being the delicate blogging of an english chap in austin, texas, who has recently
ressumed his technical writing career but is still searching for eternal verities in
the bottom of his martini glass and on curious web pages. he is married, quite old
and off to the gym in a few minutes. you can email him at anything-that-doesn't-have-the-word-blog-in-it (at) nerichardson (dot)
co (dot) uk...
You can read about the real "Yes/No Interlude" here.
Friday, February 28, 2003
Here's a new excuse to invade Iraq -- Saddam owes the British taxpayers a billion pounds in defaulted loans for the military equipment Thatcher and her creatures arranged for companies like Marconi, Racal, Thorn-EMI and Tripod to sell him in the late 80s. God, all it needs is one mention of that evil, duplicitous thing (shudder) for Tony Blair to seem merely misguided....
Haven't been in a blogging state of mind lately. I think my brain may have iced over during the freaky weather earlier in the week and I've nothing new to say about the, uh, forthcoming "liberation" of Iraq. Have been to the gym though, using a 7 day trial membership doodad that was waiting in our mailbox when we moved here in the summer. It 's a very different experience to how it was at the fitness centre we went to in Headingley. No cheery chubbies here, gasping away for fifteen minutes on the rowing machine before collapsing in the sauna for a couple of hours and then heading off to the pub or chip shop. Even though I'm 32 pounds lighter and there's 5 inches less of me packed into the waistband of my pants than this time last year, I feel like the token fat bloke, the guy who all the honed and toned hunks stay well clear of in case he sweats in their fabulous direction. After decades of being tubby I'm now the right weight for my age and height but that obviously isn't enough for this sort of place. But another six days and we can move on to the next place offering a week's free trial, in our quest for a place with less gleaming chrome and fewer mirrors aimed at low-budget married hetrosexuals who just want the ocassional cardiovasular workout so that they can indulge themselves properly at Katz's or Amy's more than once a year without having to buy a new wardrobe afterwards....
Talking of which -- are Ted Mooney's other novels (Traffic and Laughter, Singing into the Piano) worth reading?
(And it was weird to see my name brought up when using Google to find information about Mooney. I reviewed Easy Travel to Other Planets... 19 years ago. I'd completely forgotten about that. I ought to add "book reviewer" to my resume even if I didn't get paid.)
These days I feel like one of those character in Ted Mooney's novel Easy Travel to Other Planets who is stricken by "information sickness". Each new thing I read makes me feel less in control of the information I need to understand the world. Each article about some element of "The War" or "The Crisis" I read makes me wonder why I was satisfied with or even accepted the validity of the last one and makes me want more, sending me off in ten new directions, wanting corroboration and alternatives, background and extrapolation. I then find myself almost woozy, feeling at the same time that I know too much and I don't know a damned thing, that it's all just a blizzard of white noise, scraps of data that connect with nothing and just fizzle away. It's not that I'm reading so many different viewpoints that they cancel one another out but that all the information seems to have reached critical mass and it isn't functioning as information any more. I wish I could just purge my brain and start from first principles....
Austin is in the savage grip of a winter storm.... yikes. From t-shirt weather to subzero in two days. There was even snow falling yesterday, one or two flakes in between the torrential freezing rain, hail and sleet. And I left all my winter clothes back in Yorkshire.... So like everyone else in the entire city I shall spend the day in bed.
Back to reading a couple of books a week. (Who knows what unthinkable intellectual achievement will be next? A grammatically correct paragraph? Wait and see.) Just got through The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith, which was the flamboyant disapointment I had been led to expect. There are some good things in the book but it is ultimately crushed by its own over-reaching attempts at cleverness, superfluous gimmickry and not wanting to do the expected thing. It very much reads like the work of a young, much-heralded writer troubled by critical expectations, someone wanting to do the unexpected, maybe get "the difficult second novel" out of the way so as to take the pressure off. It's a lumpy work, its influences and references barely digested or worked through. The convincing multicultural stew of her first novel is replaced by a gallery of unlikely, tricksy freaks who all seem to act like young Woody Allens regardless of their ethnicity, upbringing or livestyles. There are too many dollops of religion and pop-culture, as if their presence would thicken the texture and richness of the book. Which they do, but not nearly as successfully as if they had been incorporated into the story itself rather than just allowed to dangle from it like ornaments. There are just too many quotes, diagrams and references to Zen and the Kabbalah that neither explain nor resonate; they just get in the way, like the writer's equivalent of scaffolding that should have been removed in the final draft.
But it's worth reading. There are some terrific passages where she's funny, evocative and unique and you'd be a fool to miss these. And they're not all in the prologue as a lot of reviewers suggest.... And how can you not give at least one upward thumb to a novel that namedrops Philip K. Dick, Bettie Page and Giant Haystacks?
Of course there are sillier awards than the Grammies -- Blogcritics' Critiquees for example, where Elvis Costello's When I Was Cruel gets voted the second best electronic album of 2002.
