The Austin Chronicle's "Best of Austin 2003" is now online. I always look forward to this issue. If they list things I already know about and enjoy then I feel my good taste is vindicated and if they're things I've never heard of then it's a useful guide for things to experience over the next few months. The Weirdest Thing About Austin according to the Reader's Poll is "Republicans". The critics selection is as eccentric as ever, with Best Nationally Syndicated Talk Show Host to Run a Sex Shop, Best Way to Subvert the Dominant Paradigm and Best District Judge in the same section. Normally these things are just lists, padding, asskissing and attempts at being hip that shortchange a city's true heart 'n' soul (See any issue of London's Time Out for proof — jeez, I used to pay good money to be condescended to?) but the AusChron's annual list helps define what it is that makes Austin unique. And any list that invents a category just to rave about Habana's Tres Leches gets my vote.

Free tickets to see Fischerspooner at Stubbs — now there's high concept for you. Electroclash and BBQ. There's no band in any genre that can't be improved by a plate of brisket, pork loin and hot sausage with a couple of sides of whisked yam and a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale before hand. Somewhat bemused to find myself seated beneath a signed photograph of Peter Frampton while we ate. The signed photographs on the walls of Stubbs are accompanied by signed bottles of Stubbs BBQ sauce, which is a novel idea that I'm sure could prompt deep thoughts on comodification and fame and why some rock stars only get to sign the mild variety.

Then outside and down into the Waller Creek Outdoor Amphitheatre (not all BBQ places in Austin have these) where a lot of people had dressed for the ocassion, although I'm not sure if there's much concesious as to what dressing to see Fischerspooner means. Which is a good thing, leaving lots of room for improvisation, quirkiness and outright flauntage. Lots of interesting styles, mostly mismatched and worn by women a third my age. Goth, punk, mod, 60s, genric Hot Topic, drag... and amongst the truly stylish, burnt orange UT t-shirts and backwards baseball caps....

An astonishing number of people by the time the music started, although a fair few seemed to be there for the support act, Kenna, an MTV favorite apparently, whose first album somehow involved the Neptunes and Fred Durst. To my ancient ears, Kenna and his band sounded like a heavyhanded Duran Duran tribute band with the ocassional Genesis keyboard flourish. I'd mention Seal if that didn't involve getting into the tricky subject of "black Africans whose music doesn't sound remotely black" and why a middle-class academic's son from Ethiopia shouldn't prefer U2, Depeche Mode and the Cars to whoever's been allocated the role of authentic and essential black voice this week....

Fischerspooner came on with the expected smoke machines, blinding lights and dance troupe... but no musicians. What a fuddy-duddy I can be, children! It takes (me, at least) a few moments to adjust to this as being a lightshow with tinsel-haired, spandex'd dancers and some karaoke rather than a rock gig. When Spooner appeared through the smoke it was like Stars in Their Eyes. All it lacked was Matthew Kelly saying "Tonight, performing as Steve Strange from eighties New Romantic band Visage...."

Fischerspooner went from being this year's thing ("The best thing to happen to music since electricity," according to the NME) to reviled /ignored around the time their #1 album came out, so part of me wanted to like them out of sheer perversity, simply for not being a retro guitar band with a name starting with "The". And they have got two songs I like in "Emerge" and "Turn On" and their cover of Wire's "The 15th" captures the sweet poppiness that Wire seem to have spent the last two and a half decades crushing.

Hmmmmm..... someone in influential circles must had decreed that sub-Bob Fosse aerobics with a contemptious gay drunk going through the motions could be considered performance art. How much of Spooner's act is genuine boredom and how much of it part of the show is probably something you could mull over at length, but when most of the vocals seem to be pre-recorded as well as all the backing you find yourself examining every look and grimace for some sign of active participation, for... well, if not verve and spirit then at least involvement, a reason to be there. Half the time he looked like a lumpy, unwilling kid in a dance class, unable to keep up with the lithe dancers and trying to pass this off as some kind of ironic commentary. But the audience lapped it up, applauding and cheering as he drank a beer and his vocals continued, something he did a couple of times. And his "fuck Janet Jackson, fuck Madonna" outburst was the same as that quoted on the band's webpage from a show over a year ago. Too often I found myself thinking that this was a parody of something, imagining Ben Stiller as Spooner, and trying to remember what it was a send-up of.... (Of itself, maybe.)

Maybe this is revolutionary stuff, especially in a city hooked on tired notions of tradition, authenticity and that self-regarding "live music capital of the world" schtick. If you're a kid (and this was an all ages show) here in Austin, where it seems to be city policy that nine-tenths of all live music must be guitar-strumming singer-songwriters recapitulating the World Armadillo Headquarter-era Austin, this stuff just might seem as envigorating as punk. And much of it was amusing as eye-candy where the question of whether they're laughing at us orvice versa could be temporarily ignored. Taken in the right spirit, or the wrong spirit, it's a hoot and it makes a glorious change to be overwhelmed with a tacky spectacular overload after the usual Austin heritage music that has been seeping into my consciousness without really registering lately. I hope all the under 21s who were there went off to form their own post-electroclash bands. I just hope they invest something extra in it when they do....

