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...
One of the unwritten bonuses of Stacey's job at the Child Development Center is that she gets to bring home all the ailments and contagions that incubate and accumulate within its walls, tots and toddlers being enthusiastic vectors of every known kind of cough, wheeze and sniffle, and today I am stricken by vile, throat 'n' nose enveloping pestilence, so blogging could be erratic, non-existent or unusually incoherent and wildly phantasmagorical.
It's been rather nice outside over the last couple of days after a week or so of wretched rain, hail and low, grubby cloud... well, I've got to uphold traditional British stereotypes on this page and mention the weather every other posting. This change in the climate did seem to bring out an especially mean bunch of mosquitos. I hadn't been bitten for over three months, so obviously they felt obliged to make up for lost time. I now have six bites, all swollen to the size you'd normally expect to see only in cartoons. My halloween costume could be Mr Lumpy, if such a character existed. The weather has also brought out all sorts of other critters peculiar to the eyes of a urban Yorkshireman, like possums -- a cross between a cat, a monkey and Marilyn Manson; stink bugs that look like origami creations and sound like buzzsaws as they hit the window; giant dragonflies as fat as tadpoles and the colour of blood; geckos you'd pay $10.00 for in a pet store; bright orange-red cardinals and bluejays -- and of course roaches the size of the shoe you have to repeated hit them with....
"Is there anything else going on in this country apart from Z-list celebrities having sex with each other?" -- Ian Hislop, Have I Got News For You, 25 October 2002.
I've caught up on the latest celeb-scandals from home but I'm sure there are many more lurking behind the lunkhead navigation of the Sun and Mirror. You don't seem to get that kind of malarky here. Although the media is just as saturated in prurient voyeurism, and even the local news babe reporting from a chili cook-off, murder scene or old folk's halloween parade is expected to show plenty of tanned and toned cleavage (front and butt), American TV presenters are the last people you can imagine getting deep into crazy drug-fuelled sexual shenanigans. There are so many flawless, beautiful women and hunky, square jawed men on American TV, but having lewd thoughts about them is about on the same level as fantasizing about those Lingerie Barbies -- in theory it's just about possible but you'd need long-term psychiatric help afterwards if you did. Or maybe I just haven't fully adjusted to the cultural change of moving here yet.
Even the Sun has picked up on the kabbalistic low-jinks in Madonna's "Die Another Day" video. Although it isn't some some gimmick she's just picked up on -- she's been going on about the kabbalah since 1997. So she stuck with it longer than most things she's toyed with....
I still don't "get" the video though, which irritates rather than intrigues me.
Here's an article analysing Ray of Light in kabbalistic terms from a curious but no-longer-updated site: Shoot the Messenger -- "an attempt to provide an Australian Christian perspective on popular culture".
I have no albums on this list. Do I get a prize or am I a traitor to my generation? (Okay, I have Low and Todd in the attic back in Leeds, but that's all.)
Sometimes the best originator of new and useful words can be sloppy typing. I'm as guilty as anyone and have probably generated an entire dictionary of neologism, but I cannot claim obsucre, which is a perfect word waiting for a definition. Any suggestions?
It was a slow afternoon at the office for one BT openworld customer, so he or she typed "naked pictures of robbie williams" into the LookSmart search engine and after going through 615 higher ranking results -- or at the very least 42 pages of results -- decided to visit my page. Sir or madam, we here at the Yes/No Interlude salute your perserverence, but cannot help you in your quest. So instead, here is a picture of African-American Lingerie Barbie.
Looking at the ethics section from Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook, I see I'm only guilty of one real sin in that I often go back and change entries. Usually it's just to correct spelling or grammar or fine tune a sentence that otherwise wouldn't make any sense. For someone who has made a living for most of the last fifteen years from writing, I can be pretty lackidaisical when I'm trying to type and think at the same time. It's inevitable that I will miss out a crucial "not" or "-n't" from every other entry I upload. I never go back to change the meaning of what I wrote but is it wrong if you accidentally write something you didn't mean and then go back to change it? I think I may put a little "edited for clarity -- hh:mm mm/dd/yy" tag on amended entries in future, seeing as I'm a goodie-goodie.
I know I've got a giant-sized heap of better things to do but I've signed up for the 2002 National Novel Writing Month thing in an attempt to dislodge the novel, which everyone supposedly has in them, that has been blocking up my creative system for countless years. Instead of pecking out a few pellucid sentences here each day I plan to churn out 50,000 words of thrilling adventure, trenchant satire, multidimensional characterisation and knockabout ribaldry by the end of November. It's about 1,500 words a day, which sounds a lot, but since half of them will be "the", "and", "his", "her", "their", "its", "pinguid" and "detumescent" and the rest a random selection of nouns and adjectives it should be a doodle, a piece of cake, a walk in the veritable park....
My muse will be Lionel Fanthorpe, aka Pel Torro, aka Leo Brett, Bron Fane, Robert Lionel Fanhope, Mel Jay, Marston Johns, Victor La Salle, Oben Lerteth, Robert Lionel, John E. Muller, Elton T. Neef(e), Phil Nobel, Peter O'Flinn, Peter O'Flynn, John Raymond, Lionel Roberts, Rene Rolant, Deutero Spartacus, Trebor Thorpe, and Karl Ziegfreid, who in a three year period in the early sixties wrote at least 89 novels, which works out at more than three a month, every month. I've read a few of these, half for the strange gush of his prose and half for the Badger Book artwork. There is nothing in literature to compare to Fanthorpe when he realises he needs to pad things out to reach the required word count:
The silence was broken by metallic noises. Harsh clanking, jarring, metallic noises. Things were stirring within the disc ship. Strange metallic things; things that were alien to the soft green grass of earth.