Stayed conscious without the aid of drugs through much of the Norah Jones 45th Award Ceremonies last night, although it all went rapidly downhill after Gwen Stefani's thighboots and I had to struggle not to flip channels when Coldplay and the New York Philharmonic showed America what "alternative rock" was all about -- chimpy piano thumping and the less fiddly bits of Deep Purple In Rock. But complaining about the Grammies is a bit like geting upset that you can't breath underwater. The best you can hope for is some distracting silliness and maybe a nod towards something of genuine musical worth in the garbled announcements just before the commercial break, when the man with the manly voice runs through the awards for categories that don't concern 13 year olds or AOR fans -- nice to see Lee Perry, the Clash, Vaughan Williams and Charley Patton picking up a bundle.
Horrified that Sting didn't get his usual award for being Sting -- seems this will go to Bruce Springsteen from now on.
The Clash "tribute" -- a neat demonstration of just about everything the Clash were against when they wrote the song.
Faith Hill's impersonation of a drag queen impersonating Britney. Sheryl Crow's industrial-grade backcombed impersonation of Sharon Stone in Casino. Lou Reed's impersonation of Grampa Simpson.
Robin Williams. James Taylor. Those two worried-looking park attendants dragged in to sing "The Sound of Silence". Why?
The ancient laptop is back in the land of the whirling, clicking and working again, virus-free and with all the correct drivers, updates and wotnots reinstalled. Latest versions of Opera and the Bat! downloaded, a million superfluous graphics, fonts and uncompleted mp3s deleted and we're ready to venture back into the blog-o-thing.
I had a fight with a squirrel yesterday; I opened the front door to find it ripping apart the doormat. Even as I looked down it continued to tear fiberous mouthfuls from the corner before it hurled itself off the balcony at the nearest tree, bounced onto the next and was then away across the flat roof of the opposite apartments, returning about thirty seconds later for further nesting material, only stopping this routine when it decided it wanted wet leaves instead.
Technical dificulties, folks. Insert graphic of potter's wheel or kittens here with soothing music or an ironic 70s soundtrack if you must.
My laptop has been devoured from within by a virus, and I had to re-install the ancient operating system scholars call "Windows 98". Twice. I had backups of all my important stuff of course, but it has to be said that backups of virus-infected files aren't really worth having. So today I have to re-install fresh versions of everything, track down a billion drivers and updates on the web, trash all my old backup CDs and reburn a new set. So I may be gone for a while.
Can Kim Bauer please stay locked in that bunker for the rest of 24? (Don't go to that site if you've just started watching the new series back in England.) And if she does survive this series and there's another, can she at least be shipped off to a nunnery on a remote island out of mobile phone range? Or is it obligatory for every Fox show to feature one female character who gets the time to take a shower and change into a tightfitting top without a bra even if all hell is breaking loose everywhere else?
Leave futurism to the futurists: Greg Eastbrook at the New Republic gives Bush's hydrogen car the "nice idea but..." treatment. It seems that "making hydrogen from water requires loads of electricity, far more electricity than the energy value of the hydrogen that is obtained" and the only potentially cost-effective way of making it (besides hooking up a big vaccum cleaner to the sun) involves "steam-formatting" fossil fuels -- natural gas, coal and petroleum. So you might as well stick with gas-guzzling SUVs, folks....
Following Nick Cohen's piece in the Observer on Sunday, another essential read for those of us who are uneasy about the lack of real alternatives to war offered by the left: What would you suggest? Those who are opposed to war on Iraq need to show that there is a peaceful way to liberate its people by Jonathan Freedland in today's Guardian. The demonstrations at the weekend made it abundantly clear that people don't want the Bush-led war on Iraq, so what is now needed is some fine tuning. The left needs to stop acting hurt and huffy and respond to the conniving right's accusation that it is pro Saddam. It might seem obvious to those on the left who were protesting against Saddam when the Reagan Administration was happy selling anthrax, bubonic plague, and botulinum toxin to him but people have short memories and the right are always going to twist things like that. It needs to focus on what is best for the people of Iraq and stop pissing around with nonsense about "Bush = Hitler" and it all being about the oil or how the Republicans wanting to distract everyone from the shitty state of the US economy. It needs to pay some attention to what exiled Iraqis say instead of dismissing them as ideologically incorrect tools of America. As Freedland says, it needs to proclaim itself "pro-peace, aggressively anti-Saddam". The west has helped liberate countries from tyrannies in the past without bombing the hell out of them -- admittedly with little consistency or expertise, and it may be a stretch to compare, say, Spain under Franco to Iraq under Saddam but it's worth looking back at how oppresive regimes have been toppled in the past. There has to be something useful to be learnt from the history of the 20th century other than than modern warfare is a bad thing....