Who could resist this, a George W. Bush talking action figure with realistic boots, detachable head and a vocabulary almost as good as the real thing? I think it looks more like Roger Moore after a bad night, but it's been designed to "promote awareness of the political process and an understanding of how the government works" so I shouldn't mock. You can also vote for the next Toy President. Clinton leads so far, but Nixon isn't all that far behind. Stacey wants a Toy President Taft on the grounds that you'd get plenty of product for your $29.95....

Saturday morning means, these days at least, a walk across the edge of Adams-Hemphill park (not the most evocative name) to Taco Shack now that I've realized that life is intolerable without Breakfast Tacos at least once at the weekend. It's an Austin tradition I'd somehow failed to latch onto earlier. There's something intensely life-affirming about walking back home afterwards with a bagful of tacos and salsa, knowing there's coffee, the Lounge show on KOOP and the rest of the weekend ahead....

One, maybe two of the greatest mysteries of our time elucidated here.

You probably didn't notice but I've been away. I did something remarkably silly a few night ago. It didn't involve Dick Cheney, two hundred pounds of pureed liver and a trampoline but it was something almost as ridiculous. I found an old backup CD and couldn't resist seeing what was on it. Imagine my delight to discover my favorite text editor, which I'd forgotten the name of and had not been able to track down since I deleted it back in February. Imagine my lack of delight upon discovering there had been a bloody good reason for deleting it.

One complete re-install later....

At least this gives me a chance to delete all the crap on my machine, get the latest versions of Opera and The Bat and so on -- all the things a fellow with a well-adjusted social life ought to be doing on a Friday night.

Bush to World: Drop Dead!

From 1,700 hits a day to 90 in two weeks. (That's 90 a day, not 90 in two weeks -- that would really be tragic.) I know I said I wanted to get this site's bandwidth usage back under control but I think that's called "taking the piss". Was it something I wrote? Didn't write? And half the hits I do still get are grubby miscreants looking for Faith Hill's bra size, "amatuer" + housewives + Grimsby or other bloggers checking the links to them via Technorati. At least they're constant. Should I say something else pro-Michael Moore to boost my readership again? Or should I be content with my little niche readership who don't come here via Google... all three of you.

The piece everyone refers to when they write about the late Ian MacDonald is here: Exiled from Heaven: The Unheard Message of Nick Drake. Take care. Be warned. It's a depressed writer who killed himself writing about a depressed musician who killed himself.

The World Health Organisation predicts a vast upsurge in clinical depression in the first quarter of the coming century. Already, GPs report that half of their patients display signs of this illness. Can it be that the materialist world, in which there is no intrinsic meaning, is killing our souls? Nick Drake's work reminds us that life is a predicament and that the world is an insoluble mystery. It tells us that a "magical", contemplative way of seeing can keep us aware of this, preventing us destroying the world through the arrogant assumption that we know what it really is. We do not. We're all exiled from heaven, though some of us don't know it. But when "magic" reveals heaven to us in a wild flower, we remember. And then we hear the chime.

Maybe the time came when MacDonald stopped hearing that chime, but maybe also he was just listening for that one specific note, straining so hard to hear its diminishing peal that he closed his ears and mind to all the other things that can bring joy and magic or at the very least temporarily say "fuck you" to the killing materialistic world.

Listening to Lester Bangs. Never really wanted to hear his music before -- I always felt uneasy about writers deciding they want to make music instead of "just" writing about it, although I don't know why. It's obviously not an "either/or" thing. There aren't many novelists who don't also review, for example. But I guess that's out of necessity as half a dozen book reviews for the Guardian or a column in the Independent will bring in more than the advance on an unpopular novel. (I have no figures to back this statement up, but it sounds solid to me.)

There have been some crossovers from writing to performing that have made it look like a logical step, more logical than going on to present TV shows, for example, or write drippy lifestyle columns in the Sunday broadsheets.... After all, some music writers have been known to actually love music and after years of soaking it up ought to have distilled from it what works for them.... Patti Smith, David Thomas, Chrissie Hynde -- they are all known for their music rather than their writing, so I don't know why I was so resistent to giving the late Lester a chance. Maybe it was the way he looked -- he might have been listening to the Stooges, Cecil Taylor and Amon Duul II, but he looked like he was auditioning for a grubby version of the Blues Brothers. Just like Charles Shaar Murray, in fact, and who wants to hear yet another white guy chugging through "Route 66" on the harmonica? Wouldn't that just be too much of a disapointment?

Well, it -- "Kill Him Again" from 1979 -- sounds better than I would have expected, but I don't think I would have paid money to hear it at the time. I wanted it to be great or bad but it's just "good", and that's never enough, not from an old time hero. Although he does sound like he was enjoying it....

