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.
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Keeping it a bit too weird -- a Coil album was playing when we walked into Quack's coffee shop this lunchtime. Pretty unsettling stuff to go with your latte and pumpkin bread. And last week Black Flag's truly dire Loose Nut (I'd forgotten how hopeless they had become by that album, churning out a sort of grumpy, half-hearted heavy metal) was blasting out of the speakers in the Blue Velvet vintage clothing store. That's not the sort of music you'd led to believe is appropriate for laid back, hippy-dippy Austin....
A few weeks ago we had to go and pick up a record player from Circle Stereo. This involved a 50-something mile round trip as the owner and his cat had relocated from a dreary row of workshops and offices just up Lamar to the deer-infested wilds of Dripping Springs (forthcoming festivals: Cajun Shrimp Boil in September, Chili Cook-off in October). Apparently we're lucky to have him so close as there aren't many people who fix old hi-fi equipment these days. Most folk just buy a new model when their CD player or whatever shows the first sign of malfunctioning and only those with a sentimental attachment to a 30 year old turntable/tuner would think of seeking out a specialist to delve into its guts and figure out why it only plays at 0.03rpm. Mr Circle Stereo gets vintage audio shipped in for repair from all over the USA, stuff from the days when turntables and amplifiers had solid American names, wood veneers and knobs. Getting to his workshop is an adventure in itself. If most of the loose bits hadn't already fallen off our car in the previous few weeks I'm sure they would be scattered along the twisting dirt track that led up to his property. As we juddered and crawled up the side of the hill I felt like we were visiting the hideout of some isolationist cult rather than going to a shop. The view was spectacular when we got to the top, although the half-dozen abandoned cars rusting away in the weeds made me wonder how we were going to get back down.
But we did -- and for the last couple of weeks I've been able to connect the record player to my laptop and burn a few CD copies of stuff that's pretty much unavailable on CD like the Pop Group's Y and the Associates' Fourth Drawer Down. It's a slow process, however, and there are more that I want to copy than I have patience or time to do before the record player's original owner wants it back. Which should I copy next? Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, Ivor Cutler's Dandruff, Husker Du's Zen Arcade or The Many Moods of Ann-Margret?
I know there are one or two more important things in the world to write about but am I the only one to find it strange that the winner of the Rear of the Year doesn't actually have what scientists would call a bottom? (Or even a neck in this picture?)
Seems like my reasons for steering well clear of that Eeyore's Birthday thing in Saturday were well-founded.
So.. why is it that i never get the CUTE boys rubbing their erection on me in an eeyores drum circle.. its always the creepy and uninteresting looking ones that like to try and hump me like a dog..
I mean -- ick. What could be more disgusting than drum circles?
Arose at an implausible hour on Saturday so that we could go down to Buda for the 6th Annual Wiener Dog Races. It's actually the local Lions Club Country Fair and Cook-Off, but the wiener dog racing is the main event, the thing that lifts this fair from the dozens of similar events scheduled for the weekend. What better way to start the day than two hundred wiener dogs and their owners, the smell of BBQ, chili cook-offs, funnel cake and the obligatory Elvis impersonator? We got a bunch of last year's Proud to be an American Wiener T-shirts as they were being sold off at $2 each. We only stuck around for an hour -- to be honest once you've seen one weiner dog race you've seen them all. One dog will zoom out of the traps and cross the line in about four seconds, one dog will stop halfway and the rest will amble off to the side to sniff each others butts or just wander around as if they had no interest in winning the $500 or acknowledging the person waving their favorite toy, a pair of socks or a handful of prime fillet steak at the finishing line.
Back home to reapply sunscreen and decide which event to go to next. For some reason just about every spring event in central Texas was scheduled for Saturday, from the Barsana Dham Indian Fair to the Texas Alaskan Malamute Rescue Benefit, the American Botanical Council's Medicinal Herb Fest to the Parksfest. We couldn't decide between Eeyore's 40th Birthday Party and the Flugtag, but our taste for hi-tech absurdity won out over shirtless drum circles and curious smells. It's probably deeply unsound of me to prefer a corporate sponsored event that is, at heart, just a way of promoting a pointless and unpleasant fizzy drink over something that has KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD stamped all over it, but my definition of "weird" has moved on from 1972 and no longer includes stoned guys with BO than Hans Blix could track down bashing bongos until it gets dark. If you want "weird" then I think people trying to fly a giant model of Willie Nelson's head off 1st Street Bridge is pretty damn weird.
Other Texas events we missed: Bob Wills Day in Turkey, the "western swing capitol of the world" and the 7th Annual Dewberry Festival at Cameron. Next week -- who knows...?
I need to get a hat. A few hours out in the sun at the weekend and I felt like my brain was being stewed or steamed. The culinary metaphors can only get elaborate as spring turns to summer. Already the temperature is reaching a steady mid-80s by late afternoon, but it's the direct merciless sun on my noggin rather than the heat that bothers me. But what kind of hat can an Englishman of my age wear without looking like a complete pranny?