Went to the Food Bank yesterday to do a spot of that "volunteering" that you're meant to do when you're out of work, that supposedly impresses prospective employers by showing them that even under adverse conditions you want to make the world a better place. Or something. It's all a bit shameless and cynical, but everyone gets something out of it. The government gets to pass the buck, the poor folk throughout central Texas get the cans and packages too damaged or unpopular for the supermarkets to continue stocking, and we get to feel that we're not just spending all day on the internet waiting for the economic upturn. And there's also that slightly suspect sense of superiority, that we may be out of work but at least we're not sitting around in our underwear watching Dr Phil and eating free menudo from a dented can. This is also meant to be a chance to "network", which is a concept I'm still not sure I fully understand. From reading the literature of surviving unemployment and/or finding that ideal job, it's considered a big deal on this side of the Atlantic, but I'm not sure how hanging out with other non-working people is going to be a source of job leads and inspiration. But it gives me a nice warm feeling that for all I know might turn out to be genuine altruism, so I'll stick with it.
What happened to the duct tape? The US Dept of Homeland Security's emergency supply kit at ready.gov does find room for moist towelettes, however, so no matter what the terrorists throw at us, we can remain pleasantly fresh.
Saturday and Sunday's marches against the war heartened me even though I probably disagree with about 80% of the sentiments proclaimed. To me the banners and the cliches and the cliques are just tics. On this scale concentrating on the silly signs and chants, chuckling at the muesli-munchers or scowling at the Stalinists, is the equivalent of looking at a finger when its pointing at the moon. A protest of this size is a declaration that there's more to a democracy than being permitted to put a cross on a ballot form every few years. The rich, powerful and connected -- who even in the most democratic systems are still the only ones who can get to govern or rule -- need a constant reminder that they exist to represent the people, not ignore them, especially at times like this. And if this is the only way that Bush and Blair and the rest can be shown that not everyone goes along with their simplistic, for us or against us, world view then the more protests the better. I may be reading my own opinions into what I see, but I see this not so much as a protest against war but against being bullied into a war for the wrong reasons and without much thought as to what happens next.
It must be wonderful to have firm, resolute beliefs about Iraq one way or the other, to be able to wake up in the morning and know that no matter what you read or hear you'll still have the same rigid viewpoint by the time you go back to bed. I'm starting to think that anyone who has maintained the same set of opinions for the last year just hasn't taken anything in -- and that it's only those of us who have been made to feel bad for sitting on the fence for so long who are being truly honest.
I dither, therefore I am.
Three pieces just from Sunday's Observer that don't make matters any clearer for me....
It's good to get up in the morning, turn on KVRX radio and hear Nick Drake, Elvis Costello, The Streets and My Bloody Valentine in the same half hour. Certain strands of British music sound even more heartening at a distance. Unfortunately it turns in KOOP radio at 9am, which means creakingly "authentic" music -- who wouldn't look forward to two hours of "Celtic Storm" with dismay?
Blimey, when did this all come about? Labour just one point in the lead over Conservatives. I'm sure when we left the UK there were only about three people who would have voted Tory and two of those probably thought Mrs Thatcher was still their leader. What's going on back there?
Aw no, the "terror alert" has even spread to the duct tape fashion world. But those who mock the effectiveness of duct tape in the fight against terrorism should take a look at this picture.
When I referred to George W. Bush as reptilian yesterday I didn't mean it in the David Icke way. Bush isn't a giant alien reptile masquerading as a human as part of an interplanetary conspiracy. He doesn't have that excuse. But he does seem to operate in a way that bypasses all the higher emotions and levels of rational mentation and runs directly off his reptilian brain.
An odd sensation to walk into Thundercloud Subs this lunchtime for a Veggie Delight and hear Syd Barrett's voice. Took me a second to recognise it was"Mathilda Mother" one of the creepier songs from the first Pink Floyd album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the only Floyd album we music snobs are allowed to like without reservation.
That "Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Potassium" mp3 really needs to carry a warning label. You're obviously going to get something pretty weird when you try to marry lyrics like:
I'm just hydrogen, nitrogen, potassium to her I wonder why I wonder why I adore her I deplore her I'm just hydrogen, nitrogen, potassium to her And yet to me And yet to me, he's my one and only And I know, yes I know, he'll be Batting eyes in my direction And I'm filled with perfection There is need of protection, I'll admit But I have an institution That in such a high position He will never ever ever fall for me. I'm just hydrogen, nitrogen, potassium to her, etc
to simplistic bar room boogie. Yes, the gender of "the other" switches halfway through the first verse, and I suspect that "institution" should be "intuition", but you can analyze the lyrics later. The chorus is so insanely catchy you won't be able to get it out of your head without medication. This really is one of those rare artifacts that rises above the usual tired irony of "strange" music and becomes something magical despite its cheesy, sleazy or shabby origins. Download it now and you'll be singing it too. I'm just hydrogen....