I've got Movable Type set up just right on my other website but it looks so generic, like every other Movable Type blog. I want something more organic and baggy, that doesn't have three columns, a calendar, links to recent comments and previous postings, a search this site box and look like every other post is going to be about John Ashcroft or link to the New York Times.

I've done the online diary, the "web journal", the nothing-to-say-but-fancy-graphics diary, the vaguely leftwing blog, the mostly-music blog, the what-I-had-for-breakfast blog. Time for a new approach.

I'm waiting for inspiration and hoping I don't forget my password in the meantime.

Meanwhile I've got a few months left on this site so there's no panic yet.

The mid 70s rock dinosaur's graveyard on LBJ (10am-3pm) has started to amuse me now rather than merely annoy. KLBJ's "rock 'n' roll mamma" (sic) played about a quarter of Dark Side of the Moon, the obligatory Led Zep track, some post-Sabbath Ozzie (which sounded like Sharon had slammed the refrigerator door on his boys after finding him guzzling his own weight in bat pate for a midnight snack) and... oh my goodness! Can it really be? It is....

It's a track from Frampton Comes Alive.

Prepare yourself, popkids, for a tale from a dark age, a time that should be depicted in garish woodcuts with f's where s's should be....

I don't know if I can go on....

Ahem. Pull yourself together, boy. It has to be dealt with. There's blockage, repression and denial here, Freudian and otherwise, but you know what they say -- better out than in. A clean hanky, a big blow and a couple of ounces of vodka and you'll be able to face it.... You'll feel better afterwards.

Okay.

Begin.

Ahem. To hear Peter Frampton gargling into that preposterous "guitar-scrotum" "talk-box" thing on the 14 minute version of "Do You Feel Like We Do?" from Frampton Cometh Alive (1975), while the audience cheers and bays like he's just announced a cure for cancer and is tickling their tummies, is to be reminded of where punk came from, of why even its worst excesses were so bloody necessary to burn off the resentment and alienation that had been generated by years of lazy, arrogant, unchecked manipulative crap. Over the subsequent decades I've blanked out the absolute ninnie rock nadir that was "Do You Feel Like We Do", the track that summed up everything that was wrong with its time (and that served as the basis of 85% of pre-punk NME humor). It is quite breathtaking -- the epitome of the bloated "I am a star, I can do what I want and you will lap it up" attitude that prevailed back then. Everyone should hear this track at least once just to understand what we went through so that you young pups could have your Coldplay and Slipknot. Frampton Comes Alive isn't just some chucklesome MTV anecdote, an I-Wuv-The-Seventies perplexer. We old folk really lived through this in real time....

With the passing of the years, it's grows easier to forget the stiffling awfulness of that era, to point out the classic albums that managed to slip out despite it all, the Rock Bottoms, Tago Magos and Clear Spots. And nowadays five years of uninspired dullness doesn't seem such a catastrophe. If rock (or whatever you want to call your favorite bit of it) goes through a sticky patch you can listen to something else for a while, certain that something will come along to get you interested again. But in 1976, five years was a good third of rock's lifetime. And five years was also about how long you were supposed to listen to rock music for, filling the gap between Donny Osmond pop and grown-up Beatles re-issue music. If that five years coincided with the fallow years, then tough luck. You missed out on the good times, dude.... Nowadays five years is nothing of course, an acceptable gap between albums for many bands and we old guys are still gettin' down to the White Strokes and Sir Dizzington Rascal. You'd need at least twenty years of dullness, nothing but Good Charlotte and David Grey until 2023 to get the same perspective, to suffer what we suffered, to get a taste of that pre-punk ennui we went through.

(Embarrassing, after saying all that, "Do You Feel Like We Do" conjures up that era for me more vividly than "Anarchy in the UK" or "White Riot" -- why even more than Throbbing Gristle's First Annual Report. Not in a good way, obviously, but the moment the curly-haired milksop (as was) got his laughing tackle around his state-of-the-art garden hose gizmo I'm taken back over twenty five years and dumped in those chintzy, anti-masacar-draped lodgings in Sheffield, surrounded by chemistry textbooks and Philip K. Dick novels, and watching the Old Grey Whistle Test with growing horror....)

This week's most heartwarming websearch:Punks Who Miss John Ritter. I can see the VH1 special right now:

"Without John there would have been no Dead Kennedys," sniffs Jello....

I was going to write about the over-the-top eulogies for John Ritter that have been on TV lately. I'm sure he was a sweet guy and his friends loved him and the world is a lesser place without him, but it's a bit rich for the media industry to make him out to be an integral part of their veritable touchy-feeling culture when they all he got from them in the two decades between Three's Company and Eight Rules... were guest spots and Lifetime TV movies. I know that he was constantly working and 99.9% of the acting community would give their left brain just to be in a disease-of-the-week flick with Judith Light*, but if they loved him so much couldn't they have found something more challenging for him to do than put-upon dads? He got to be Buffy's prospective robot stepfather (or something like that) and the voice of Bobby's music teacher on King of the Hill but that was the best of the crop. And it was telling that the only clip the tribute shows seemed to think showed him at his best from his inbetween years was from indie-flick, Slingblade, rather than the stuff THEY put him in, like Danielle Steel's "Heartbeat" and Gramps?