The Church of Me is back with an apraisal of the album that even after 30 years most people who pretend to be half-serious about music are apprehensive about mentioning: Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Since it became the ultimate rock album for people who didn't like rock music some time in the mid 70s, even the most open-minded of critics have declined from considering it as anything other than a major part of What Was Wrong With Rock Music Until Punk Came Along. Read the main names in rock criticism since then and you'll be hard pressed to find so much as a grudging "Well, okay, he was the first person to bring Terry Riley style minimalism to the mainstream, but..."
But following Marcello's lead I'm going to come out of the closet and admit that I was a teenage Tubular Bells fan. As far as I know everything he did afterwards (except the guitar solo on Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom) has been either a rehash or something far worse -- and that includes most of side 2 of Tubular Bells -- but the first side of that album meant a lot to me the summer of its release. I suspect my brief devotion to it had more to do with my late pubescent bio-chemistry -- every kid needs a suitably dreamy soundtrack to accompany their discover that they are the most wretched and miserable of creatures that ever existed. Ten years later and it would have been the Smiths or the Cure. I won't say whether that would have been better or worse for me. (Ten years later when I needed an updated soundtrack for the reaffirmation that I was indeed TMWAMOCTEE it was to the Birthday Party, The Fall and Lydia Lunch I turned, but that's neither here nor there.)
I have the urge to get back into The Fall. All the albums I had by them mysteriously disappeared somewhere between London and Leeds at the start of the nineties and I didn't have much awareness of the band's continued existence after that (other than the annual appearance of album reviews that kept insisting that this time, no really, Mark E. Smith -- and whatever bunch of teenagers were cowering behind him -- was really back on form), but at some point I did get This Nation's Saving Grace on CD as a token reminder of the sort of thing I used to be obsessed by in the early to mid 80s and as a placemark in my collection for when I got around to going back and filling in all the gaps.
But there's something not quite right about having a token Fall album. It's like just having a couple of pages torn from the middle of a novel. And while TNSG is probably the most self-contained Fall album besides their first, Live at the Witch Trails, I still find myself wishing I had kept up with the band and bought every damn thing they released, even all the dodgy live recordings and late 90s compilations. So I guess that's my first month's paycheque taken care of when I do eventually get a damned job here....
...and at the heart of it was a vicious rivalry between Suede's Brett Anderson and Blur's Damon Albarn.
Ahah. Maybe that's why I didn't "get" Britpop. I'd stopped reading the pop-rags so I wasn't privy to the minutia and only had the music to judge the scene by. And since that was mostly reheated "freakbeat" I may have been a little unfair. Although I'm still not sure how knowing who was nobbing what's-her-name from Elastica explains or excuses Ocean Colour Scene and Menswear.
Dixie Chicks say: "We forgot country music fans were rightwing, misogynistic bigots so here's a tasteful nude shot of us to make up for it". Or something. Is this damage limitation or are they saying "up yours, Cletus?"
I thought Hectorini would be an online cult but the only reference to him and his very homemade TV show I can find is this photograph of the Hectorinimobile. Imagine a hyperactive four year old in a middle-aged man's body, let loose in the strip malls and car repair shops of South Austin with a video camera and the urge to make everyone he meets sing and dance along to 80s disco classics. His own dance style consists of hunching up with his arms outstretched, baring his lower teeth and vibrating. Endearingly insane.
I don't know what's going on with Austin's finest cable access show, The Reel Deal (their website has been down for a while and the only decent article about it is three years' old), but last night's show was their back-up tape -- which just so happened to be from September 12th 2001. It was an amazing -- to me, anyway --snapshot of how people in the USA were behaving barely 24 hours after the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon away from the news media cameras and websites. It was angry, funny, sad, spooky, irreverent and raw, and nothing like what we in England would have assumed from what we were shown. It ought to be preserved forever to balance the pious, manipulative rot that has been served up since.
What was also interesting were the trailers they showed for movies that had been put on hold because of the previous day's events. Was Big Trouble ever given a theatrical release? Are pre 9-11 versions of the Spiderman trailer still collectible? Were any films ever made before 9-11 that didn't have a shot of the twin towers in them?
UPDATE: Naturally the Reel Deal website has started working again since I typed this. More here.
The new Austin Chronicle doesn't go online until tomorrow,but I thought I'd be the first to bring you this little gem from Christopher Gray's "The Pleasure Principle -- The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Austin's Eighties-Inflected Nerve-Rock":
Punk rock left jolly olde England economically and culturally exhausted. Lads on the dole had little else to do but sit around, get pissed or high (or both) and play music. Since their world was monotonous, dreary, and generally lacking in hope, that's what came out of their guitars. Joy Division, Wire, PiL, Gang of Four, the Fall, Suicide -- bands that combined the hollow nihilism of their dying industrial hometowns with punk's anyone-can-play aesthetic and a disco-rooted beat as steady as the mail.