Everyone is going on about the American Song-Poem Anthology, which turns out to be the sixth collection of these things, but at the American Song-Poem Music Archives, you can download dozens of examples for free, with delights like "Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Potassium" by Jim Hall & The Radio Pals (which sounds like an early, upbeat version of the Fall gone boogiewoogie) and "Junkies and Monkeys" by Kay Weaver (which doesn't quite live up to the title, but will amuse your stoner friends) just waiting to be snagged. You wouldn't want to listen to many of these more than once, and some are a struggle to get through the first time, but listening to a few of these while reading the material on the site gives a fabulous glimpse into a bizarro world where money is made from the clash of dreams of creativity and/or stardom meeting the crushing indifference of the real world. A bit like American Idol, I guess....
I've never been a big Clinton fan and suspect that likeability may not be the most important quality to be president of the world's most powerful nation, but watching his speech at the Frank Erwin Center last night live on News 8 Austin, made me wonder how the hell America ended up with that reptilian thing that currently squats in the White House.
It's good to see they've found their target audience.
"Blimey. If this is cynical, processed pop, give me some more!"
James "TFW" Delingpole, reviewing t.A.T.u's 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane in the Daily Telegraph (although the review isn't online, it gets pride of place -- along with praise from those other teenage poplicious papers, the Times and the Guardian -- on the official t.A.T.u website).
Just been browsing Diary of a Courtesan. Ah, such wicked parody. Or is it? Do women like this really exist in the enlightened paradise that is Houston or is it just the start of a kuh-razee side project by a Neal Pollack wannabe? But hey, if it is real please note that I'm not being judgmental about what she does -- if I could get a couple of thousand dollars just for escorting some liverspotted old coot to the 93rd Texan Republicans Against Rich Folk Paying Any Taxes Whatsoever Annual Ball I'd be down the salon getting a bikini wax and my back hair mowed before you could say "honey, think how grateful I'd be if you didn't donate all that lovely money to that silly orphanage and bought me a nice little pad on River Oaks Boulevard instead...."
Bush's gut -- now there's a phrase you don't want to read while eating. But while picking through the grown-up blogs this morning between my usual dips into the salacious and poptastic, I spotted it twice. Slobbering sycophant Peggy Noonan reckons it's a wonderful thing, far better no doubt than a mere mortal's brain whereas The Progressive thinks otherwise. (Via the excellent uggabugga.)
Amusing but silly piece by Simon Reynolds today brings forth the middle-aged rockcrit equivalent of the Beatles Vs Rolling Stones -- I mean Britney Vs Avril dichotomy: Jim O’Rourke versus Dizzy Rascal. You mean a chap can't be mostly indifferent to both?
Just finished D.A. Callard's The Case of Anna Kavan (Peter Owen, 1992). It's a very slim volume, a whole life squeezed into 168 pages, and that includes the index, bibliography and all the stuff at the front. Kavan is married within seven pages and hooked on heroin in the next eight. While I get bored with those vast three volume biographies which detail the possible ingrowing toenail of the grandfather of the waiter who served a friend of Nora Joyce a ham sandwich in 1902, this is just too skeletal. Indeed, stripped of quotations, it almost all fits onto a single page at Callard's website. (For some reason she's refered to as Anna Cavan on his biographies page.)
It is an enthralling read, however. Kavan lived a truly twentieth century life that took her from the Edwardian moneyed classes (her father's occupation, according to her birth certificate, was simply "Gentleman") to the methadone clinics and "Happenings" of the 60s, via the duller parts of the British Empires, countless sanitariums and the offices of Cyril Connolly's Horizon. She changed her name at the age of 38 to that of the heroine of a novel she'd written eight years earlier. She became addicted to heroin in 1926 and never gave any thought to kicking the habit but still lived long enough to become a Dr Who fan. Most of her novels and short stories would be described as drug fiction these days, but her early works fitted in with the literary scene of the 1930s.
One thing the book touches on briefly is the conveniently overlooked fact that the recreational use of heroin was mostly an upper class thing in the first quarter of the last century. Kavan was probably introduced to the drug by the racing drivers she hung out with in the south of France. This idea of nihilistic, aristocratic, 1920s racing car driving junkies, all trying to experience the extremes of life before they burn out or kill themselves sounds like a cross between PG Wodehouse and JG Ballard. Kavan wrote a late, impressionistic story ("World of Heroes" in Julia and her Bazooka, 1970) that touches on this, but I'm sure a powerful, obsessive novel could still be written on the subject, if it has not already been done so.
(There's also an intriguing piece on Callard's website about a literary trail that led him from West Yorkshire to Austin. But with the Humanities Research Center holding just about every writer's archives on the planet I guess this isn't all that spooky.)