Ritter's one shot in the movies as male lead didn't work out -- Blake Edwards' Skin Tight (1989) is remembered for only one scene -- and that takes place in (almost) total darkness with only a very specific part of Ritter visible. After that it was Problem Child and downhill from there.

Yet Ritter had a quality that was never used by Hollywood, that even TV struggled to find a place for -- a sort of boyish worldweariness and just-about-goodnatured resignation, a barely hidden sadness and surprise at finding himself middle-aged and gone to seed, something you see a lot in life but very rarely on the screen. The only actor who has really been allowed to pull this off is Bill Murray and he's still averaging one great performance for ever half dozen not-so-good. Women always complain that Hollywood has no roles for women between 25 and 65. Ritter was proof that the same can easily apply to men unless they're rugged, action types.

* Despite all the made-for-TV movies they did, Ritter and Light were never in the same one. Wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't checked on imdb.

"This is a song about the world...."

Dalek I Love You existed somewhere between The Teardrop Explodes and Orchestral Manouevers In The Dark, losing members to each during the late 70s Liverpool scene. They sounded like neither. Listening to Junior Boys' "Birthday" and the Notwist's Golden Neon brough back memories of their 1980 Compass Kum'pas album, although after maybe twenty years without hearing it I could easily be imaging the points of similarity, the quiet, reflective intimacy, whispered confessions and masculine hesistancy. Now I don't normally like male vocalists (a big statement, I know, and one I might write about later when I can work out why), but there's a certain blend of undemonstrative electronics and wilfully nonchalent, doleful male vocals that bypasses my usual distain and heads straight for a very special place in my heart. You can probably trace it waaaay back to Robert Wyatt's "O Caroline" and "Signed Curtain".

I'd completely forgotten about Dalek I Love You until a snatch of "Eight Track" popped into my head yesterday. Until I read that piece I linked to below I had not known who was in the band or if they had made any other records. I was never obsessive about music in those days, just liked what I liked and didn't think it necessary to track down limited edition Patagonian remixes on 10" beige vinyl. Are there any closet DILY fans out there who can help me out, who have been itching for the chance to dig out those old albums and EPs and burn 'em to CD for a guy with a whim to hear 'em again? Or do anyone else even remember them? Over to you, I say again....

The missing piece, the band no-one has mentioned when getting all wistful and swoony about turn-of-the-80s rock/pop: Dalek I Love You. My copy of Compass Kum'pas is elsewhere. Over to you.

The other bearded crossdresser who strolls Guadeloupe was wearing a fluorescent orange unitard this evening that left nothing to the imagination -- except maybe the question of where he shoves his meat 'n' two veg.

I think a lot of male UT students who crossed his path will not be thinking about sex for the next few months....

One moment please...

Jon at World of Possibility is on a metaphorical music as climate riff, particularly in reference to turn of the 80s pop/rock like the Associates, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cocteau Twins. Humidity, chill, sun through fog, swirls of snow, tendrils of ice, wisps of mist fading on an autumnal morn, rings around the moon -- it's not entirely original but the language of weather lends itself that early 80s music so well. Where's my book of arcane atmospheric phenomena? Next to the thesaurus, probably. Aha. Okay, more meterological pop similes later....

Truly, View from the Top is the worst film I've seen in ages. We wanted a relaxing mainstream comedy to flop out in front of at the weekend, the sort of thing that doesn't involve half an hour of chinstroking in Vulcan Videos. But this was so bad I almost threw popcorn at our own TV and I will probably write about it at length because I need to get something in return for the 87 minutes of life I gave up to it.

I am so hooked on the Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth, listening to it each morning on the way to work. It isn't nostalgia as I only remember one of their songs from back then and that was "Final Day" which wasn't on the original album. It doesn't even fit in with the music I was listening to in 1979, although I was pretty hit and miss with my choices back then. I'd read about a record in the NME or Sounds or Peel would play a track and if I remembered the title and they had it in Virgin or Scene and Heard when my dole check came I'd buy it. Otherwise I'd probably get something that was being promoted or played over their system, which resulted in some shameful shockers you'll never get me to admit. It still sounds unlike anything else then or now, reserved and understated without being twee. Although with hindsight it's hard to imagine half the bands I've liked in the years since existing without their lead. It doesn't sound like old music.

I don't know how Google and Blogger work but somehow, because I accidentally published my entire blog on one page over the weekend, I've been getting all sorts of weird hits today. From "gwapple me gwapenuts" to "sharon stone thighboots" and the perennial search for the Foams' "Paint Me"....