Terrifying things, steel things; metal things; things with cylindrical bodies and multitudinous jointed limbs. Things without flesh and blood. Things that were made of metal and plastic and transistors and valves and relays, and wires. Metal things. Metal things that could think. Thinking metal things. Terrifying in their strangeness, in their peculiar metal efficiency. Things the like of which had never been seen on the earth before. Things that were sliding back panels . . . Robots! Robots were marching . . . Robots were marching, and were about to spread havoc and destruction across the earth, and as yet the sleeping earth knew nothing of their coming. As mysterious as anything in the great mysterious universe. (from MARCH OF THE ROBOTS, 1961)
Fanthorpe doesn't do this sort of thing any more. The market for that kind of book diminished after the sixties and after 200 or so novels he was probably beginning to run out of ideas. There's barely a passing mention of this part of his career on his website. He's a businessman, TV personality and Lord knows what else now, so he's probably cut down to a mere two dozen books a year....
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The 50 top keywords in searches that reached this page (in descending order of hits) make up a curious stream-of-consciousness comment on life itself.
Forgive me for yesterday's little wallow in Friday afternoon angst. Think of it not so much as the distressing aparition of a grown man flopping in the corner and sobbing uncontrolably over the world's indifference to his precious self but as a good hearty nasal honk. Big blow, fella! -- into a hanky, please -- there, all better now? Good.
Blogger's back up now after strange goings on in the morning but I've lost the urge to post today. Ah me. Friday is the saddest day of the week when you're out of work. You can imagine everyone else starting to slack off in offices all over the world, chatting about what they're going to be doing over the weekend, maybe arranging drinks or something jolly for the evening, dreaming of that Saturday morning snooze and the trip to Home Depot for a new leafblower. Friday used to be even more special for me when I was working away from home -- I'd usually finish at lunchtime, take a taxi to the station and spent a restful few hours drinking myself into a relaxed state on the train back to Leeds from Newcastle, Dundee, Stafford or wherever it was....
I don't mind being at home all day, and if I could go on doing it while making money I wouldn't gripe at all. But it's been too long now. Been here in Austin for four months and I haven't even had an interview. Haven't even had a bloody rejection letter, except for the one that told me that no only wasn't there a job any more but the company had also folded. My applications and resumes seem to go out into some kind of void. I really thought I'd be wanted when I got here, that I'd have my pick of cool tech writing jobs and could turn down the sort of dull but worthy stuff I was doing back in England, the stuff I did just to get the money together to come here. But but but but but....
I know a lot of people think of Austin as a mix of old hippies moaning how the place isn't what it was 20 years ago and new(ly redundant) software geeks moaning how the place isn't what it was 20 months ago, but there's other things going on here: like Bad Girl Good Woman Productions -- All-Girl Roller Entertainment and Satan's Cheerleaders. And the UT Ransom Center has just bought 22 boxes of Julian Barnes "rough drafts, notes and correspondence" for $200,000.
The artists begin to stand on chairs; it appears they have a penchant for slapping each other's buttocks. Smack, slap, uproarious laughter. It might, you think, be time to leave.
Stick a few linebreaks in there and you've got some kind of zen poetry.
Sashinka got to grips with the Kabbalistic malarky in Madonna's "Die Another Day" video a week ago, so go there now if you're puzzled or annoyed by it. Thanks to Anna for pointing this out.
(As any fule kno the only piece of pop or rock music with a valid reference to the Kabbalah is the Bonzo Dog Band's "Rhinocratic Oaths" from The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, a truly fabulous album I seem to have left in Leeds, along with my turntable, which is a pain. As soon as I'm earning money against I really have to patch up these holes in my collection. Just hope Cornology is still available when that day comes...)
Things I like about Austin #1 -- a new series of scrappy bits: All of the Statesman's Thursday XLENT section, really. It has all the local art, music, food 'n' drink and listings you get with a lot of newspapers but has a genuine sense of being written by people with enthusiasm for their subjects rather than being just a diversion for career journos to pose and dabble before moving on to bigger things. But in particular I've grown to be a big fan of Moira Muldoon's Girl walks into a bar columns, which are perfect little snapshots of every variety of Austin life as seen over drinks, whether it's a Black Forest Cake Martinis at the intolerably swish Browns or a can of something cold and domestic at the Poddle Dog....
The Poodle Dog isn't any nicer than La-La's; it's as dead beer stinky and dark and smoky as any number of dives. But it's also the kind of place where you can just chat with someone at the bar, where the bartender will genuinely, if absent-mindedly, wish you a good night on your way out.