Ah, yes, such evocative writing sure takes me back... the disco-rooted beat of the Fall, the dying industrial hometowns that Wire and PiL came from, and those monotonous, dreary guitars of, um, Suicide, Stockport's finest....
The Perry-Castaneda Library is a wonderful thing, although not quite the infinite resource of obscure English writers I had hoped it to be. Only the last two of B.S. Johnson's novels, for example -- and he's not that obscure. I'd been putting off reading Johnson's books for decades as I assumed they would be of the austere, joyless "experimental" genre that I had my fill of in my late teens. I went straight from reading nothing but science fiction to 400 page long unpunctuated lowercase stream of consciousness "fictions" about the last thirty seconds in the life of a mute one-legged turnip gatherer in 15th century Prague ("a searing inditement of man's inhumanity to man"), skipping everything else, which left me with a patchy understanding of what literature was for a while. But Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is actually a hoot -- very short, very dark, rather funny and worryingly close to the likes of Terry Pratchett, Peter Tinniswood or Robert Rankin in the way that it uses the tropes of modernism (or do I mean post-modernism? I can never remember where the line is drawn) devices for comic purposes. Possibly the only book you'll read where a mass murderer gives his girlfriend an orgasm using shaving cream. It fizzles out in the end, having convinced itself that the novel is dead or ought to be, but it remains one of the most curious and infuriating books of the period, simultaniously dated and fresh. (Re-reading Jonathan Coe's A Touch of Love recently I could see the influence of this book all the way through -- and it's hardly surprising that Coe next book is a biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant.)
Okay, after having reviewed a 24 year old album after listening to it approximately once in the last decade, I shall now move on to the White Stripes' Elephant, which I've only heard a few tracks from and that was outside the Club DeVille last week, which as you might guess from its name is pretty much the ideal location for listening to a record that makes such a big deal of its 1963 verisimilitude. Or it would have been if Elephant was anywhere near the album everyone makes it out to be. Inevitably I nod towards Marcello's insight that the music on Elephant is closer to 1972 and the likes of the Groundhogs or Ten Years After or a million white bands cranking up the amps but churning out the same old blues. The tracks I heard made me think of heavy metal played on a stereo where one of the speakers had come unplugged, the absence of bass sounding not like an innovation or even a gimmick -- like a piano piece played using just the black notes or that novel that guy wrote without using the letter "e" -- but a distracting and nagging technical problem that you want to get up and fix. I really wanted to like Elephant as I feel that I'm being wilfully awkward and snotty in my dismisal of the few current rock offerings that apparently do what rock ought to do but on this minimal hearing it seemed little more than irritating background music for finishing my dirty martini and the Long Island Teas of my two companions. But hey, the White Stripes were last month's flavour. Maybe I'll like the... um... let's see.... who are this week's big thing? Help me out here, kids.
Y - The Pop Group (Radar, 1979 -- currently only availably on ultra-expensive Japanese import). Was this the first unlistenable near-masterpiece of the post-punk era? Did it come out before Alternative TV's Vibing Up The Senile Man? I could easily look it up but I'm offline at the moment and I want to rattle this off without having to bother with any research. It was a big disappointment when it came out although the years (and its varying degrees of unavailability) have recast it as one of the most important and influential records of that time, part of some sort of avant-funk movement along with the Gang of Four, A Certain Ratio, etc. The Pop Group weren't funky though, not funky in any earthly way that connected to normal git down 'n' boogie notions of funk at the time. You could nod and mention Miles Davis' On The Corner or James Blood Ulmer's Are You Glad To Be In America if you were so inclined but even on their most toe-tapping numbers there was only the idea of funk, like someone had described it to them down the phone and they thought it sounded like something they might add into their mix.