...which I eventually did manage to download from slsk back when I was a furtive copyright criminal stealing the crusts from the mouths of Madonna's children. I did plan to write about the Foams, but while the idea of them -- an all girl punk band in Austin at the start of the 80s, recording one raw, live single and then vanishing -- was so incredibly evocative, especially knowing that Lester Bangs was living in Austin at that time (I can be a real fanboy at times), hearing the ramshackle, shouty, clunky, rather-blah-for-its-time music was bound to be deflating. Some records are most poignant unheard....

If my meddling with my template settings caused problems with accessing this blog over the weekend, you have my apologies. Not that there was anything new here, anyway. But to save my archives for future meddling I made a copy of the index page, set the number of days to be displayed to 999 and republished -- which gives one very big page with everything on it. Neat for saving as a backup. Unfortunately I accidently saved it as the main index too, turning this into a bandwidth-hogging monster.

But I have got Movable Type set up on my other site -- although I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it....

A few days off while I noodle around with my new site and try to configure Movable Type without completely losing my mind. Be nice while I'm gone, and if you need something to amuse you, check on the comments at the BBC website about Dizzee Rascal being awarded the Mercury Prize last week. I'm still not sure if I like Boy In Da Corner yet -- I appreciate it but don't love it -- and still have reservations about the white middleclass critics who are straining to show how hep to the new street sounds they are, but reading these tragic bleats of dismay, incomprehension and ingrained stultification is sure evidence that (a) he's doing something to be encouraged and (b) I've still got a hell of a way to go to reach true reactionary farthood when it comes to music.

When rambling on about reasons to change my ISP a few days ago I mused on the fantastical possibility of how I'd hit my bandwidth limit if I doubled the number of daily visitors coming here. Well yesterday, because Tom Tommorow's This Modern World linked to some throwaway remark I wrote a few days ago about Michael Moore not being the leftwing equivalent of Ann Coulter, I managed to do slightly better than that. My hits went up by 1,500% or so. From a daily average of about 110 hits to just over 1,700. Which is a big chunk of my bandwidth gobbled up in one go. If you can't access The Yes/No Interlude for the rest of the month you'll know why.

So that's how to boost your hits, kids. You don't get that sort of attention writing about obscure Desperate Bicycles and Fire Engines b-sides, you know....

Or do I mean an alternate 1950s, seeing how a lot of the elements swirling in the makeup of early Roxy Music can be traced to the work and interests of the artist Richard Hamilton, who was one of Bryan Ferry's lecturers at art school. Even the title of Hamilton's 1956 exhibition, "This is Tomorrow" would later turn up as a Ferry song title.... Hamilton's early photographs and collages suggested a dream American of glamor, escape and luxurious excess refracted through an English wistfulness and resignation and haunted by a certain European dread, which is the very heart of Roxy Music's first two albums.

I guess my Roxy Music posting (apres Penman, K-Punk and Reynolds)about how they were really a 60s rather than a 70s group -- albeit a 60s in an alternate universe -- will have to wait....

Was it last night or the night before Fox had the preview of the forthcoming third series of 24? This time it's the whole of the USA that's under threat, which is the logical incremental development after his wife and daughter in the first and LA in the second. If there's a fourth series it will have to be the entire earth in jeopardy, and the fifth, maybe the universe itself? (I'd like to see that. They'd have to get Greg Egan or Stephen Baxter in.) The president seems to have recovered from the stinky finger or whatever it was he got in the closing minutes of the second series. Kimmy's got nicer hair. And Kiefer looks like he'll be doing the sweaty and angsty and haunted for the first hour then ready to kick terrorist ass for the next 23 routine again. I ought to say no, but I am weak. I am tempted. It's a big commitment and a bigger suspension of disbelief. Am I really ready to give over an entire day of my life to watch it after the unforgivably weedy "who's got the chip?" routine and the lame sub-Dragnet "let's trick whoever-the-hell-that-guy is into admiting he was responsible" wiretap in the closing quarter of the last series. I know I'll end up watching it -- no matter how routine it will get it's still sure to be the only quarter-way watchable thing on US TV this fall for those of us without cable -- except Simpson repeats... and all those Merrie Old England shows narrated by Prince "I'm wearing chinos" Edward on PBS of course....

Barely a month to go until Journalcon, the fourth annual convention for online diarists, which is being held here in downtown Austin. I'll be as actively involved as a fellow can be... without paying anything or doing anything or having any contact with any other Austin diarist or blogger for about six months.... It's not that I've been particularly curmudgeonly toward my fellow local "webjournalists", but... well... I don't really feel a connection with people just because we use the same medium to communicate and live in the same city. Once it would have been enough, but now it's like being under an obligation to hang out with people because they take the same size in shoes or something equally as arbitrary. I still read a few of their diaries -- You're Going Gray, My Baby because it gives a voice to a truly excluded section of society (the middle-aged male who has decided not to compete and not even to make a big fuss in this refusal) and Invincible Girl, because she takes the shucks-ain't-ah-weird-but-cute? school of post-Pamie twee-ness and stuffs a fistful of ketamine up its ass....