I like that she doesn't use the bars and their customers as comedic material or to promote any superior agenda. There are jokes, but never at anyone's expense (unless they really, really, deserve it.) She seems to instinctively get why certain people go to certain places, why the braying software executives are here and the sad-eyed trucker there, without taking sides. She's neither squeamish nor patronising, but she also doesn't take the ultra-bland middle path. You get the impression that she goes to bars for reasons "real" people do, reasons other than to get an article together before the deadline is due. And any writer who admits to a fondness for "sturdy" cocktails in a milieu of fizzy water and lite beers is the sort of guide you want to the barlife of a new city. Some times her columns can make me think "Damn, I wish I lived near there." Then I remember that I do. Cheers.
Got my halloween outfit together yesterday. Due to financial restraints and a reluctance to shave off all my body hair I've had to come up with something a little less ambitious than my initial conception. Or rather, Stacey came up with the idea and I went out and bought a black berret and a secondhand copy of The Portable Beat Reader so I can slouch around being a beatnik.
Google Searcher: A slutty beatnik?
As I've said I'm looking forward to Halloween. Already places are decorated and you can't walk down the aisles of Target or Walgreens without two dozen motion-activated doodads going off -- dismembered hands, grinning skulls and giant spiders wriggling in their boxes accompanied by maniacal laughter and Hammer Horror organ music. It really is nuts. The supermarkets have fake blood, foam rubber butcher's knives, severed tongues and boxed sets of CDs of gruesome sound effects. Jack-a-lanterns are everwhere, although our first attempt has already rotted away -- a green furry pumpkin that starts to cave in even as you look at it is a bit too scary....
I may get around to reinstalling Windows 2000 on my ruptured laptop today so blogging could be light or non-existent. Or I may spend the day finding excuses not to do it, which will mean that blogging will be heavy and mostly banal....
Erm...
Have I mentioned that it's raining? And when it rains here it is serious rain, elemental rain, setting-the-scene-for-an-emotionally-intense-movie-of-the-week rain. You can sit watching the doppler radar pictures of the current end-of-hurricane-season storm on the News 8 Austin while it hammers down on the roof. Hmmm, not the sort of weather for reinstalling Windows 2000, is it?
Here's something new, to me at least, from today's XLENT section of the Austin American-Statesman: Nü Opera. Even after reading this article I have no idea what it's all about -- but 6.30am is way too early in the morning to digest references to Artaud, Nietzsche and "the idea of gesamtkunstwerk". Looks like it could be worth investigating as does the Salvage Vanguard "I Hate Theatre" Theatre.
Here comes the vinegar man to help all his vinegar fans Here comes the vinegar man to make this a vinegar land It's the man of the hour with his great sour power In his vinegar dressings he brings us great blessings So lets hear it now....
C-c-c-c-c-changes. Back before Everything Changed, I used to start reading John Pilger articles, get bored after the first paragraph or so, think "he's a smug git, although he's probably right" and go read something else. Now my reaction is almost exactly the same, only with "but it's not exactly useful just to wallow in self-righteous blame games" tagged on at the end. The thing is, even if you go all the way and blame America for everything, accept that there are "root causes" for every atrocity, that the west has managed to back or appease just about every wrong guy throughout the world over the last fifty years and tote up how many more of them we killed or caused to be killed by our actions or inactions against how many of us they're killing right now it still comes across as academic at best and heartless at worst when parents are trying to identify charred remains as their children by their fillings. And before you think I'm turning into a rightwing twerp like.... well, the list is to long to pick one... we do need to learn from past mistakes and start treating the developing (or stagnating) world as if it's something more than a boardgame for military and economic advantage where the rich and poweful get to make up the rules as they go along. Yes, western indifference and exploitation has helped to foster an atmosphere where fascist fundamentalist beliefs can thrive, but expecting the US and UK governments to accept their history of misdeeds and bad alliances, stand in the corner for a while and promise to be nicer in future isn't going to solve anything, at least not in the short term.
Now I think I'll go back to talking about obscure 60s B-sides or musing about all those hits I'm getting for slutty nun costumes....
Up the hill backwards. I find it harder and harder to be offended by Pop Stars, Pop Idols, American Idols and all the other made-for-TV processed pop rubbish when I see established bores and dullards like Richard Ashcroft, Chris Martin and David Gray whining about it in the Sun. If they really want to make a stand for proper music and bring back the supposed glory days of the Beatles and Phil Spector then no-one is stopping them making some decent records themselves instead of the dreary, self-involved background music they churn out. Whenever the musical mainstream becomes as tepid and sludgy as it now is, the personalities and bands that revitalise it have been lurking and plotting in the background, bringing their mad plans to fruition, not pissing and moaning to bloody Dominic Mohan.
And if something dynamic and revolutionary is about to burst through, I don't think it will involve the Red Stripes, the Hives, the Strokes or whoever is this week's favourite. They'll be the equivalent of Eddie and the Hot Rods, The Flaming Groovies and Dr Feelgood back when punk broke, the bands who had a smidgeon of the right stuff but were too tied in to the old regime, having elected to break out of the entropic mid-70s via the spirit and methodology of the past rather than trashing everything and going for something new and unhindered. Whatever the new thing is, I'll probably only recognise its qualities and worth in hindsight and even when I do get my head around it I won't like it. And that's how it should be. It's time I joined the dinosaurs.... Hmmm, I see Phish are putting out volumes 13 to 16 of Live Phish next week, four CDs of cover versions, nothing less than 20 years old.... niiiiice....
Okay,enough knockabout poptastic nonsense and curious links (like this, a new word for today: Poufbunnies), it is time to start writing about life, the world around me, the little things, the big things, the very shards and fragment that delineate me, me, me, me, ME!