But it's a beautiful morning, a cloudless sky and the Fall's version of "Victoria" stuck in my head as I walk back home along Guadelaupe, via the library where I picked up a pile of Anna Kavan novels and short stories and Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, which I've heard little good about but you have to keep up with these things don't you? I never read much Kavan when I probably should have and it's only reading Elizabeth Young's Pandora's Handbag that reminded me of her and rekindled my interest. Having free access to the UT libraries is a wonderful thing. Now I can catch up on all those writers I started reading or intended to read when I was a teenage bookworm or a twenty something layabout or thirtysomething victim of the recession or various other bibliophilic spells in my life. And there's something about being in a huge library, even one that's architecturally blah like the Perry-Castaneda, at 7.30 in the morning that still makes me feel like a kid in a sweet shop. Or candy shop, I guess I should say.
Up and out at some ungodly hour (i.e. the time Stacey usually goes to work) to get tickets for Bill Clinton's rescheduled Carpenter Lecture on Wednesday, and spend ten minutes in a queue that stretched down four flights of stairs, but it turned out the extra 3,900 tickets had gone half an hour before they were even meant to become available. Apparently there had been so many people there at 6am that they decided to give out the tickets to avoid the whole thing becoming a fire hazzard. I can only imagine what the queue would have been like if George W. Bush was speaking -- probably wouldn't be a queue at all, certainly not one packed with foxy art students and trim matrons. A few costive misanthropes with bad hair, Stephen King glasses and a blog to get back to, I guess....
CMT just took a break from their 24 hours-a-day showings of How The Dixie Chicks Got So Fabulous and Look At Faith Hill Emote to screen the video for Johnny Cash's "Hurt". Yes, the Nine Inch Nails song from The Downward Spiral. I dunno who was capable of envisioning that such a powerful fragment of almost Beckett-like grief could be dredged from Reznor's creaky old faux-decadent wallow, but this really is one of the most awesome, heartbreaking things I've ever encountered, especially out of the blue, flipping channels at lunchtime. Had to remind myself to breath about halfway through....
"We're not porn stars. We're 19, we're experimenting, we're having fun. We're out there."
On stage, Amanda and Melissa gyrate, kiss each other and lift up each other's shirts.
The boys hoot with stadium-rock abandon. They slaver and yell obscenities. Their eyes bulge like bloodshot moons. The overall expression on their faces is something like this: !!!!!!!!
Strictly for my English readers, this. The Austin American Statesman on the amazingly tacky "Girls Gone Wild" phenomena, which came to town on Tuesday night. That last line is without doubt the greatest piece of descriptive journalism I have read this week, and the whole article disproves the notion that all young men in Austin wear hornrim glasses, goatees and Sigor Ros t-shirts, and spend their evenings writing essays on Jean Luc Godard in coffee shops....
Good lord, Vashti Bunyan has a website! It's touching to read how she only discovered that she had become a cult figure (some thirty odd years after her only album was released and she quit music and apparently disappeared) by googling her name when she got a computer and internet access.
People have asked if there will be any more music from me. Maybe, if I can find it amongst the life I have now. I am looking. I left my old Martin guitar hanging on walls for twenty five years before giving it to my eldest son. My daughter gave me a new guitar for my last birthday.
Snow? Snow? The chunky weatherman on whatever channel the TV was turned to this morning was getting a bit over-excited about the posibility of snow here in Central Texas. It's easy to understand why as for most of the year his job consists of saying "If you thought yesterday was hot, boy oh boy, wait until tomorrow!"
Yes, we watched the Martin Bashir/Michael Jackson thing last night on ABC and it was stranger, sadder and more annoying than all the publicity could had led anyone to believe. It was like returning to the scene of a car wreck ten years after it happened and been mostly forgotten about to discovering everything has been left exactly the way as it was. But it was Bashir's transformation into a less subtle version of Louis Theroux that was the most unsettling thing. Every other time I've seen him do anything like this he's been creepily deferent, but here I couldn't help but imagine he was going to rip something shiny and asymetrical off Jacko's face and shout "So this is normal, is it, Michael?"
Gary Farber puts the case for sitting on the fence a little longer over invading Iraq, and I find myself in almost full agreement. Unless I'm misreading him, he's wobbling towards the inevitability of invasion, but only because "doing nothing" isn't going to remain an option forever. I've done plenty of wobbling myself, mostly onto the anti-war side, but this has generally been because the pro-war camp is home to so many hateful creeps. In this way I suspect I'm more anti-the-people-who-support-war than anti-war itself. It's easier to say what I'm against than what I'm for, and I'm probably more strongly against "doing nothing" than I am against the war. It's the foulness of the warmongers rather than the convictions of the antis that keeps me fencesitting at such an uncomfortable angle.
I would like to hear more about what the anti-war movement's alternatives to war are. I'm sure most would (a) like to see Saddam and his henchmen deposed and dealt with by an international court (and not in some cosy exile), (b) all weapons of mass destruction rendered useless, (c) any support for terrorist organisations quashed and (d) as free and democratic a system as their culture will allow put in place -- but how will a few marches and some regurgitated waffle about "no blood for oil" and how "we sold him weapons and trained his worst guys" achieve this?
