without any idiotic digressions, spurious logic jumps, personal jibes, unsupported conspiracy theories or attempts at humour, which makes the piece almost unique in the genre. Good on ya, Bri.
Got my first introduction to the American workplace over the last two days, about eleven hours of reformatting civil engineers' resumes for chump change and bus fare. When you haven't had a nibble from the countless applications sent out for jobs for which you have fifteen years experience over the previous six months you have to take whatever's going, no matter how brief and meaningless, show willing, ride a couple of smelly buses out into the middle of nowhere and still end up having to phone for a taxi because once you leave downtown and campus you're in Texas, where it's just morally unacceptable that anyone would try to go more than 50 yards without a car.
With clodhopping deep significance the bus took me past the Capitol and detoured around Congress where they were preparing for the Inauguration malarky. Nice to see all that Republican pomp and splendor and read how "companies with high-stakes interest in what goes on in the Capitol and lobbying firms that represent such companies ponied up $1.26 million of the $1.5 million budgeted for the event" when you're riding a smelly bus to a temp job in the middle of nowhere. Oh yes, times are tight.
Jeez, you know I love it here -- there are robins, woodpeckers and cardinals, bluejays and mockingbirds in the trees outside the window as I type, squirrels scurrying along the powerlines and the sky is the blue of deep eternity, but a chap can't live off fresh air forever....
"That George Bush is an absolute buggering rotter," you can imagine him telling his wife, Lady Antonia, over breakfast. "All those Yanks are. Think they can trample all over the world in their big boots and nasty tanks. Well they've gone too far. And it's about time I wrote a poem and put them in their ruddy place."
"Now, now, dear, don't over-exert yourself. Don't force the muse. And if you don't want that last chipolata, I'll take it..."
"Don't try to stop me, my lady. I know my poetic gift is not something to be used lightly but it's time someone took a stand. And as the most famous leftwing firebrand in the literary world it'll have to be Old Harry."
"Mind the scrambled egg, dear."
"A couple of dozen lines of blank verse ought to be enough. Bring those flaming warlords to their knees. Show 'em who they're messing with. I'm Harold Pinter, you know. The masses need a man like me to show them the way, you see. My muse will not be denied!"
"I know dear. Now you've got ketchup all over on the tablecloth...."
I'm sorry. You know I'm a tolerant fellow but I have my limits. I try to be a good liberal, put up with a lot of rubbish because it would let the side down if I snickered. So I can usually put up with left-leaning celebrities who seem to think that mouthing words behind a camera or knowing a couple of guitar chords gives them an understanding of world events that we mortals lack -- and what's more ,that it is their duty to give us the benefit of their celebrity brains. But even I have to draw the line at Harold Pinter.
You would think that being a writer would at least give Pinter an edge on those whose access to the media is due to their prettiness or sheer ubiquity, but I think it can safely be said that Pinter proves time and time again that any well-known figure in any field is as likely to come out with slack rubbish as anyone else. Pinter's anti-Americanism has always been tedious and embarrassing. It's the snide, heavy-handed sarcasm of a teenager who's just discovered his dad votes Conservative and rarely amounts to more than namecalling and secondhand jibes. It conflates America into a single entity, a boogieman that can only be dealt with by screaming at it hysterically. And he seems to have no sense of his own ridiculousness or realises that no-one on the left can take seriously anyone married to "Lady Antonia"....
I'd like to believe the Guardian only printed this nonsense to infuriates the right. I'm sure all the blogging prigs and blowhards have already unloaded their fabulous humour all over it by now. Laughing Boy Lileks will have taken a break from stroking his Simpson collectibles and browbeating adenoidal youths in Best Buy, Andrew Sullivan will be wondering which of his hilarous "awards" to bestow on him. Instapundit will have quoted someone else's hearty quips and tagged "Indeed" onto the end. Well knock yourself out. But nobody will be gasping in indignation as you daringly "fisk" another "idiotarian". We all thought he sucked long before you did....