I'm sure that when he was signed up as a hip young gunslinger by the NME back in 1976, Tony Parson took an oath promising that no matter how uninspired, lazy, out-of-touch or just plain cranky he got he would never resort to the IT WAS ALL BETTER IN MY DAY, SUNNY JIM article.
That's entertainment. It's good to know that old fashioned musical values like headstands, cartwheels and scissor-kicks are at the forefront of "the 'new rock' wave". (ViaNo Rock'n'Roll Funby way of TMFTML.)
She's lost control again. Aside from continuing the tradition of entirely forgetable James Bond songs, Madonna's "Die Another Day" sounds like her latest musical mentor has dug up some decade old Autechre out-take and slapped one of her more robotic vocals over the top. The video, however, is truly disturbing. What is she trying to prove? She's tortured, beaten, half-drowned and strapped to an electric chair by oriental henchmen, which she somehow escapes using some esoteric (and possibly kabalistic?) ritual. Meanwhile she's also fighting with herself with rapiers, axes and finally a harpoon gun in what looks like a tribute to Diana Rigg in the Avengers. It has an air of nastiness than the James Bond movies have attempted to move away from since the Roger Moore era -- and even then it was done with a camp smirk. Am I reading too much into it? And what about the "Sigmund Freud... Analyse this" line? Would it be more acceptable if it was some 20 year old pop brat rather than a middle-aged mother of two? Maybe I should stick to watching Christina Aguilera's "Dirty" which is so much more wholesome....
LATER: Sterling Clover thinks otherwise in the Village Voice -- "blistering zeitgeist-negation", indeed.
Thunder's crackling outside, the rain and hail hammer on the roof and it's just too damned early in the morning to think about Tony Blackburn's 300 one night stands....
Saturday evening we went up the UT Tower. The observation deck at the top was closed for 25 years until 1999, not because of the "Texas Tower Sniper", Charles Joseph Whitman, who killed his wife and mother, bludgeoned a receptionist to death and then picked off 45 victims (13 of whom died) from the top of the tower in August 1966, but because it became a favourite spot for suicides in the following decade. (A former UT president described the tower as a "compelling symbol for the mentally disturbed.") Now there is a metal cage surrounded the deck, you have to pass through a metal detector on the way up and there are a couple of cops present when you take the tour.
There's still bullet damage in the stone work, not from Whitman but from people who heard what was happening and fetched their own guns and shot back. One guy even went up in his private plane to try to get him. It's an eerie feeling to be up there, where such intense madness and death lust was focused. You can crouch down at one of the vents where he fired through and see what he saw, feel how impregnable he must have felt as he lined up his victims. And of course it's impossible not to compare this to the current DC sniper, although Whitman's killing spree lasted for just an hour and a half.
Okay, new comments system is set-up and seems to be working. Anyone who left slabs of significant wordage on previous comment pages should feel free to re-insert them -- and this time you can use HTML tags. Knock yourself out.
Switching over to Haloscan comments now as Enetation didn't prove reliable, pretty or sophisticated enough for you guys. So let's see if it works, shall we?
Okay, so it's Godspeed You! Black Emperor, not God Speed You! Black Emperor -- or even Godspeed You Black Emperor! as suggested by Alex from Close your eyes, a music blog I know you all read.
Did you mean supergalactic? Sometimes just one or two words can make a blog irresistible. And while Kate Sullivan's Rockblog may not be awash with the 364 word sentences comparing a PragVec b-side to, say, Erik Satie, Han Bennink and Willard Van Orman Quine we're so often impressed with around these parts, it rises well above the usual meat-and-potatoes stuff you normally get from professional rock critics. And everyone else is linking to it, so who am I to be a contrarian?
Gloria Gloom. I seem to have gone all this time thinking that God Speed! You Black Emperor were called God Speed You Black Emperor! They've got a new album coming out next month, Yanqui U.X.O., the artwork for which is a little worrying. There's always that horrible and seemingly inevitable moment in the lifecycle of leftwing bands when they decide they have to spell it out, that the music alone isn't enough and they need to draw diagrams -- and there's the danger that everything you ever found inspiring and enriching in their music is going to be declared mere accompaniment, secondary to the sloganeering. Think of The Pop Group's For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? Even if you agree with what they are saying there's always the inclination to want to pat them on the head and say "how clever, you can play instruments and read Chomsky" or "Don't patronise me -- you think maybe because you're in a solemn and earnest band you have a better understanding of the way the world operates than us? You think we sit around reading Garfield while listening to your albums?" Maybe I'm just being an old grouch and the world is filled with GS!YBE fans for whom the music industry's interconnections with the arms industries will come as a big shock and galvanize them into reading a book now and then, in which case I'll shut up.
Official -- Rock 'n' Roll not to blame for the Clintons.Truly the most bonkers thing you'll read today: Rock Left, Rock Right in the hilariously bad Frontpage. It's starts reasonably enough by ranting about a particularly tasteless piece of oooh-we're-so-edgy programming by VH-1 to be shown tonight but soon slips into that delirious, spluttering blame-the-Left inanity I know you cynical curmudgeons love to chuckle at. You can tell how mad it is because it links to Bruce Bartlett's Top 40 Conservative Hits in support of the argument that rock 'n' roll doesn't have to be part of "the cesspool of cold-blooded evil at the dark heart of the political Left". Here's how it ends:
The evil that VH-1 and the Clintons embody should not be blamed on rock-n- roll.