Y was produced by Dennis Bovell, although its hard to detect his input, especially when you compare it to the lustrous skanking miracle that is the Slits' Cut. There are the sonics of dub, a bass so big and low that you feel it in your teeth and elsewhere even when the volume is turned down, guitar and drums jangling with echo, but as with the funk element the reggae is there as part of a discarded template, the ghost of what might have held things together. And that's the problem with Y. It's such an ambitious mess of ideas and influences that it might have worked had they not tried to strip it down to reveal something new and raw, untainted by hateful commerciality and convention, even the conventions of their beloved reggae and funk. What were, in previous demos and a John Peel session, perfectly formed, coherent songs, were hacked down not to their skeletons but to lumps of barely connected bleeding meat -- a blat of bass here, a piano-down-the-stairs crash there and -- bloody screams everywhere. With punk turning into powerpop and the dreadful mod revival, there was a feeling at the time that melody and tunefulness were the enemies of serious intent and unless you wanted to tra-la-la about your buh-buh-baby (cue "She's Got Suspenders On" by Advertising for a horrible example of what punk had devolved into in certain circles) you had to sound like Kevin Coyne gargling with maggots and coat hangers and the Pop Group took this even further than most. Nearly all of the songs of Y -- except the surprisingly tender and evocative "Savage Sea" -- start with a scream and intensify from there. "WHAT does it FEEL LIKE to KIIIIILL A MAAAAAAAN?" The lyrics are impossibly overwrought: chopped up slogans and quotations delivered as if they were loaded with secret meaning. Too often the album gives the impression of being mimicry, of trying to replicate the sound of the most commited and intense musical creativity and exploration without having to go through the irksome business of getting there by dilligence, understanding and craft -- like someone sitting down at the piano and banging their fists on the keyboard and declaring "Well, that's what Cecil Taylor does, isn't it?" Well, yes and no. I'm the last person to knock inspired primitivism. I've said nice things about Amon Duul's Paradieswaerts Duul and even Mahogany Brain. I suspected after hearing the first Meat Puppets' album that they had either never touched musical instruments before or else were classically trained and I'd say the same thing about Vibracathedral Orchestra, to pick two fairly random examples from the "primitive, genius or both?" file. But I suspect that like Alternative TV, the Pop Group were somewhere in between -- they knew three too many and three hundred too few chords to really be able to produce the savage, burning music in their heads and so had to fake it. And they almost pull it off, I have to admit. I still play the first side every few years and find myself wishing they just hadn't tried so hard.
Hey, when did the Independent start charging for their opinion columns? Sixty quid a year or a pound for one article for 24 hours? A pound for.... oh, I think this needs a paragraph to itself:
Ahem. They are seriously expecting people to hand over one hundred shiny new pennies to read a page of drivel by Janet Street Porter?
UPDATE: TMFTML informs me there is a simple way to read these columns for free, should you want to. The phrase "hiding the doormat under the front door key" may spring to mind when you find it.
24: The resurrection of Jack Bauers. Was last night's episode a special Easter episode? Don't want to spoil it for UK readers but by the time this episode comes around on BBC2 you'll have forgotten what I've written, I'm sure. This second series started off a bit slow and I had my doubts at first. The writers were trying to be a bit too clever, setting it up as an almost conventional thriller and almost daring you to be dismayed by the simplistic us (or U.S.) versus them plot with the additional "oh daddy, will my dream wedding be ruined by nasty foreigners?" storyline. I can't quite say when it all twisted into shape -- possibly when the most evil man in the world turned out to be a pawn in another game and it became clear why it was still called 24 and not 16. Although the Kim-in-peril sequences seemed to be part of some other show for the first dozen or so episodes, at least it's been her own bumbling and stupidity that has got her into trouble this time around rather than a vast conspiracy of murderous kidnappers -- and she hasn't been in the last two episodes at all. I'm hoping that it doesn't all turn out to be the masterplan of a previously unknown Drexel sibling -- if the Dennis Hopper character turns out to have an identical twin brother I'll be very annoyed.
The only problem with this show is that at this point you feel cheated if they bring in a new, unsuspected bad guy but you also feel that they're playing unfair if the next level up the hierarchy of evil dudes turns out to be a character you've been rooting for all along. Shocking revelations are promised next week and it looks like Kim will return and actually shoot someone -- instead of getting people killed just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just four more episodes of this and four more of Buffy. Then what will there be worth watching?
Talking of MTV, we caught part of the Madonna album plugfest last night and it was a tragic thing to behold. Once the thought of Madonna singing live on TV would have been a major cultural event, back in the days when she had cultivated such an air of mystery, controversy and anticipation that any appearance or utterance was analysed and documented even by those who loathed her, but this was just something we chanced upon, channelsurfing between people eating worm omelettes on Univision and the usual subhuman reality dating shows. Once she permeated all aspects of our lives, from the dancefloor to the bedroom to the library; academics wrote books about dreams of Madonna and you could have probably proposed the establishment of a journal of Madonna studies with special reference to the works of Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray et al, but now she's just fodder for Carson "Epitome of everything that is wrong with modern life" Daley, trying to come on all real and deep for the dwindling attention of kids who'd applaud a coke machine if it was shiny enough, strumming the ocassional open chord on an acoustic guitar to show some kind of authenticity I guess, reducing songs that are banal and tuneless enough on American Life when given the groovy-four-years-ago Mirwais treatment to... I dunno, I can't think of anyone suitably and notably dull to compare them to... Seals and Croft? Andrew Gold? Barbra Cartland? And the grand finale, "Like A Prayer" deformed from its original feverish dark ecstacy into a happy clappy Sunday School singalong was a suitably dreary soundtrack for the death of my interest in Madonna even as a spectacle of decline.
I think we can all agree that what the world has been crying out for of late is an MTV version of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights set in Puerto Rico with characters called Cate, Heath (a homeless musician) and Hendrix. Oh come on, it's what she would have wanted. I just hope they don't mess up the climatic jet-ski chase with the kung fu lesbians that makes the book such a classic. (Via TMFTML.)