Finished Peter Tinniswood's Hayballs (1991) last night. A quick read, due to Tinniswood's reluctance to extend his paragraphs for more than a sentence, or write sentences that were more than brief declarative statements. It's hard to tell if this was a conscious poetic style, paring away the superfluous and decorative, or just a way of writing that allowed him to turn his radio plays into novels and vice versa without too much extra effort. Sometimes it works and his books seem to fit perfectly into a very British genre of grim bucolic tragi-comedy where wasted and thwarted lives of meagre subsistence are redeemed by the almost random intrusion of enchantment, happiness or simple self-awareness. But in his later books -- well, the couple I've read -- both the prose and the storylines are stripped back too far and almost all that remains are stereotypes of bumpkins and toffs, sluts and spinsters, trainspotters and senile old codgers. The only real moments of poignancy and grim comedy are those that hark back to the earthy magic realism of I Didn't Know You Cared, A Touch of Daniel and Except You're A Bird. Start with those if you can find them.
Here's a review I put on Amazon two years ago and forgot all about until someone just sent me an e-mail mentioning it....
Beat at Cinecitta Volume One -- Various Artists (Crippled Dick)
These days most film music is dross, pure and simple. Either a glib emote-by-numbers dirge by those gurning pensioners, Elton John or Phil Collins or a surging, mock symphonic "Star Wars" rip-off. But once, in a country not too far away, film music was sexy, fun and wild, a vivid cartoonish mix of whatever took the composer's fancy that week and seemed halfway appropriate. It rocked, it teased, it made you want to walk into a casino with a rakish grin and a bad girl on each arm....
Crippled Dick's BEAT AT CINCECITTA series rescues this music from the vaults, packages it wonderfully and brings it to you just when you need it most. There's nothing around today that can touch the music on this first collection for vividly evoking a world of mad glamour, excitement and fun. You'll probably never see the movies these tracks are taken from, but that doesn't matter. Ten seconds into the first track, "Iena Sequence" by Roberto Pregadio, you'll be grinning and seeing yourself speeding through the backstreets of Naples in an Alpha Romeo with a sex kitten squirming in the passenger seat and a Walther PPK in your pocket. And you won't stop smiling until your face starts to hurt.
The music, with its twangy guitars, doot-doot-doo vocals, sensual strings, discordant horns and -- well, just about everything but the kitchen sink percussion, will take you to another, more life-affirming place. Listen to it on headphones and everything around you will change to fit the music and make your the star of the wildest, sexiest movie the 60s never produced.
another from the same day....
Start Breaking My Heart -- Manitoba (Leaf)
Although nothing revolutionary, Manitoba's Dan Snaith (a classically trained pianist and mathematician, but don't be scared away by that) takes all your favourite beeps, glitches and icecream van chimes and sculpts them into the sort of charming, twitchy electronica that will keep anyone happy until Aphex Twin, Plaid and Boards of Canada get around to releasing new albums. There are a few stretches that sound like Cubase on 4/4 autopilot but then the whole thing will kick off into a wonky Sun Ra riff or subside into tinkling, summery, half-heard children's voices and the sort of electric piano figures last heard on some mid-70s Matching Mole or Hatfield and the North album. Which is nice.
As with the best (and worst) of this kind of electronica, Manitoba layers skittering high velocity beats against snatches of melancholic and unexpected melody, music box rhythms and almost subliminal but evocative intrusions of real life sounds. When it works it's playful, engaging and joyous and even when it doesn't you know it'll change into something new in about 15 seconds.
The only reason I wrote these two reviews was idiot greed. You see, I must have been drunk or something at the time but somehow I didn't see the words "Earn a chance to" in the "Write the first review of this item. Earn a chance to win a £50 gift certificate" thingie that appears on the pages for unreviewed items. I really must have been in an otherworldly mental state where I could believe Amazon would hand out that kind of dosh for every first review that was a bit more thoughtful that "This album f**kin' rules, d00d!" What a sap....
I do read the increasingly infrequent comments left on this blog, you know. Which is how I came across this fine piece on John Franklin Bardin and can also recommend it's author's blog, Hot Buttered Death.