Much of rock music is anti-socialist, anti-big-government, and profoundly critical of politicians like the Clintons, examples of which are cited in a fine Tech Central Station article this week by Radley Balko. Much modern music can even be called “conservative,” according to columnist Bruce Bartlett.
And the spirit of rock-n-roll, like that of the American Revolution, affirms independence and the integrity of the human individual. It’s time we did the same to VH-1, Hillary Clinton and all those like them who would impose on all of us their Leftist collectivism and the dark mischief side of the force.
And that is why we must invade Iraq. (via nobody -- I found this myself, three cheers for me.)
Goodnight, Irene. This week's curious fetish: carrying comotose women. At Sleeping Beauties, "many of us long to see a great Monster story, where the fainted heroine is carried off... Dressed in a silk nightgown, barefeet and all! Being all "floppy" as she is carried!" But these guys are very specific: "'North Dallas Forty' should not be included because (a) there is no arm carry, and (b) there is an overhead carry but the actress is awake and fully aware. If we were to include films that feature non-'sleepy' arm carries as well, the list would probably be ten times longer than it already is!" Indeed. But I'm sure devotees of "non-'sleepy' arm carries" are catered to elsewhere. (Via LinkFilter.)
Blame Nick Hornsby.Over at Land of A Thousand Dances, Epicharmus is following his reviews of the 50 CDs in the Merzbow boxed set with reviews of 50 versions of "Send In The Clowns" -- which sounds like even more of a masochistic and daunting task. There's surely a term for this kind of mania. Across at Big Man Restless, Mr Restless (possibly not his real name) has a list of his 500 favourite LPs, but it lacks the 2,000 word essay for each item that marks the true obsessive. Troubled Diva has gone off at a tangent and is reviewing his shirt collection. If I had the inclination I would expand this into a comprehensive list of exaustive blog lists but I'm feeling -- inevitable punchline coming up -- a bit listless today.
Today's Doonesbury reminds me that there's a lot more to an invasion of Iraq than just invading Iraq. The November issue of the Atlantic has an interesting piece on what happens afterwards. We can only hope that, like Donald Rumsfeld says, it all turns out "fabulous"....
The Courage to Compete Before an Impossible Crowd -- a dramatic title, an amusing little squib and a great boost for Canadian reggae, but it's still hard not to picture New York Times critics turning up to events like this wearing pince-nez and bowties.
Okay, after reading Kenan's comment I have to admit that the Moon Towers mentioned below are rather a disappointment. We had actually driven past the one on 41st and Speedway dozens of times before I realised that this anonymous spindly thing was one of those Moon Towers I'd been reading about. Just from hearing the name I had conjured up an image of something noble, elegant and other-worldly, filled with elaborate systems of dynamos and crystals, mirrors and lenses, housed in intricately-tooled mahogany, leather and bronze -- some half-forgotten, near-mythic icon from an age when electricity and civil engineering were new and exciting adventures for dreamers with big ideas that even now demanded astonishment and awe. But they just look like the sort of thing you'd find around any tatty old industrial estate. Maybe the name is just too damned evocative, hotwiring all sorts of associations in my addled brain, from strange weather phenomena to the hallucinatory novels of (early) J.G. Ballard and Steve Erickson, and even having seen the reality I want to think of them as something strange and phantasmagorical.
Austin is the only city in the USA to still have MoonTowers. Once most cities had them, but now only these seventeen 165 foot tall structures remain. They're not quite as mysterious or evocative as the name implies but they're a intriguing link back to another era.
I was beginning to think that the whole Bettie Page thing had been flogged to death years ago, but I can't help but want Santa to put this in my, ahem, stocking: Bettie Page and Irwin Klaw action figures. As an added bonus this link takes you to the Bust boobtique -- specials gifts for those hard to please family members.
I get a few hits here from poor souls searching for stuff about the band Yes -- mp3s, guitar tabs, nude photos, hair care tips, that sort of thing. Well let me make it clear that this site has no time for these prog dinosaurs and still has a grudge against them from the time when I started college and a hippy room-mate tried to make me listen to all 17 sides of "Tales from the Topographical Ocean". Some wounds don't heal.
I do, however, exempt Chris Squires and Peter Banks from total contempt as they were members of The Syn, one of the best British R&B-turning-into-psychedelia bands, circa 1967. The B-side of their first single, "Grounded" (to be found on the The Freakbeat Scene compilation of singles and B-sides released on the Deram label around that time, just like The Psychedelic Scene and equally essential, popkids), is a wonderful chunk of angsty, organ-driven, swaggering proto-punk in the very best Small Faces style that soars into some kind of snotty empyrean when the sullenly perfect "ooh-ooh-ooh" backing vocals come in. One of the ten best British B-sides of 1967, a list sure to come your way real soon....
Driving through Tarrytown late yesterday afternoon, we passed the United Methodist Church's pumpkin patch. We had to stop and take some photographs as it's the first time either one of us has seen anything like this outside of Charlie Brown cartoons.