It's taken me until now to discover that I miss Penguins. Fortunately Central Market sells them, albeit at $2.59 for a 59p packet of eight. But sometimes you have to pay for epicurean goodness -- and you appreciate them more when they're not so cheap that you question what they're made out of. But where is the local equivalent? Australia has the derivative Tim Tam, so where is the US version of the mighty Penguin, king of biscuits?
Ay up mother, better fetch a mop and bucket -- Ian Penman has a blog: The Pillbox. Half brilliant, half daft, all enticing, like a freestyle updating of his best NME outpourings in those distant post-punk days when he was Stan to Paul Morley's Ollie and we all pretended that getting past the translator's introduction to Derrida's On Grammatology was essential to understanding the flipside of the new Modettes' single. Happy days (are here again).
Looks like I've been going about this look for a job malarky the wrong way:
"I want a well-paid job. I have no imagination, I am anti-social, uncreative and untalented," read an advertisement posted by Angelika Wedberg, 30, in the regional daily Goteborgs-Posten on Sunday.
On Monday her phone started ringing incessantly and job offers poured in.
I'm probably in a minority of one here, but I gave the new Yo La Tengo album, Summer Sun a listen, and decided against buying it. I'm sure it's everything Marcello sez it is, but I need an album to sound radically different to what I already own by an artist before I want to spend money just for the sake of being a completist, and Summer Sun doesn't -- on the briefest of listens -- seem to add anything new to the almost perfect summation of Grown Up Melancholic Rock that was And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. I've done this in the past, stopped buying albums by bands not because I don't like the band any more but because they seem to have reached their pinnacle and anything else is just reitteration -- I still think Sonic Youth are one of the best bands of all time but I haven't bought anything by them since Daydream Nation. Perhaps this is a bad thing, showing that my tastes become fixed after a certain point and that once an artist does what I think is the best they can do I discard them.
This doesn't explain why I bought the Aphex Twin's 26 Mixes for Cash instead though, does it?
Watching TV this morning you'd get the impression that the conflict in Iraq was all about releasing those seven POWs... Oh, sorry, that was last Monday's post, wasn't it? But it still applies today, only more so. All that's missing is George W. Bush giving the "returnees" piggyback rides around the White House lawn. With special Easter footage of shameless clergymen in full Reverend Lovejoy mode telling their congregations how the return of POWs relates to the Easter story. ("At a cold sunrise service in Fort BLiss, El Paso, the return of the POWs fit right in with the Easter message of rebirth", sez K-EYE, who understandably don't have permalinks on their webpage.)Yes, because Jesus invaded a foreign land on the assumption that they had Weapons of Mass Destruction, made sure the oil ministry was okay while letting looterstrash the hospitals, museums and libraries and... ah, forget it.
There's something not quite right when genteel, 51 year old author of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan, can pull off the rock 'n' roll dominatrix look better than Britney, Christina or any of the current crop of pop muffins. (Via Bookslut.)
It still gives me a warm feeling when someone finds this site searching for "jack trevor story" or "desperate bicycles" rather than the usual topless teen singers, bored regional housewives, balloon bursting babes and naked celebrity feet. Although the search for jlo and saddam remix rather intrigues me.
Watching TV this morning you'd get the impression that the conflict in Iraq was all about releasing those seven POWs. Obviously I'm glad they were okay, but this sort of story only emphasises the way the TV media here slobbers all over any story with a simple, cosy human interest angle, layers on the mushy music and soft focus graphics and lines up a 60 minute special with Diana Sawyers or Bawbaw Wahwahs -- and ignores everything else. Only room for one story here, folks, so let's make it a good one! Shouldn't we maybe start worrying that it looks like BushCo is on a roll and Syria could be next? Nah, let's see those ordinary American families weeping with happiness one more time....
Mr Personality looks like being another cultural high for Fox TV. 20 men vie for the heart of Stockbroker Hayley only she doesn't get to see their faces. They have to rely on dodgy, non-physical attributes like inteligence, wit, humour, charisma and personality rather than good looks. Who knows, she might be tricked into picking some devious swine who gulls her with kindness, wisdom and warmth when he doesn't look like a Calvin Klein advertisement. Add a random C- list celebrity (Monica Lewinsky) and you've got fun for all the family. Next month Mr. Trustfund -- 20 men vie for the heart of Realtor Tawni but she only gets to see their wallets and their dental X-rays. Possibly presented by Disco Stu from The Simpsons, other commitments permitting.
Via Branton's webpages -- the website of Scarlett Thomas, another young English novelist for whom the internet is as natural a medium for writing (diary, previously published columns, ocassional rants, etc) as any other.