I wish the Daily Mail could drag itself out of the 15th century and get online as I rather miss its splenetic, spluttering vileness. It can encapsulate almost everything I hate about England in a paragraph, so an entire issue can get me almost feverish. It wallows in its own petty, priggish, hatefulness, mired in a vision of a Little England that never existed and where the most important thing was that everyone knew their place. This comes from this morning's Wrap, the Guardian's daily email thing:
The Mail takes apart a recent life satisfaction study and summarises it for the benefit of readers. "Where are you in the happiness stakes?" the paper asks. "Tall and attractive rightwing Protestants who attend church twice a week and have satisfying marriages are among the happiest of us", apparently. Gardening helps, too. "Well-educated Catholic occasional churchgoers" come second. But no regular Mail reader will be surprised to learn that the really unhappy people are "short, unhealthy, atheist leftwingers, who earned a university degree but are now middle-aged and unemployed in a prosperous area."
Far be it from me to join in with the sarcastic masses who regularly point fun at every aspect of the New York Times' popular music coverage, but exactly what kind of qualification is "longtime observer of the English pop scene"? And can I put it on my resume?
The servile "I am not worthy" routine when linked to by superior blogs is always tiresome, and I managed to refrain from doing it when The Church of Me recently included The Yes/No Interlude in its blogroll. But I see it's now been added to The Rittenhouse Review's blogroll and feel I have to say something. Like, um, sorry to all those folk coming here expecting to find asskickingly substantial left o' centre commentary and useful linkage to essential stuff that will help bring about a better, kinder, fairer world where no-one uses "fisk" as a verb and anyone who uses the term "blogosphere" gets a crate of wet fish down their pants. So, um, sorry. My heart's in the right place but my brain is only firing fitfully these days and besides I'm still in limbo between cultures -- trying to come to terms with the American psyche while retaining a grip on what I left behind in England. Hey ho.
FRESH PLUS GIRL from the great white North. Talked about produce, your hair golden like potatoes. Nice thighs, did you steal my wallet? Coffee sometime?
You: dark, long, lean waitress. Me: sweatpants, cross eyed and moles. Sorority girls bombed the washroom, you deodorized, thanks. Irish coffee? Your place or my moms?
The personal ads in the Yorkshire Evening Post were never like these....
More punk nostalgia from the Austin Chronicle, Sublett, Moser, et al, inspired by the Clash this time. (Did you know the "Rock The Casbah" video was filmed here?) But there's also a letter from "an old geezer" complaining that last week's piece on the Sex Pistols in San Antonio was "a self-serving group reminiscence by Chronicle cronies". Which it was, but what's not to like about that sort of thing? It's a free paper and that sort of pop culture anecdotage fills the pages between the Garbage Collection Announcements and the grippingly surreal, haiku-like human interest nibblets of A Shot in the Dark quite nicely.
Oh goodie -- Resonance FM has a live audiostream that sounds okay even over dial-up. See what you've missing so far today. Apparently it's being featured on The Richard and Judy Show even as I type this. Be sure to make a date for next 7pm next Tuesday, when Marcello Carlin will be discussing "The Feminisation of Noise", but it's all intriguing stuff.
The weather buffoons on all the local TV stations -- KTBC, KVUE, KXAN, KEYE, News 8 -- are palpitating with excitement because the temperature dropped below freezing point during the night for the first time here in Austin for about 1,872,625 years. But they still seem to resent being excluded from all the fun when they see weather reporters from other states all bundled up and reporting from beneath three feet of snow. They try to make their suggestions about bringing houseplants in and remembering your gloves sound as urgent as the blizzard warnings from way up north.
Will Hodgkinson joins London's strangest radio station in today's Guardian:
There is a man on the radio who is playing a record backwards. When the disjointed lurches of sound come to an end, he makes his introduction to the track he has just played in a voice that sounds as if it was recorded backwards, placing the emphasis on all the wrong syllables. The man is Reverso Mondo, and absolutely everything about his show, Xollob Park, is the wrong way round. Repeats come earlier in the week than the original airings, and the first show ever broadcast was of course the last, when he said his goodbyes. It is all part of Resonance FM, the strangest radio station in Britain.
Nothin' to say today, babes, except to point you in the direction of Invinciblegirl's latest rant, where she refers to Entertainment Tonight as "the giant dildo of media adoration" -- as perfect a phrase as the English language is capable of, if you'll excuse the dangling doo-dad.