There may be a lot of this sort of thing in the days up until Halloween. Like a lot of people in England I always felt that we were missing out on something rather wonderful whenever American TV shows like Roseanne had halloween specials. It seems to be on the same level as Xmas here -- Xmas without being marooned with your family and forced to watch The Sound of Music.
LATER: All your pumpkin facts in one place: Pumpkin Patch.
Thanks to the Austin Chronicle, I now know which parties Sanchez, Perry, Ron Kirk, John Cornyn, David Dewhurst and John Sharp nominally belong to. Wouldn't have known otherwise as it seems to be against the law to mention such things in their TV commercials. These all seem to be bought by the yard, saying either (a) "(candidate) is a family man who supports Texan values -- he'll cut government overspending, improve our schools and support George W. Bush's war against terrorism" or (b) "(opponent) would be bad for Texas". Sometimes, when things are getting really dirty, it will be suggested that an opponent is -- gasp! -- some kind of liberal, but mostly this sort of academic political analysis is avoided.
Over at Perfect Sound Forever, a Chris Cutler polemic from last year arguing that downloading "in-print, independently produced music" is bad but "concert bootlegs, out of print music and other collector material" is sort of okay. His approach is a lot more convincing than the usual whinings of the uber-celebs and their money-men seeing as he works at a level where a 15% loss of sales due to downloading would mean the end of his record label rather than one less gold napkin holder for Sir Elton.
The issue is not, excuse me, are you for or against major record company profits (a question that merely muddies the water), but how can we reconcile what's possible with what's equitable? Asking simplistic questions raised on the false polarity of won't pay/must pay just fuels a circular rhetoric that tediously reiterates a false pair of knee-jerk decoy positions. I suspect this rather suits the record industry, since energy is expended, participants feel morally vindicated, tribal loyalties are repetitiously aired and useless, or specious, answers squeeze all other considerations out of the debate -- allowing the real war to proceed on other fronts. Perhaps, rather than what would be better for the record industry, or the (not) paying consumer, it would be more generous to ask what would be better for the health of the music and the conditions that bring the music into being? That's the approach I wish to advocate.
Like Cutler, I suspect the major labels could get by if the majority of their sales were lost due to downloading. They might seem like lumbering dinosaurs but they'll adjust or come up with some new angle if their profits are being hit as badly as they like to say. (Maybe there's a parallel in what happened when the market for popular music switched from sheet music to recordings? I dunno, but I'm sure someone's looked into this.) It's evident that they're not unprepared -- the actual importance of hard music sales seems to be decreasing compared to all the money that comes in through licensing and other tie-ins. Independents and non-commercial music makers don't have these options, of course -- you don't see many Fred Frith2003 calendars or Heinz Godspeed You Black Emperor! shaped pasta in sauce on the market....
I know he's an ugly old bugger and the (dubious to begin with) record is probably horrible, but can it be true that shops like Woolworths aren't stocking John Otway's single, "Bunsen Burner" -- despite it being number 9 in the UK charts -- because they reckon young girls won't buy it? What strange, shiny variant of market-driven capitalism is this?
The Minor Fall, The Major Lift is unwell, so I suppose I'll have to pick up the slack on the crucial music stories of the moment. Like Billboard's report that Antonio Banderas has recorded "Imagine" for an album benefiting the SABERA Foundation. Yoko has never allowed anyone to do a cover version of the song before....
Just form an orderly queue and make up your own punchlines, and if you're having trouble thinking of something nasty just take a look at whose website that Sabera link takes you to.
Ex-Stone Roses' singer, Ian Brown's holiday home in Wales has been picketed by protesters dressed as monkeys. The image this conjures up should keep you smiling for a while.
There is something almost supernatural about being able to read stuff from an 1862 issue on the Atlantic Online. And I'm still having trouble sorting out my 1999 archives....
I did my patriotic duty as a newly-welcomed American and Texan two nights ago by watching the first of the televised gubernatorial debates between Rick Perry and Tony Sanchez. Well, someone had to.
But now I see that without the pressures of live TV and questions from a studio audience they've found their natural level for debate:
"Again, Mr. Sanchez is a little late. He's short," Perry said, pausing as if he were at the end of a sentence. "He's short on ideas. He's short on solutions. He's long on criticism. That's about the only thing I can suggest that this fellow is long on."
Perry is 6 feet tall. Sanchez says he is 5-foot-6.
A reporter asked Perry if he was hurling a barb about Sanchez's height. Perry did not verbally respond. He pursed his lips and slightly shook his head.
Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan said Perry's comment was not intended as a reference to Sanchez's stature. "We recognize first and foremost that height does not matter in the governor's race and there is nothing that Mr. Sanchez or anybody else can do about it," Sullivan said. "It appears his famous short temper is coming out in the waning days of this campaign."
But the remark clearly irritated Sanchez when he heard it later at his Houston campaign headquarters.
"These one-liners by Rick Perry aren't going to work," Sanchez said.
These two clowns are spending $17,376 an hour on their political campaigns. You'd think they could hire some better writers for their repartee.
Maybe Sanchez will say something cutting about Perry's hair next and it'll really get interesting....
Ah, so that's what Shela Na Gig is/means. (via Fimoculous) Hands up if you only knew this term from the P.J. Harvey song? Me too, despite my oft-mentioned fascination with quasi-erotic stone carvings on Norman churches...