I read Matthew Branton's The Love Parade soon after it came out (okay, soon after it turned up in the local remainder shop, if you want the facts) and thought it was a terrific, assured satire on modern life, even if it did weird out towards the end. I bought his next book, The House of Whacks, but despite it being a thriller narrated by a 1950s bondage model I couldn't get into it. He had a few books out after that but my attention was elsewhere. Now I read in yesterday's Observer that he is so pissed off with the world of publishing that he is giving away his latest novel online and rather than have anything to do with it he has seriously dropped out and moved to Hawaii to surf, fish and grow vegetables. The final straw was the publication of Sophie Dahl's "novel", although he also singles out "Tony Parson's drivel":
"I don't want their stupid money until the industry is less stupid," he says. "Culture is important; it affects how people think of themselves, the world, their place in it, and the publishing industry in this country is now a joke that's gone too far."
Now I feel an obligation to go back and read his books -- if I can find them here in Austin.
I just have to catch sight of Donald Rumsfeld on TV and I lose the ability to act or think like a rational human being. A filthy red mist fills my brain and the urge to spend the next couple of years under the bed chewing my thumb comes over me, or it would if we had the sort of bed you could hide under. I've tried to write something about him but no matter how I try to focus on his particular brand of smirking, cracker-barrel wretchedness all that comes is a stream of incoherent and surreal insults about his hair, his suits and those mean, smirking Cigarette Smoking Man from The X Files meets Benny Hill eyes. Even more than George W. Bush and the Cheney Thing he represents everything I hate about the current US regime. It may be totally irrational, but when I look at him I come over all Philip K. Dickian and see him not as a person but a nexus of everything that is wrong with the western world masquerading as a person, all the life-hating, pleasure-denying, reptilian, robotic.... Sorry, it's all gone red. Lovecraftian things pulse in the warm, fetid darkness. Ring for the nurse please, I need my soothing potion again....
Meanwhile, back at the ranch ... Sen. Ted Stevens suggested last week that New York City's cops and firefighters should work overtime without pay as a wartime sacrifice. "I really feel strongly that we ought to find some way to convince the people that there ought to be some volunteerism at home. Those people overseas in the desert -- they're not getting overtime. ... I don't know why the people working for the cities and counties ought to be paid overtime when they're responding to matters of national security."
Stevens, R-Alaska, had just voted for tax cuts that will give those who make a million dollars a year $92,000 more to spend on polo ponies. Some must sacrifice more than others.
Three good tracks on Madonna's album shocker -- the Guardian's Alexis Petridis goes against all expectations and finds something nice to say about American Life. One track even gets a "fantastic". Although you can't help but suspect he's trying to be positive when he describes one track as having "a wonderful choral finale", which isn't really what her fans used to rush out and buy her records for.
At least I haven't written anything too silly about the war. Haven't really had chance as everything changes so quickly that a slow thinker like me doen't get the time to formulate even the briefest comment before the next big event occurs and everything that made sense five minutes earlier is now painfully outdated. After watching the BBC World News this morning (sure it's unpatriotic to watch this now that I'm an American and should be taking the likes of Fox News as gospel, blah blah blah.... but really, all the local channels can offer is a human interest story from Fort Hood, women's basketball and the run down of school lunches for the day -- which is no longer any fun now that K-EYE's Fred Cantu isn't there to drool over any mention of bacon and trill "a whhhhhhoooooolllllle wheat roll!" when he reads the school district menus), it looks like it might all be over soon and all those pundits who said it would be "a cakewalk" and then denied they had said any such thing will now be backtracking once more and insisting that they had said it all along. I'd like someone to have the honesty to admit that events as complex and catastrophic as this can't be predicted and that everyone from the retired generals to pizza-fattened bloggers are just as clueless as everyone else and has just been making it up as they've gone along, trying to make every report and rumour fit in with what they said yesterday or else reworking yesterday's flustered interpretations to seem like prophecy.
My current POV? My big statement to the world, to be preserved for all time or until I fire up Blogger again and re-edit it? This is valid for only the next thirty seconds, please note -- so read quickly before it all changes. But wow, guess what? I'm glad it seems to be going well. A shocking revelation, eh? A liberal like me pleased that there aren't more dead, haven't been bigger allied setbacks, outbreaks of famine, cholera and radio-active plague. Jeez -- only in the unspeakably foul dreams of the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Mark Steyn and Richard Littlejohn (there's a trio you wouldn't like to be trapped in a cupboard with) are evil liberals, BBC employees and Guardian readers in any way crestfallen about the collapse of Saddam's regime. (Example: you think we didn't get a nice warm glow from seeing those statues of Saddam taking a nosedive? You should have learnt by now that we're hardwired to feel good about the defacement and toppling of statues and what it represents. We chuckled when someone did a bit of freelance replenishment on that statue of Thatcher so why wouldn't be enjoy seeing statues of her old trade partner trashed?)