Further steps towards the de-weirdification of Austin: Sound Exchange is closing at the end of the month. A sad tale of huge rent increases and a shifting market. I'm sure it'll make a great location for a new Starbucks, once they've painted over the Daniel Johnson artwork on the wall outside....
Yesterday's Times Online had their version of the sort of space filling articles you get in GQ or Esquire about the thing you should do before you're thirty.(Via It Makes No Difference...) Being ostensively more highbrow it concentrated on cultural essentials rather than the usual: "34. Commit multiple unnatural sex acts with identical twins in a jacuzzi filled with egg nog on top of a runaway train in a thunderstorm. 35. Punch your boss. 36. Own a tie." Of course you have to wonder how many people under 30 would give a damn what John Bayley or Beryl Bainbridge had to recommend, or that twit out of Erasure. But I know you want my list.... Book:The Recognitions by William Gaddis -- one of those books you may never get the time for if you don't start before you're thirty. Probably ought to read all the big Russian novels too for the same reason. You get to a certain age and just looking at a book like The Possessed or Dead Souls makes you feel tired. Building: Here I agree with Meredith Etherington-Smith's choice -- The Sir John Soane Museum in London. It's like a temple to the restorative, calming power of high art and tradition tucked away in the middle of Holborn. If you could sit on the furniture and take the books from the shelves I would have spent much of the late 1980s there, turned willfully away from what passed then as the modern world. Film:A Matter of Life and Death by Powell and Pressburger. Astonishes me afresh every time I see it or read anything about it. Or do I mean Kangeroo Jack? Music: Schnittke's Concerto grosso no. 1. It's not my favourite piece of music or even my favourite piece of Schnittke's but it was the first modern composition I enjoyed without having to work at, that opened my ears to classical music as a living thing. A "loccus classicus of polystylisticism" indeed. Painting: I'm a sucker for willfully obscure religious imagery of the 15th century Italian school and still go all weak and woozy when I stand in front of Botticelli's Mystic Nativity at the National Gallery. Performance: How can you recommend a performance when it has been and gone? But if you could get into a time machine and go back to any live performance I've seen then it would be either PJ Harvey live at the Town and Country in Leeds, around the time of To Bring You My Love (1995) or Gidon Kremer playing Schnittke at the South Bank, London at the end of the 80s.
The Otis Fodder 365 Days project started odd and continues thusly, although with a dial-up connection I've having problems keeping up with his uploads. They're more like wonky vignettes of life than the "incredibly strange pop" I expected, tableaux of constricted normality where suddenly music and song permit the things that can't easily be said to somehow be sung. My favourite so far is Elvis Casio, although I suspect that without the background information supplied it would just be another criminally bad Elvis impersonator. Read the story behind the performance however and it's an all-American tragicomedy, a family drama, an all-encompassing satire on pointless consumerism and the degraded iconography of popular culture.... all that good stuff, in an 8 minute sound clip.
Woefully neglected authors with three names with posthumous websites number two: John Franklin Bardin. The Deadly Percheron and The Last of Philip Banter are two of the books I judge all mystery novels, from the hard-boiled to the whimsical, by -- and to date they have nearly all been found lacking. These two books are like a cross between Jim Thompson and Julian Symons, somehow combining the obsessive, unhinged grip of noir with the inventive, controled inteligence of the locked room mystery, taking the best elements from each -- which in theory ought to be, and in most cases is, impossible. The only book I could compare these two with is Fredrick Brown's The Screaming Mimi. (Which has been out of print for over twelve years now, so it's probably not a very useful comparison....)
Shame to read, via TMLTMF of the death of Peter Tinniswood, whose books I Didn't Know You Cared, A Touch of Daniel and Except You're A Bird captured a sort of Northern surrealism that was mad, poetic, real and spooky and has stayed with me since I read them a good twenty-odd years ago. Time to read some of his other books, I suspect....