More on Ghostwatch here. I didn't realise it had become a cult. For its 10th anniversary it is being released as a DVD. See Michael Parkison possessed by a demon!
Halloween is so much different here than back in England. Commercials of a local haunted house are showing on TV. The supermarkets have been selling pumpkin-coloured and pumpkin-shaped stuff, bitesize candybars in "ghoulish" packaging for trick-or-treaters, vampire makeup and candy bowls that make ghostly sounds and slap you with a skeletal hand since September. HEB and Central Market now have about five kinds of pumpkin on sale -- the main types being giant, misshapen ones for carving and smaller, smooth ones for eating. Goodwill and other thrift clothing stores are now aiming their racks at party-goers rather than the poor, with posters showing how you can turn yourself into geek, freak, hipster, mummy or Mr Potato Head (who is 50 years old this year.)
Back in England Halloween used to mean a cosy M.R. James adaption or something by Nigel Kneale on the BBC, but after the notorious -- and now fondly remembered -- Ghostwatch in 1992 they stopped even this. You might get a couple of kids in Batman costumes reluctantly shepherded to your door by their parents if you live in a nice neighbourhood and possibly a disturbed clergyman on TV warning that even this was Too Satanic. If you're very lucky you might get to go to a party where all the women are dressed as slutty somethings -- slutty schoolgirl, slutty nurse, slutty brain surgeon, slutty nun -- and the guy just dressed normally. (Or maybe that's what normal parties in England are like these days, so long since I went to one.) I'm looking forward to the American version of Halloween, although I haven't decided on a costume yet. I keep getting hits from people looking for avril lavigne halloween costumes however so maybe I'll go with that....
Big post this morning over at No Rock 'N' Roll Fun in response to the rather bonkers Conservative Pop Music? The Top 40 of the Top 40, although it fails to ask the question: why did the guy bother making the list in the first place? It's not as if it's a list just for fun or to fill a couple of hours on Chanel Four or MTV -- it's a speech given at a conservative society meeting. Shouldn't he have been listing 40 reasons to bomb Iraq instead?
It's all good fun though -- both to see Bartlett struggle to find 40 hits that even vaguely pertain to conservatism, and then watch Simon B. effortlessly neuter them.
Things I meant to write about over the last few days but didn't get around to:
1. Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room, the archetypal piece of "process art". The composer reads a description of what he is doing into a tape recorder. The recording is then played and recorded on another tape recorder. This process is repeated about 35 times during which times the room's natural acoustics gradually filters and transforms his voice into pure sound. It really ought to be unlistenable art-wank but isn't.... I'm just not sure what it is. Spooky? Beautiful? Provocative? Hypnotic?
2. The intense, almost vertiginous sense of nostalgia brought on by the harmonica part in "Tomorrow's Just Another Day" by Madness.
3. Being unable to bring myself to read Atlantic Monthly except in other people's bathrooms.
4. My wariness at using specifically English references in this blog. I'm trying to write a review of 24 Hour Party People and find myself mentioning Richard Whitely, Harry Corbett and "the bloke who played Alf Roberts in Coronation Street".
5. Being unemployed in a foreign country.
6. The cute green lizard catching bugs just outside my window.
7. Mexican TV -- I don't want to seem like I'm being superior or anything but what the hell is going on? Female midget wrestling, monkey bike racing, clowns reading the news and no male presenter with a less than 52 inch waist....
Today would have been John Lennon's 62nd birthday. I didn't realise he was only 40 when he was shot -- in any other field but pop 'n' rock he could have had another 40 years of creativity ahead. All the punks who were sneering at the Beatles for being old farts are all older now than he was when he died. Me included. Are any of them still relevant, or at least producing work better than the weedy slop he was churning out around the time of his death? You tell me -- there's a comments link just aching to be clicked upon....
I may write about the Beatles later. I still share Mr Unpopular's inability to love them or their music, at least with the uncritical totality it seems you're supposed to. I like a handful of Beatles songs, although often it's only through the interpretation of others that I start to see some of the "genius" people speak of. I suspect, as in many things, it is their fawning fanbase that alienates me rather than anything in particular about them, although I also find it hard to forgive them for the torrents of pretentious cack that Sgt Pepper unleashed upon the world.
It's this kind of pro-kidnapping moral equivalence that made me quit The Nation.
In 1938, George Orwell wrote, "The puerile appeasement of the rumormongers is little more than insouciance." "What ever happened to Osama Bin Laden?" says Nigel E. Richardson. Well, duh. In politics, the Democratic Party is the screeching home of the Chomsky-like and those hysterical members of the Chomsky-like Left who have a lust for power.
When Jenna Bush tries to protect us from puerile brown men, depraved Nigel E. Richardson and his fellow leftoids cry out, "racial profiling!" That's not what Nigel E. Richardson was saying last year. Last week Nigel E. Richardson went so far as to leave the mainstream completely and enter a kind of hysterical alternate universe of child-molesting treason. Nigel E. Richardson, what kind of a man are you?
The New Statesman gets it wrong again (or "got it wrong again" as the issue with this article in came out two weeks ago):
The journalist Stephen Pollard, the only British political blogger on the left, notes: "There are plenty of new British political blogs. And they are all -- all -- on the right." (via Grayblog.)
How many mistakes can you spot in this article? And check out Pollard's diary -- he might be on the left of someone, but my knowledge of the conservative party isn't complete enough to say exactly who....