I'll be perfectly happy if it's nonstop dancing in the streets, football and liberated child prisoners from this point on, if every old geezer the camera passes insists on gleefully bonking a lifesize portrait of Saddam on the snozz with his shoe 200 times. I won't feel hurt or tricked if some rudimentary form of democracy blooms in Iraq and spreads throughout the east and maybe even reaches Florida some day. I'll accept your word for it until independent figures come in that casualties were minimal and the only civilians who were deliberately targetted were those protestors in Oakland. I'll be no less delighted than the most sentimental warblogger if the bad guys are dealt with appropriately by the families of those they killed or tortured and all over the world similar career psychopaths start to get the feeling that maybe tyrany and oppression isn't the way to ensure a long, happy retirement. I won't shed a tear if Robert Fisk has to take up writing captions for cute pet photos on the Lower Snoddlington Weekly Bugle because his increasingly dubious area of expertise is no longer needed. I admit to having been against the war at the beginning but you've got to be some kind of nincompoop not to want to win a war once someone has got your side into it. You've got to be a realist. Saying "no" to war is one thing, saying "let's stop this war halfway through, having killed thousands and trashed the place and riled everyone up but leaving the evil regime still in place" something else entirely. It's like heart surgery -- even if it wasn't really a good idea in the first place you can't just walk out of the operating theatre halfway through -- although you can do your best to get the doctors struck off....
Of course it's not over yet and there are still plenty of things that could go wrong, but I don't want them to go wrong. I think that's what I'm trying to say here. I still think Bush and his gang are a bunch of malicious, hateful twerps who now more than ever need a critical and unblinking eye kept on them. I want all the promises that have been made to be kept. I want the obvious things -- peace, democracy, liberty and French toast. I want the economy to boom in reaction to all the "good" news, especially if it extends to Austin and means some cool organization wants to employ an experienced technical writer and RoboHelp specialist at a sensible salary -- email address up top. I want mainstream America to grow up now that it has seen both how strong and how human (in good and bad ways) its consensual, sentimentalized superego -- the military -- is. I want America to feel good about itself for the right reasons and ditch the phony, suffocating Hallmark movie-of-the-week self-image it has been gulled into thinking was the one true way to be an American and that everything else was unpatriotic and weak. I want America to realize that being the most powerful nation in the world means not having to continually prove anything except that it can do good for purely altruistic reasons. I want America to be part of the world, not some sulking Stan Lee superman off to oneside, moaning about the fickleness of "Old Europe" and how it has to keep pulling the ingrates out of the flames at the last minute. I want everything to go so well that people say "Hey, we brought freedom to Iraq and made the world a better place -- so why the hell do I need to buy a new and bigger SUV every other year? What was I trying to prove? I'm an American! Number One! Don't need to prove a goddamned thing! And talk this Talk Radio crap off!" Etc, etc. Is that too much to want? Is it?
Oh and a free health service, non-fat Krispy Kremes and a monkey butler would be dandy too.
Every have one of those days where everything goes wrong? Of course you have. Yesterday was a more specific kind of day where everything went backwards -- I got nothing doing but instead managed to undo things I had done previously, like reblock the bathroom sink and maybe kill a plant I had nutured back to life. I probably forgot all the PHP4 and mySQL code and functions I had learned too. There's something infinitely deadening about a day when the only thing to look forward to tomorrow is maybe getting back to where you were the previous day, no wiser, possibly poorer and with a lot of cleaning up to do.
For all the saddos who have been repeatedly coming here for over a year seeking "charlotte church topless" -- here you are in today's Sun. I hope you feel suitably sullied, ashamed and ready to make amends to society.
Haven't seen any reference to Austin Mitchell's war diary in any English blogs -- the MP for Grimsby has a very idiosyncratic website that I'm sure I've mentioned before. He looks like a theatrical old drunk on the opening page, but that's what makes him Austin, ex TV-presenter and old school socialist. His war diary finishes at the end of March however....
Third sighting of Segway Boy last night, a lone nerd silently and surreally passing through the otherwise romantic twilight of Hyde Park as couples strolled and cats slinked. Where are you going, Segway Boy, so alone and unemcumbered, noiselessly passing into the thickening tendrils of night's approach? Does Segway Girl await?
Made my second sighting of Segway Boy this week, again on Guadeloupe. I assume it was the same guy. I suspect there aren't many around here, the Austin economy now being such that the sort of people who would have rushed out to buy Segways are no longer the sort of people who have a spare $4,950 to fritter away on such novelties. And to be honest, I still don't get it. Where do you put your coffee and breakfast taco? As the ultimate anti-SUV statement it's pretty cool but I suspect my tolerance for novelty one-person transportation was destroyed forever by the Sinclair C5. And that only cost £139.99 if you waited a couple of months after its launch and got one in the Comet sale.
Ana Marie of The Antic Muse sez all that needs saying about the death of Michael Kelly and the vindictive uselessness of the ya boo sucks "school" of online "political" "debate" that comes from both the spittle-flecked right and left.
If you've ever woken up in the middle of the night wondering what in tarnation you would get if you crossed Transvision Vamp with a Victoria's Secret commercial, then Harry may be just for you....