I feel the urge to write something substantial about My Bloody Valentine's Loveless to get myself back on track and away from some of the stuff I've been writing about lately, but what remains to be said? There are over 215 reviews on Amazon.com, which leads me to suspect that every permutation of soaring, blissful, crunching, enfolding, vast, fractured, smudged, oceanic, surging, exalted, prismatic, evanescent, languid, hallucinatory, fractal, dissolving, engorged, throbbing, delirious, and ecstatic has already been tried. Was it the last major advance in white guitar rock? Has everything since been little more than restatement or retro? But I should be able to find something to write. I didn't give much attention to the band when they were active but right now Loveless successfully stands in for about 95% of the albums I bought in the late 80s and early 90s and left behind in England. I love it to pieces even though I was one of Those Who Thought Their Copy Was Warped when I first played it.
Was I being prematurely anti-Lileks last year? I stopped reading him and most other joylessly rabid rightwing bloggers at some point in the autumn when I realising that I was wasting valuable time that could be spend browsing for information about forgotten bands like Bogshed, the Desperate Bicycles and Girls At Our Best or trying to find a fetish that was stranger than overinflating balloons -- but the terrible and soul-dampening truth is that these bloggers don't just disappear when you stop reading them. They go on, spewing it out for their unpleasant fans. But today I dipped back into that crazy world and found smart, funnyliberalbloggers have been having a go at some of his most recent sanctimonious nincompoopery and it warms the cockles of my heart.
Oh, and what about the Friends of the Swastika who believe the damage done to the swastika's original symbolic worth can and should be ameliorated? Can the symbol be "de-toxified" and resume its ancient place? Should anyone even try? Is it just perversity for its own sake?
There's a Canadian artist called ManWoman who has written a book called Gentle Swastika - Reclaiming The Innocence, in an attempt to restore "the enormous heritage we have lost because of swastikaphobia." The material about how common the symbol was in America before the second world war is fascinating -- it was seen as an eyecatching emblem of good luck, especially in the oil business. Here in Texas there's an oil field still called SwastikaSand. And you can understand why conspiracy theorists get all worked up about things like the Swastika Oil and Gas company that was operating right up until the start of WW2. But while an historical appreciation of the use and role of the swastika before the Nazis is a useful thing I still think it's somewhere between quixotic and stupid to even think of rehabilitating it, expecially in the west. Some processes are irreversible, some stains won't come out.
I still can't get over the fact that there's a town in New York called Swastika though. How come I've never heard of it before and there's hardly any reference to it online?
Went to Swad last night, a Gujarat vegetarian Indian cafe out on North Lamar where you'd need superhuman appetites to get the bill over twenty bucks for two people. It's a deceptive place, looking more like a works canteen with its plastic cutlery and disposable plates than the sort of place you'd travel across Austin to eat at, but the food is terrific even if you're usually a carnivore. The thalli plate looked the obvious choice for a first visit, and turned out to be about twice the size and double the number of items as any I've had before, ranging from a spicy dhal and a great okra curry to a near orgasmic version of rice pudding that is infinitely better than the slapstick gloop I was forced to eat as a child.
In the Taj Market next door, stocking up on sugar coated fennel seeds and Cadbury's Bournvita, I was unnerved by the sight of swastika logos on some of the produce on the shelves. I'd never seen this in any Asian stores in England and even though I know that it originated in Hindu mythology and was used as a symbol of peace for five thousand years or so it still startled me to see it on jars of confectionary. The continued use of the swastika after WWII isn't something I'd ever given much thought to -- there was its idiotic shock value during the early days of punk and neo-Nazis and other right wing grotesques still march behind it but I had not even considered that it might still be used in a non-Nazi context.
But a quick look on the web...
Well, there's no such thing as a quick look on the web is there? After finding the Swastika Bungalows in Bali, the Swastika Public School in Swastika, Ontario and Swastika, New York, I really don't feel capable of following this line of thought any further. (The fact that this last Swastika lies between Peru and the North Pole makes me suspect that this may all be an hallucination so I'm going to have a lie down.)