Like Gary says, a lot of necessary questions have been brought into the mainstream debate by the anti-war movement about the complicity of the west in the creation and maintenance of, and the blind eye subsequently turned to, all these regimes we've now decided are the epitome of wickedness. Mistakes have indeed been made. But these are things to be dealt with later.
I don't want war and I don't want a compromised, dangerous peace. So what do I want? I want to be for something, I'm tired of having to base my beliefs on the things I'm against.
Quick nurse, the screens! -- The NME Brat award nominations make me glad I'm an elderly fart listening to my old Magazine, Kim Wilde and Hatfield and the North albums (oh, and those UK Garage downloads). Yes, I know it's no longer aimed at the likes of me and I did stop buying it over fifteen years ago, but it was such a vital part of my adolescent development that I still cling to a rather soppy idea of it as commentator, educator, friend and lifeline. Which it was. When I was a spotty and uneducated youth (i.e. between the ages of 13 and my late twenties) in need of cultural direction it was the NME I turned to for inspiration. For years my fortnightly dole cheque was blown not just on the records it recommended, whether they were by the Desperate Bicycles, Frank Sinatra or Ornette Coleman, but also books and films. I learnt to drop all the right names like Gramsci, Derrida and Lacan (probably pronouncing them wrongly) even though I never got beyond the first page of their books.
I don't think the NME of that would have churned out something like this:
What a year! 2002 was the year that the New Rock Revolution swept the nation. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club! The Datsuns! The Libertines! The Vines! The Cooper Temple Clause! Everywhere you looked there was something new and truly essential to get excited about. Frankly, it was one of the greatest years for music that most of us up here can remember.
Well, um, really? There was a lot of good stuff last year but none of it by pasty-faced MC5 wannabes with "The" at the front of their name. I've sneaked a listen to most of these bands and it just seems perverse that anyone could get excited about the shabby, secondhand goods they're churning out.
However, it does give No Rock 'n' Roll Fun the chance to provide a commentary that, even though I don't have a clue who half the nominees are, made me hoot like an owl. Which can only be a good thing, unless you're drinking something hot when you read the annotation for MOST SEXY WOMAN....
During my thirties, as I anticipated, my family's marked hermit gene began to wake up and stretch. My parental relatives have always had an extremely strong tendency to withdraw. They take up their beds and walk into their libraries and are rarely seen again. They live off fried egg and banana sandwiches with a lot of pepper on them. All these impulses surfaced with great ferocity in my psyche. (Right down to the pepper -- the laziness gene I can understand but a pepper gene?) All I wanted to do was stay in bed forever and read and drink tea and smoke cigarettes and one or two other recreational substances. Unfortunately nobody pays you for reading books. If they did I'd be a squillionaire. So I had to shovel aside all the kittens, ashtrays, mags and mugs and install a wooden drawing-board and a laptop in the duvet and start to write.
On the job front or no-job front... Dice just returned four results, but they all turned out to be for the same contract. And it was a bit of a stinker, paying about half what my first contract paid in 1989. Back then I had absurdly limited useful experience for putting myself on the market -- three years at a company that only used their own software and operating system, four months at that place I can find no historic evidence for ever having existed, using Word Star and Ventura. That was enough to get me the first technical writing contract I was interviewed for. ("You'll pick Word Perfect up as you use it. You might even get a chance to use this crazy new thing called Windows.") Now I find myself applying for something that wants experience of just about every bit of web publishing technology in existence for a couple of bucks more than I'd get stuffing envelopes. And I just know I won't even get an acknowledgment let alone an interview. I'm sure I can't blame the foul machinations of George "$304,000,000,000 budget deficit" Bush for this, but I'd like to, just to give my irritation a focus....
Talking about Thomas Leer... His single "Private Plane"/"International" from 1978 was one of the records that helped focus my musical outlook after the necessary cathartic splatter of punk. It was DIY bedroom pop, yearning synths and vocals as fragile as the crackles and hiss that came with my copy, a sound somewhere between "Telstar" and Throbbing Gristle's "United". With punk turning into a grubby pantomime of parochial self-disgust it was no wonder this record enthralled me, leading me up the path of nerdy guys with Korgs and reel-to-reel tape machines. I wasn't too keen on anything he did afterwards -- even at the time the rather limp synth-jazz of his 1981 release, Four Movements seemed misjudged and directionless, a music that seemed to do all the right things but still bypassed the head, the heart and the feet. Maybe the technology wasn't up to it. I was intrigued by his partnership with Claudia Brücken in Act in the mid 80s but not enough to investigate -- in hindsight their music may have been a perfect encapsulation of the way pop from that era tried to have it all but I was determedly rejecting anything tainted by that supposedly ironic glamour (or glamorous irony) of the time, lurching around sullenly to the likes of Swans, Big Black and the Butthole Surfers instead. Years went by and I may have played "Private Plane" a couple of times when me, a functioning turntable and my singles collections were in the same place at the same time. It still hit the spot, sounding as ancient, evocative and precious as one of Thomas Edison's wax cylinders....