I'd forgotten to visit the Head Heritage for a few months, maaaaan, and so had missed Julian Cope on Leeds' finest, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and a Black Sabbath live bootleg double CD entitled Behind the Wall of Spock, that even I, a total Sab agnostic, might have to look out for.
Won't be posting much today as I'm slogging through Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas after reading David Brooks' piece on it in the May issue of the Atlantic, which isn't online yet. I always find Brooks engagingly wrongheaded, especially when he makes his big bold statements about what America is and what it means to be American....
If I was an American citizen I think I'd tell this grotesque, debasing, tax-dodging sham to stop assuming he can talk for the American people and bugger off back home.
Meanwhile, while the war goes on elsewhere, here's the news from Austin: Lawmaker's shampoo legislation draws laughter from colleagues. A more thoroughly blogger would follow this up with the comparison that it takes longer to train to be a shampooist than to be a _________, but I'll leave that to you as I have to get some quarters for the washing machine. Pip pip!
I was assaulted yesterday as I sat minding my own business outside Jamba Juice with my Orange-A-Peel (plus Energy Boost) on the drag yesterday. A bunch of women in highheel boots, miniskirts and size-too-small-tee-shirts set upon me to promote Old Spice, a form of aftershave that I thought had been outlawed by the Geneva Convention in the early 70s. Old Spice, as old geezers will remember, was what you found at the back of the bathroom cabinet when you had just experimented with your First Shave. After razoring your face raw and getting shaving cream in your eyes you probably thought it was an integral part of coming into manhood to slap the stuff all over your face with the rigour of the guy on the TV commercial. But instead of visions of a luscious bikini'd blonde stepping out of the crashing surf to the sound of "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, you probably screamed yourself silly and lost consciousness for a few seconds, vowing to grow a beard if the hair ever grew back. The smell of Old Spice was almost frightening and unplacable in nature, that attacked the nose,throat and eye -- something that only ancient, peglegged sailors on whaling ships that only docked every other year would consider resorting to.
(I think the survival of Old Spice was due to the fact that they lucked onto one of the two genuinely erotic TV commercials of my youth. Now I know for a lot of males, adolescence is a time when everything on TV can be construed as arousing and even a Shackleton's High Chair commercial could send 'em up to their bedroom with a couple of yards of kitchen roll, but for me only the blantantly orgasmic Old Spice commercial and the series for Cadbury's Flake really registered. I'm sure every sale of Old Spice was due to advertising rather than on the merit of the product itself. The same probably went for Cadbury's Flake -- a stick of crumbling flaky milk chocolate was all very well but you couldn't eat it in public without assuming that same sort of positioning and mouth action as the languid pseudo-felatrices in the commercials.)
(But I digress....)
"Try it, it's great," one said, brandishing an aerosol. Even in the presence of my pert and lovely wife it's shamefully rare that I'll shout NO! PLEASE GO AWAY! at a booted, miniskirted woman in a tight top, but I did, although this only resulted in her spraying a piece of card with the terrible, acrid airborn pollutant and dropping it in front of me, leaving the three of us at the table gasping for fresh air. Even the fumes from the stream of single occupant SUVs going by was fragrant and pure in comparison. Maybe I should have told her I only use Heritage by Guerlain, but that might have probably got me pummelled for anti-American activities....
I have no idea what this anecdote is going so I'll stop it here.
New observations cast doubt on the existence of two physical quantities: the Planck length and the Planck time. In theory, these are the smallest measurable units of space and time, beyond which both become jerky.
I must have missed the announcement that the universe was made of jerky. It's a theory that would explain a lot, however.
The Supreme Court tries sodomy.... Oh, I think the Slate writer knew what he or she was doing when commiting that headline. The article that follows may make you want to put your head under the cold tap for half an hour:
Justice David Souter asks whether Texas really has a 200-year tradition of criminalizing gay sodomy. "Was this law on the books in 1803?" he asks.
"Texas wasn't a state in 1803," offers Rosenthal.
"Good question!" applauds Scalia. "Don't fall into that trap!!"
Breyer notes that during World War I people also thought it "immoral" to "teach German in schools. … Immoral is a hard line to draw."
"There is a rational basis," insists Rosenthal.
"You're not giving us a rational basis," snaps Breyer.
"The rational basis," says Scalia, "is that the state thinks it's immoral. Like bigamy or adultery."
"Or teaching German," grins Breyer.
Souter wonders why Texas doesn't limit sodomy among heterosexuals. "Because it can lead to marriage and procreation," says Rosenthal....
Who writes these guys' dialog? Throw in a bunch of eye pokings, slaps and punches with the appropriate sound effects and you've got a Three Stooges script.
When I first saw that gruesome AOL "cybersex" broadband campaign I thought it was a damn shame that a woman who looked a bit like Sharon Stone had to resort to such things to pay the rent. It was only when I read in the New York Metro that I realised it was Sharon Stone.