Having a Courtesy Borrowers Card for the UT libraries is an unspeakably fine thing. If I read about some book or CD online I can just open the UT library catalog and see if it's in stock -- it's only a fifteen minute walk down Speedway to the Perry Castaneda library and the Fine Arts library is just around the corner from that and they're both open hours that still seem implausible to someone used to the Leeds library system, where what was our local branch opened something like two mornings and (briefly) one afternoon a week -- barely long enough for the tramps to fall asleep in their copy of the Evening Post. Being able to walk into the Fine Arts library and come out with a handful of Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley and AMM CDs is a treat. Today I picked up Jesse Sublett's Rock Critic Murders, having stumbled across his website yesterday. I've always got a kick from books set where I live and there's more than a few based here in Austin. (Strangely, for the 4th safest city of over 500,000 in the USA, most of the books I've read that take place here in Austin are hard boiled crime novels, chockful of dead bodies, savage beatings and all manner of usually drug-related mayhem. Why's that?) This one actually opens with the word "Austin". It looks a bit more jolly than the last book I read that was set back in Leeds, David Peace's bleak, nightmarish 1977, a book that captured the almost supernatural malevalence of the city around that time so well it almost made me ill.
I hope that catching up with my reading will be considered a fine and useful pursuit if any job interviewer asks me what I've been doing since I last worked. It hasn't just been pulp crime novels. I finally managed to get through Charles Williams' War in Heaven. That's not the Charles Williams who wrote Hill Girl (1951), The Catfish Tangle aka River Girl (1951), Big City Girl (1951), Hell Hath No Fury aka The Hot Spot (1953), Nothing in her way, (1953), A Touch Of Death aka Mix Yourself A Redhead (1954), Go Home, Stranger (1954), Scorpion Reef, aka Gulf Coast Girl (1955), The Diamond Bikini (1956), The Big Bite, (1956), Girl Out Back aka Operator, (1958), All The Way aka The Concrete Flamingo (1958), Man in Motion aka Man On The Run (1958), Talk Of The Town aka Stain Of Suspicion (1958), Uncle Sagamore And His Girls (1959), The Sailcloth Shroud (1960), Aground, (1961), The Long Saturday Night aka Finally, Sunday! (1962), Dead Calm, (1963), The Wrong Venus, aka Don't Just Stand There (1966), And The Deep Blue Sea, (1971) and Man on a Leash, (1973), none of which is currently in print. I prefer that Charles Williams, I have to say, even though I've only read The Diamond Bikini. Theological thrillers, even if they do feature the most ludicrously evil characters chasing the Holy Grail and being thwarted by an archdeacon, a poetry-loving duke and God, obviously aren't my thing. I've reread a few Martin Amis's and books by literary mavericks like Arthur Machen and Iain Sinclair and right now I'm making inroads into the Dedalus catalogue of European decadence and bohemian fin-de-siecle unwholesomeness. Even as I slouch into middle-age there's still a disolute and rather morbid romanticist in my head that's a sucker for books that carry blurbs like "The hunchbacked Daniel Jesus spends his immense wealth on a search for the ultimate intensity of experience in cruelty and debauchery". Nice.
Wow, it's 25 years since the Sex Pistols played San Antonio, 25 years and one day to be exact -- there's a chunky piece on it and how it kickstarted punk in Austin in this week's Austin Chronicle, but it isn't online yet. Try tomorrow, pop-pickers.
One of those who attended the Sex Pistols gig was Jesse Sublett, novelist, musician and TV documentary writer -- his website is well worth nosing around.
Posting's been a bit sparce lately, so let's see if I can just rattle out a bunch of verbiage, or at least post a few links ripped from my early morning web browse... William Gibson's blog up and running as of yesterday.... Miss Kittin website includes a diary but it ends after one entry for November.... I didn't get the job I was interviewed for last week, so it is time for much grumpiness and wallowing in self-pity after I've been to Kinko's to copy a few thousand more copies of my resume.... weather's supposed to hit 78F today here in downtown Austin and I can't help feeling a gooey sentimental ache when I hear about England being festooned with snow -- missing those news items where they send photographers to the nearest zoo to get pictures of shivering lions and penguins....