Anyway, noodling around as usual yesterday I found he has a rather minimal website and it has eight mpgs of new songs. The one I've downloaded ("It's love folks") sounds like it could have come from Four Movements, however, beefed up a tad with subsequent but not exactly contemporary gizmos and notions. Hey ho. Further investigation may be required.
Keeping up the highbrow, compassionate hi-jinks that this blog is noted for, did you know that Avril Lavigne is an anagram of "Grave Villain", "Vaginal Liver", "Virginal Veal" and "Vanilla Giver", Britney Spears is an anagram of "Sneer by rapist", "Betray in print" and "Nearby priests" and Pink.... well, unless "Knip" is a kind of Polish baked product, Pink isn't an anagram of anything.
As an experiment in non-linear, reader-defined blogging, you get the chance to decide whether this post is about the emerging field of attosecond physics or Kylie Monogue posing in black lingerie, two crucial fields of human endevour that have been curiously absent from The Yes/No Interlude for at least a couple of months.
Haloscan seems to have died, fallen off the web or just plain run away with half of your comments, dear readers. I'll sure they'll put it right soon and you can get back to adding your sage and acerbic annotations to my rubbish by the gigabyte....
Finally got around to hearing tATu's version of The Smith's "How Soon is Now" a few times and I'm still trying to decide whether it's the most brilliant thing I've heard for ages or just androidal, souped-up Avril Lavigne without the laughable MTV "authenticity". But it seems to work, cranking the intense, fatalistic ache of the song into a ecstatic scream of need rather than the languid sigh of resignation that is the original. The almost mocking swagger of the dense reverb (Link Wray's "Rumble" on the verge of turning into Can's "Dizzy Dizzy") and the siren swoops of the Smiths' version are replicated faithfully and at first it does seem little more than a novelty cover version, the girls' voices coming in like the Chipmunks or Pinky and Perky -- but once you get used to their helium squeals it starts to make a kind of sense. It's when everything drops away except the reverb and voices about halfway through that it starets to sound like a development on the original rather than a credibility-seeking gimmick. And in that sudden stillness everything seems suspended: the voices, the music, the song, floating in a still moment of chill melancholia. Then the piano comes in, a three note motif that hints at Joy Division's "The Eternal" and the last minute of so captures what tATu could be if they're allowed to be more than prurient teenage lesbo-romp fodder. But I suspect they're 15 years too late to fulfil their real potential. They could have been the last half-great ZTT band, a version of Act but with Claudia Brücken teamed up with Theresa Bazar instead of Thomas Leer. (You can thank Marcello Carlin for putting that imagine in my mind.) Paul Morley wouldn't have settled for schoolgirls snogging in the rain....
(LATER: If I was a real 80s geek I would have remembered that Act did a Smith's cover ("Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now") too.)
Nothing to say about Wacko Jacko, except I never want to hear the word "sleepover" again, unless it's accompanied by footage of teenage girls having a pillow fight.
I'm a big fan of Michael Bracewell's but reading his latest book, When Surface Was Depth: Death by Cappuccino and Other Reflections on Music and Culture in the 1990's, I'm distressed to find two big errors in the first 20 pages. He seems to think the lyrics to "Wannabe", the first Spice Girls single, went "If you wanna be my luvah, first you gotta be my friend" which screws up what little meaning the song had in the first place. And two pages before this he refers to Oasis's 1994 single "Whatever" as "groundbreaking" when it was really just a rip-off of Neil Innes' "How Sweet To Be An Idiot". But I have faith in the man so I'll keep reading....
Been on a thriller jag this last week. I'm not a big fan of the genre but on the edges, away from the loaf-sized airport blockbuster and the arid sleuthing of spinsters and dons, there lurks good stuff that works (when it works) in ways no other form, genre or otherwise, can touch. I've read the usual rediscovered and reclaimed noir of Thompson, Goodis, Wooldritch and Willesford, but there's more....
John Franklin Bardin - The Deadly Percheron (1946) Even odder on rereading than I remembered, right down to the way that most of the action takes place in the book's epilogue. Many of the ideas in the book are overused cliches of the thriller genre now, especially the convenient way the narrator falls prey to and recovers from amnesia every time he's tapped on the head, but in 1946 this book must have seemed truly bizarre. The first few chapters of the book - before it gets into a slightly predictable rut wherein characters start turning up dead just as the narrator or the detective decide that they must be the killer or know his identity - is still one the strangest openings in crime fiction. A rich young man walks into a psychiatrist's office. He has a flower in his hair and suspects he is going mad, claiming that leprechauns are paying him to give away money. It gets weirder from this point and all sense of certainty is soon lost. When the cops eventually, inevitably, accuse the narrator of being the killer you can almost believe it, and even though I'd read the book before I starting thinking that this might be the case. The resolution is too tidy and silly, the real killer explaining everything in detail in the last pages just as the narrator gets his memory sorted out, and the showdown in a rundown funhouse is straight out of Batman but it's still an intense and mindboggling read.