Anyway. Me and online diaries. What went wrong. Part.... I've lost count. Contiuned from.... I've forgotten where....

If I've been consistent in any one thing since I started doing this it's been my wariness towards the need to validate and codify something that's supposed to be fun and individualistic. Joining Open Pages, the first webring of online diaries back in '96, was as far as I wanted to go. I got the need to turn a hobby into something that needed membership fees, meetings and minutes out of my system back when I attended a bunch of science fiction conventions in the mid-80s, thank you, and I didn't enjoy it all that much then. I'll admit I got a buzz from the sense of community in the early days of personal web publishing but what I enjoyed was feeling like a creative malcontent and discovering a new way of expressing myself with a brand new medium. When people started giving each other awards for Best Web Diary Entry About Missing An Episode of Buffy I started to siddle away. If you had told me back in those early days that people would be paying $75 to assemble in a hotel, wear badges and attend panels I would have said something unpleasant and sarcastic... but I don't think I would have been entirely surprised. And I'm not saying I'm right or in any way ennobled by being a standoffish prig. Whatever works for you, boys 'n' girls -- and Austin is as good a place as any to spend a weekend. Just remember that those Mexican Martinis are stronger than they seem and anyone you see wearing little more than a pink thong and fishnets on Congress or the Drag is probably a man. But he'll probably still be your friend if you buy him a drink.

I missed most of the obituaries on Ian MacDonald except for this one in today's Guardian. I was a fan of his NME writing in the prepunk era, especially when he wrote about the likes of Faust and Can and recall wondered what had happened to him. I have a vague recollection that he wanted to write science fiction, and when books with titles like Out on Blue Six and Desolation Road by Ian McDonald started to appear I thought it might be him and the "a" had been misplace -- a bit like Ian Banks gaining an "M" to write SF -- but it wasn't. At the same time, I thought the Ian MacDonald who wrote Revolution in the Head and the Shostakovich biography was a different person all together, and that the Ian MacDonald who wrote for Uncut and Mojo was possibly a third.

Until I read Marcello's piece and then Penman's I really didn't know what the story was, why he stopped writing, how he started again. Of course I still don't -- fine writers that Carlin and Penman are their subject matter is always themselves and although I read them before anything else online I would't go to them for mere facts....

Looking elsewhere... I still don't know. Was it the music? Why now? After 25 years of looking backwards, of discontent, of not finding anything to love in whatever the new thing happened to be that week, what made right now so intolerable?

But what does a music writer do when he loses faith in music? It's interesting that those who have gone on to do other things were those who were never really passionate about music qua music, all those who were happy to move up the career path to write about cappucino, cufflinks and Al Pacino for the Face and Arena in the 80s, all seemed to be doing very nicely. Look at Tony Parsons -- he gripes about today's music not being what it was in his day but he still seems a chirpy chappie with his million-selling potboilers and his Daily Mirror columns. (Was he ever really a music journalist even in his early days? Did his writing ever make you dizzy to hear the record he was extolling? I can't remember any examples. Julie Burchill had a good turn of phrase, usually intoxicatingly negative, but between them they could only come up with one band to praise in their 1978 book, The Boy Looked At Johnny. And do you remember which that was? That's right, the Tom Robinson Band. But I digress.)

It's hard to believe that MacDonald was still in his 20s when punk came along. He wasn't that much older than, say, Joe Strummer. (3 years older, I think.) His writing accurately diagnosed the state of music and youth culture that made punk necessary, yet he didn't get it. To him the Police were the one last gasp of musicality before the barbarians took over. It's almost impossibly now to comprehend the horror and dismay so many people his age felt about punk. With the benefit of hindsight, punk pretty soon resolved itself as a logical part of the rock tradition, cathartic and messy but essential, like a loud belch after too stodgy a meal. But hardly anyone saw that at the time, except maybe the record companies who were just as happy with Gentle Giant or Generation X -- as long as someone was buying their records it was still rock 'n' roll to them. Maybe it was essential at the time that punk seemed so final, so devastating, so either/or, but it was a damned shame that some people took it so literally and couldn't or wouldn't see it as anything but the End of their music....

There were those who would happily listen to the Who and Yardbirds at their rowdiest yet curl up in a fetal ball if you played them Spiral Scratch. It was like that Abbot and Costello sketch about the meatballs:
-- First we have a fast, heavy drumbeat.
Oh boy, that gets my heart going....
-- Now we add a pounding, no frills bass.
Yeah, that's the stuff.
-- A-a-and add a choppy, trebly guitar.
Neat, like Lou Reed! I can really get into this!
-- Then we add a whiny vocalist complaining about something.
This is great, proper rock 'n' roll... raw and snotty!
-- And what have we got?
AWWWW NOOOOO! IT'S PUNK ROCK! TAKE IT OFF! IT'S RUBBISH, ETC.