Gosh and golly -- there's a Jack Trevor Story website. If you've never read him, or even heard of him, he was a very English writer that you really ought to know about -- although English in a melancholic, mad, undisciplined, wayward and hapless way, with a sense of pessimism and apocalypse and a tendency to mix insane fantasy with the most heartwretching glimpses of ordinary, working class life, most of which was drawn from his own experience. He wrote countless novels -- including The Trouble with Harry, the film rights of which earnt him £150, TV series and films, a column for the Guardian -- even had his own TV show for a while but died in poverty. His later works were very odd -- unpublishably so in the case of a novel about "Frank Harris in cahoots with the Dutch Bulb Growers’ Association in a plot to unseat the Kaiser". This obituary from the Independent is probably the best introduction to the man, but this website has a startling amount of original material. And as none of his work is in currently in print, it is invaluable resource. If you like the George Orwell of Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air (a comparison I've nicked from Michael Moorcock*), you should try to track down his novels, particularly the Albert Argyle trilogy, Live Now, Pay Later, Something for Nothing and The Urban District Lover.
(Moorcock is another neighbour, I've recently discovered --- well, 30 miles away in Bastrop.)
So I'm the last person on the internet to discover the 365 days project am I? You all already know about the decidedly strange mp3 files that are appearing there, oddities from the collection of one Otis Fodder, a past-master of curious and arcane sound projects from the early days of cassette japery -- and have downloaded them, and grooved to their lopsided glory?
No Rock 'N' Roll Fun is also back up to speed 'n' chocful of goodies -- even if it does seem a mite preoccupied with Coldplay's Chris Martin's trouser yoghurt. Of the many choice items it unearths today is the news that Britney Spears is being lined up to play Sherlock Holmes, which is just what Conan Doyle would have wanted.
The computer repairman as self-deprecating buffoon part two -- Austin has not just Computer Nerdz but Computer Geeks. This seems like a grubby reversion to old stereotypes for a city that has always been on the cutting edge of cool tech. Bruce Sterling lives on the next street, you know....
The Minor Fall, The Major Lift is up 'n' running again, keeping tabs on outlets like Slate that I suspect I ought to read but never get around to, linking to cultural commentary and other oddities that might otherwise go unseen -- by me at least. Like this piece on that depressing VW Beetle commercial where the tragic office drone's single moment of lucidity and uplift in his dreary repetitive live comes when he gazes out of the window at a departing car. To the sound of ELO, even. It's a novel approach to flogging motors, or at least it seems that way from here, where every other commercial on TV seems to go for the strident, bludgeoning this is TEXAAAAASSSS, so you'd better drive a CHHHHHHEEEVVVYYYY! methodology, implying that if you're not skidding down some dirt track in your single occupancy SUV, early seventies rawwwwwk blasting, then you might as well put on a pink tutu, pick up a poodle and ride the bus. Car commercials in Texas hardly ever show a car in traffic -- it's rare enough that they're shown on roads or against any human backdrop. You're a hero who lives in a big land, so you need a big heroic car would be the subtext if it wasn't shouted out so blatantly. How will You're a weedy guy whose only dream is getting away from the office occasionally with the top down play here?
But hey, don't get me started on commercials. They're all wrong here. Nothing but cars and junk food at peak time with bizarre local efforts for Hubcap Annie, Computer Nerdz and the "Kiiiiiilll your bugs" guy in the morning. Where are the chocolate bars, breakfast cereal and Toilet Duck commercials that dominated back in England?
Oh my, the year must really have started. Simon Reynolds' top 5,435,265 albums of 2002 -- " this year being rather thin on the long-player front". The Church of Me returns and the boy Olaf posts 26 alphabetical entries from Audio Bullies to Zovirax. That's approximately 14,000 words in just three blogs to read before breakfast. Better brew some more coffee....
Had my first job interview yesterday since... well, let's say the first one this year. Just a ten minute walk away at UT. Seemed to go well, although I hope I didn't overdo the lovably bumbling Englishman routine. It would be a complete change from what I've spent much of the last five or even fifteen years doing, but I'm ready for a change of pace. I'm ready for an income and health insurance too....
No Rock 'n' Roll Fun lists the ten most played songs on US radio last year. Yikes, who would've thought? Which leads me to suspect that it may not be such a bad thing that our car radio seems to be stuck either on Mega 93.3, where they're still playing Kylie to death (note too that their "most glamorous DJ" Ms Kitty could easily win a Kylie lookalike contest if drag queens weren't allowed) or 91.7 KVRX where students giggle over their Sun Ra, Chicks on Speed and Spaceman 3 obscurities. Could be worse, could indeed be worse....