Fredric Brown - The Far Cry (1951) At his best, in both science fiction and crime stories, Fredric Brown would twist a conventional idea inside out and make something new and enticing from the hoariest theme, and this is one of his best. It messes with a lot of the basic concepts of this kind of novel - he main character is a drunken wreck but instead of achieving some sort of redemption by sobering up and solving the mystery the exact opposite happens. Come to think of it, the book's entire modus operandi seems to be to reverse everything that normally happens in the "tough but noble loner stumbles onto crime, solves it and gets the girl" genre. The hero is only investigating the eight year old murder because he wants to get some money together to escape from a loveless marriage. Even the crime itself is backwards - the identity of the killer is known but no-one knows who it was he killed. One of the nice touches in the book is that no-one is blessed with the supernatural memory characters in crime novels usually have and it takes the narrator three quarters of the novel before he stumbles across the first real clue, by which time he's too obsessed and screwed-up to do the right thing. The book takes a nasty, unexpected, Jim Thompsonesque twist at the end, which works but leaves a nasty taste, especially if you've just being reading how the novel was Brown's exorcism of his own first marriage.
James Sallis - The Long-Legged Fly More unconventionality dressed up as a traditional crime novel. A twenty four year arc through the career of a black private eye in New Orleans. You're led to suspect that maybe the four missing persons cases he investigates over this period are somehow linked, but the only connection is that people and their reasons for diapering are varied and unknowable, their tragedies too private for even a good hearted diligent gumshoe to solve. It's a bravado performance, writing a plotless detective novel, stripping away the usual wonky scaffolding that drives this sort of book while often rendering it meaningless at the end. It might be said that this is actually a novel about a detective rather than a detective novel, but Sallis intentionally uses the detective novel form and conventions like a poet would use the form of a sonnet or quadrille, using the traditional framework and expectations of the genre rather than a convoluted conspiracy or evil mastermind to hold the story together and give it momentum. And it works. Time to read the rest of the series.
LATER: For "diapering" back there you might want to read "disappearing". It's too good a typo to change -- although I'm sure I'll get some Google hits from some very odd people.
Okay, my epic piece on Strawberry Switchblade may have to be delayed as the only track by them that I was able to find online besides the Sibelius's 5th Symphony meets "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" majestic pop of "Since Yesterday" turned out to be mislabeled and something else entirely, a bleepy dirge by some Marilyn Manson cohorts. Until I reacquaint myself with their brief but gorgeous oeuvre, you'll do no better than read Alistair Fitchett's piece from 1994: New Pop and the Art of Polka Dots.
Anyone remember Jock 'n' Roll? In a woozy heavy cold induced fugue I stumbled upon the homepage of ex-Scars guitarist, Paul Research, and found myself living the early eighties yet again.... Now have the definite urge to write about the Associates, Strawberry Switchblade, Josef K, Fire Engines.
Finally got around to installing Soulseek and have to admit it won me over straight away by finding and downloading "Cigarettes" by PragVEC. If I can get hold of the rest of the Bits EP from Oct 1978, I'll be a very happy and nostalgic bunny. Along with "Skank Bloc Bologna" by Scritti Polliti this was one of the first records from the punk era that didn't feel obliged to pretend to be dumb or numb. Suddenly it was okay for bands to drop names like Ornette Coleman in their NME interviews rather than just moan about being bored, having no future and feeling no love.
Julie Burchill's lifelong anti-Americanism wobbles bigtime and she comes out in favour of war on Iraq. Sloppy stuff, and about six months late, but it's indisputable that the antiwar movement needs better slogans -- or else admit that sometimes putting the world to rights is too complicated to fit on a placard or make a catchy chant.
I didn't post anything yesterday for the obvious reason, well, obvious to me. There was nothing of value I could say about the Columbia disaster, but to write about other things would seem cowardly or ignorant. Any death is bad news -- and I don't want to get into the tired old "why are seven dead westerners more important than dozens of dead Nigerians" debate -- but it's the symbolic value of the spaceflight, the feeling that it encapsulates some higher set of ambitions for all humanity that gives such a catastrophe its overwhelmingly tragic dimension. Maybe the reality of the space program is based on military and commercial aims and its goals are as base and capitalistic as anything grounded on earth but through my lifetime the various space projects, from the first bleeping sputniks to the interplanetary grand tours have represented something pure, a necessary outward trajectory in the face of the shabbiness of most earthly undertakings. It's sad that these seven people died but it will be so much worse if what they believed in, what they knew they were risking their lives for, also died.