MacDonald wasn't alone in his view that Punk marked the end rather than the start or even the middle of something. I seem to remember other writers who were agreed upon the mostly parlous state of rock music in the mid-70s but who failed to see that the punks were saying the same things they were, only at a visceral, immediate, let's-do-somefink-abaht-it! gut-level rather than musing upon it at length in a wistful, all-passion-spent manner. What happened to those guys? Did they all go to write for Record Collector or hi-fi magazines?

So where does North Austin or Pseudo-Houston or The Rest of Texas begin and funky ol' littl' ol' boho "keepin' it weird" Austin end? Going up Burnet I'd draw the line at 49th St. Out beyond that and I feel like I'm in alien territory. There's a buffer zone from there up to Anderson, which is sort of a neutral territory for the old folks. Go into the Frisco diner and it's crowded with seniors who have decided what the hell, they've reached 75 so they can have meatloaf every damn day if they want to. Above Anderson, however, and you're really not in Austin anymore, you're in a place you go to for one specific reason and then get away from as soon as that's achieved. You don't hang around out there, not because it's a scary ghetto but because it's a soulless void, where you go to work or buy a new car or something from Target, but for those few steps between the car and the office, shop or salesroom you might as well be on the moon....

The anti-Michael Moore backlash is now underway, I notice. And about time too. I have to own up to following the herd and believing the disinformation spread about him. He's fat! He's hairy! He looks pleased with himself! He lives in a nice house! How can he possibly have anything to say about important issues? We watched Bowling for Columbine last week and although Moore does try to tie too much together, and in his enthusiasm turns out to have relied on some news material that has since been proven to be inaccurate, I still wonder how anyone with a functioning consciousness could come away from this film thinking that he's just the left's equivalent of Ann Coulter*. I feel deeply ashamed of myself for taking the word of vacuous twits and not going to see the film when it came out so that I could make my own mind up.

*Recap: Moore gets angry because kids get shot, Coulter gets angry because liberals get to write for newspapers. Yeah, they're really both as bad as each other....

What the hell is Froogle? Oh? Right. I see.... But why does it say you can get Texas Longhorn bed sheets from my website for $3.80? Which is a bargain compared to the $38,000 they cost at www.beauty-search.com, but not exactly true. Expect this Google innovation to stay in beta for a little longer...

Looking up "JG Ballard + Roberto Matta" on Google comes up with this, from Strangewords.Com:

Ballard quotes the Chilean artist Roberto Matta's rhetorical question "why must we wait, and fear, a disaster in space in order to understand our own time?" and answers that "all disasters reveal for a brief moment the secret formulas of the world around us, but a disaster in space rewrites the rules of the continuum itself."

Last Saturday, unexpectedly found ourselves at the Menil gallery in Houston, where I turned a corner and encountered a collection of paintings by Roberto Matta for the first time. I'd seen a few of his works before, perhaps only in books, and liked them in passing but to see a dozen or so together was a real experience. His work is somewhere between late surrealism and abstract expressionism, and the paintings on display from the fifties (after he was kicked out of the Surrealists -- who I hadn't realized still existed as a body at that point, which shows how little Art History I know) captures not the meticulously transcribed referents of the dreamworld but something raw and nascent, a hot, unmediated chaos radiating in every known frequency that simultaniously seems to be on the galactic, cellular and sub-atomic level. It makes me think of what the universe might look like if we weren't here to process and interpret it, snapshots of something primal yet eternal without scale or bounds. Curiously, he said something back in 1965 that I always thought came from J.G. Ballard: "It is not the astronauts but the inner nauts I am interested in... the inner moons and the inner spaces."*

There's an amazing collection of his work online at www.matta-art.com. I don't think I've seen such a comprehensive collection of an artists work on the web and I see that the works that I saw were but a small part of his incredibly productive and rich output, mostly circa 1952-3. But a warning: there's at least 500 of his paintings here so if you like his work and only have dial-up you could here for weeks....

* Ballard had an article called "Time, Memory & Inner Space" published in The Woman Journalist (huh?) in 1963, so maybe Matta got it from him. Or they just came up with the same phrase around the same time.

Another snippet I forgot to post yesterday: Thursday night was First Thursday, which is when South Congress takes on a festive atmosphere, all the upmarket junk shops and galleries stay open until ten or eleven and it feels like Austin would like to think it feels all the time 'n' all over. Crowds of the young and/or pretty mill around, mostly aimlessly but in a good way, a beer or a bublegum flavored snow-cone in one hand, mobile phone in the other, gals dressed to show lotsa cleavage and tattoo'd midriff, guys dressed... well, however guys dress to recipricate -- backwards baseball caps, XXXL Dave Matthews t-shirts, hairy knees, is it? (The world still favors the male heterosexual gaze.) I don't know if any of the shops actually make any money by staying open late, if anyone has ever had the sudden impulse to buy 1950s dental charts, lifesized cardboard cutouts of Roy Rogers or paintings of Country and Western singers by in Yard Dog by Jon Langford (another Leeds exile, now in Chicago) while searching for the mythical free booze. It's a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, to remind yourself that Austin can be a cool, artsy and laidback place if you can stay away from the hideous northern expanses of soulless concrete strip malls, office parks, car lots and half-completely six-lane highways....