Another "cool" thing about Austin -- Tito's Handmade Vodka (warning, the endearing shambolic website is cursed with soundfiles), winner of the 2001 Double Gold Medal at the San Francisco World Spirit Competition.Tito's an ex-oilman who decided to finance his own distillery five years ago -- the first legal distillery in Texas -- by maxing out his 18 credit cards. Now he's winning all the major awards, beating the big companies whose products cost twice as much, yet still has a tatty website consisting mostly of photographs of him grinning inanely at chili cookoffs surrounded by pretty girls....
Good omens for the new year: (1) we saw midnight in at a fine party across in East Austin with puppeteers, carpenters, artists, musicians, people who stuff old dolls with broken electronic components, spray them silver and bolt them to the wall with angled piping, nannies, pizza delivery guys and as far as I could tell not a single blogger or online diarist; (2) I completed my UK self assessment tax return yesterday and submitted it online four whole weeks before it was due; (3) I have lost five pounds since the weekend despite feeling the the obligation to finish a tin of Extra Large New Orleans Style Homestyle Peanuts, a box of Godiva truffles and most of a family sized selection of Swiss Colony Petit Fours.
My obligatory and suitably glib list of resolutions for 2003 1. Either get a highly paid, highly meaningful job that takes over my entire life with righteous, soul-captivating dedication or find a lowly paid, low responsibility job that doesn't destroy my brain but encourages me to do something creative and life-affirming in my free time. One or the other. 2. Write more, in this blog and elsewhere. 3. Read a novel a week. Right now it takes me longer to read a book than most authors take to write one. Too often I will accept the deadening pabulum of the TV and let even something as pernicious as a Will and Grace repeat steal my attention while still holding a book or magazine in the reading position. 4. Run everything through a spelling checker before posting. 5. Read the articles in the Atlantic and Harpers within a week of these magazines arriving. 6. Go back and read that three-part "American Ground" article in the Atlantic. 7. Watch less TV. No more gazing slackjawed at the knucklegrazing reality shows that spill out of the idiot box. I don't need to be told, let alone shown in grotesque detail, that there exist young people on this planet who are superficially good looking but as stupid as they are morally bereft. If they want to change their underwear before cackling crowds in a tank of squid then more fool them. 8. Make fewer meaningless lists.... 9. ...and more meaningful ones. 10. Lose another nine pounds. I lost thirty last spring, then put four back on in the subsequent months -- which isn't bad to say I stopped going to the gym, stopped watching what I ate and inhaled a two pound bag of El Galindo tortilla chips with salsa every thirty seconds. 11. Maybe join a gym. 12. Learn everything about everything or else accept not knowing 99.9999% of what makes the world go around. Note to self: "Remember that strange sense of panic you felt last week when you realized you didn't know what a joule was or why surge protectors carried different ratings? At least look things up if you don't know. That's what the internet is for." 13. Manage my money better. They have software to do that, you know. 14. Deal with official correspondence sooner, which means submitting that UK Self Assessment form right now. 15. Get back into regular correspondence with people I've lost touch with. 16. Learn to concentrate, to get something finished, to focus, to do whatever it takes to snap out of my inability to sit down and do something. I suspect I can't multitask, that I can only multi-procrastinate, spreading my attention so thinly that I might as well not bother at all. 17. Realize that saying "I. Am. Not. Stressed. Out." is not an effective way to relieve stress. 18. Get over my fear of telephones. This is Austin 2003, not 1903 in the Outer Hebrides. 19. ______ something new every day. (Insert new verb every day.) 20. Decide if I'm going to write in English or American. Stop switching between -ise and -ize, -or and -our. One or t'other, not mix 'n' match. 21. Find God. Just kidding. 22. Continue this list tomorrow or until I reach a more significant number than 22 on which to end.
At least this year I have an excuse for not recognising 90% of the records in John Peel's Fesitve Fifty. Even generation-spanning giants of indie-pop like David Gedge and Half Man Half Biscuit don't get much coverage here.