(Tasty article on First Thursday here.)

Although I've never got around to reading any of his novels or short stories -- he started appearing in Interzone around the time I lost interest in the genre and although many recommended his first novel, Dead Girls to me I never got around to reading it -- I'm pleased to have found Richard Calder's blog, from which comes the following evocative snippet:

The East End is currently overflowing with young women from the former Soviet Union, many of whom seem to work in some of the 'strip pubs' such as THE NAG'S HEAD, on Whitechapel Road itself, or else in a host of similar establishments ranged along Shoreditch High Street. In their attractive, if mercenary, company I'm told that I begin to resemble -- accent-wise, at least -- a middle-aged Peter Lorre. Or Peter Lorre's son, perhaps, if John Lydon had ever been in the position of bearing him a child.

Innit maaaah-velous...? First time I get a chance to sit down and blogulate, Blogger appears to have fallen off the edge of the web so I can't update. And every blogspot site gone with it, gone, bad, unread, the lot. Which brings home to me the fact that most of the personal web pages I read these days are on Blogspot, all cloistered in the same corner, susceptible to the same server meltdown, telecom glitch misdirected pickaxe or whatever when it comes to clobbering time. There's either too much to read or nothing at all. Diversify, folks! Used to be that everyone who wanted to publish their own words got themselves a website and learnt the rudiments of HTML. Now they go straight to blogger regardless of the nasty advert at the top and its fairly regular outages. And even some of us old timers have lapsed into the same trap, moving to Blogger or LiveJournal. But after this latest stunt it really is time to say toodle-loo. My contract with UK2 ends in a month or two and I'm looking for a new host, one that enables CGI/PHP/PERL and all that hands-on stuff I used to play around with so that I can use a grown-up blogging application like Movable Type instead of relying on Blog-grrrrr. And is cheaper. And doesn't clobber me with extra charges if the number of hits I get goes up by a mere 100%. It's just taking me a while to think of a new name for this nascent site. The two names I really wanted, the domains I owed for a couple of years and let slide, has been snapped up by some swine. I had flaneur.co.uk and slubberdegullion.com and let them lapse! That was back before corporations bought up ever webname from www.a.com to www.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.za and only the Concise Oxford English Dictionary names had been taken. Now that I've got a job in semi-corporate America it would probably be wise for me to become a bit more anonymous and not have an URL that is an anagram of my name -- which is not Neri Chardson as some have thought but Chad "Necro" Irons -- and * is starting to attract way too much deeply uninteresting spam.

(* From tonight all emails with this address will be filtered and deleted unread, so if you need to email me stick anything but "blog" in front of nerichardson.co.uk.)

After fearlessly breaking MTV's granny snogging taboo, Britney dives further into controversy with her thoughts on politics:

"Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens."

She's also thinking about moving to London. Why?

"I just like the way they treasure everything. Everything's very simply done. And, you know, the milk man still comes to the door."

I think she must have been watching Madge's Benny Hill videos....

A little chunk of Yellow Dog. I reserve judgement but it does read rather like one of those late 80s Amis impersonators.

Maybe I'm beyond help now... I walked into Waterloo Records intending to buy something new, something now, something truly poptasmic. Not necessarily little Justin Timberlake, but something you younguns would approve of. But I left with the most recent reissue of the Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth from 1979. Back in 1979 I would have sniggered at people who insisted on buying albums that were 24 years out of date, but I don't feel that I've turned into some kind of geriatric Ted locked into a long gone era. Colossal Youth sounds more new and now (if not exactly poptasmic) to me than any of the current mainstream or alternative sounds. But I would say that, I suppose. I'd be the last person to willingly own up to being past it, daddy-o. So I sit on the fence and "ummm" and "ahhhh", stroking my imaginary beard. Does the current crop of pop 'n' rock sound lame to me because I'm inexorably drawn to the music scene of my youth or have I retreated to the music of the early 80s because the music I'm hearing right now and the surrounding cultural scene is so lame? Where is the foolproof scientific aparatus to put this question to the test? Ummmm. Ahhhhh.

Oh hello... I just nodded off there for a few days and am now struggling to get back into the mood for frenziedly blogging life's minutia. Been listening to music, looking at art -- Max Ernst and Matta, in particular -- and travelling hundreds of miles to buy Gentlemen's Relish and Tunnock's caramel wafers. Experienced my first official American holiday as a working stiff. Onward and upward. Long epic piece on something or other soon, I'm sure. Later.