LATER: That should read "How many mistakes you spot in this quotation," of course, as the article itself isn't so bad, although it does underestimate the number of leftist blogs and assumes that all rightist blogs are unquestioning Bush groupies. Maybe if it had been written a year or even six months ago it would have been true. But just as September 11th sent a lot of people who assumed they were liberals scurrying rightwards, subsequent events have returned them to the left or the middle, albeit with their critical faculties sharpened and a lower tolerance for the old slogans and easy answers.
Of all the things that still baffle me about America after living here in Austin for three months, the most disconcerting is platinum selling country music artiste Travis Tritt -- the man, the hair, the trousers and the Xmas cards. Please explain this curious phenomenon to me.
On the subject of recordings I don't think I want to hear, here's something that is truely scary -- I've just discovered that one of my favourite Lee Hazlewood songs wasn't actually written by him but is a cover of a Cliff Richard song from two years earlier: What's More I Don't Need Her. I haven't heard Sir Clifford of Richard's version, but Hazlewood's take on it, on A Cowboy in Sweden, is one of the bleakest songs I've ever heard, that would be entirely at home amongst the desolation of Frank Sinatra's No One Cares. Around a forlorn, neo-classical string figure that alone would be amongst the saddest sounds ever recorded, the song stumbles into a chasm of stoic end-of-the-relationship resignation that seems infinitely more sad than heartbreak. It's a song of love that ends not in betrayal or carelessness or even incompatibility -- instead the singer realises she doesn't need him any longer, he doesn't need her and -- in this version of the song, at least -- this sounds like the most terrible thing in the world, like its the end of love itself rather than an affair. I can't begin to image how Cliff Richard would have handled this song, the grinning nincompoop. Even with the horribly inappropriate, almost feverishly unfocused choir that pops up in the middle of the track and threatens to untangle it completely, this song always leaves me emotionally drained and teary-eyed. Maybe if I could track down the original and it was as ineffectual and drippy as I imagine, I'd free myself from the almost embarrassing hold this song has on me....
Oh, and further down in the Guardian article about Robbie Williams comes a cliche almost as old as the printed word:
"One point Americans find hard to grasp is irony, so most British bands don't do well there," said the Daily Express showbusiness correspondent, Mark Jagasia.
Ahem. (a) Irony is "the expression of meaning using language that normally expresses the opposite" (SOED) not a point. (b) If Americans don't understand irony then explain the popularity of shows like Seinfeld, the Simpsons, the Sopranos, Larry Sanders, writers like David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Thomas Frank, the whole McSweeny gang, etc, etc. (c) If the Daily Express showbusiness corespondent has the answer then the question must have been pretty bloody stupid. (d) Who are these masters of irony that America has failed to recognise? Oasis?
After an EMI press conference to announce the deal, with an understandably cheerful Williams shouting "I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams!", EMI's share price fell 1p.
Saturday's Guardian on Robbie Williams "truly groundbreaking" £80m contract.
It's good to know he hasn't gone blind as was reported a while back, but I wish people would leave Syd Barrett alone. Even if he did want to speak to anyone he's doubtlessly too far gone to have anything meaningful to say.
There are some records and films that you read about but put off hearing or seeing because you suspect they'll never live up to what gets conjured in your head. I had always assumed Lee Hazlewood's version of "These Boots Are Made For Walking" would be one of these and was genuinely wary of playing it when I tracked it down on a German "Lounge Legends" compilation. Turned out to be the epitome of everything I find so great about the guy -- sly, sarcastic, self-mocking and hilarious, with inane, self-referential asides. When he growls "This is the part of the record where Billy Strange raised his hand and asked if he could leave the room" I just fall to pieces.
But Kim Wilde singing "Because the Night"? No way could this live up to what popped into my mind when I stumbled across this ghastly item. It would have been the perfect song for her to have covered around the time of "Cambodia". But circa 1999, with Mike "We will suffer no intrusion from the infidels of France" Batt conducting the London Philharmonic? Nah, I'll leave that well alone, thank you. And the same goes for Bonnie Tyler doing "I Put A Spell On You" and Lemmy doing "Eve of Destruction" -- although on second thoughts that combination is just so bonkers it might be the greatest thing ever recorded....
Attended the Not In Our Name march up Congress yesterday afternoon -- so I guess this has turned from a pop-culture-fluffy-lifestyle-with-squirrels blog to a peacenik-liberal-(insert-derogatory-descriptor-here) blog for the weekend. But it'll be back to rambling about obscure French LPs from the 70s that I've never heard and stealing jokes from No Rock'n'Roll Fun, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, PopSquid and Lounging Around In Lingerie as soon as they start updating on Monday.
The march itself, despite the 90F heat, was remarkably peaceable, genial and generally inoffensive, although we only stuck around for one dreadful song and about half a speech we couldn't hear afterwards. While I agree that invading Iraq at Bush's whim is an idiotic and dangerous move that can only make a bad situation worse, the subsidiary propositions on display were increasingly dubious. I know you've got to accept a bit of data loss when you try to compress your political philosophy onto a placard, but some of them needed to be sent back for another draft. Any anti-war slogan that reads like a pro-war slogan unless you supply your own punctuation and emphasis is, in my pedantic opinion, counterproductive.
I liked the fact that a good number of the people on the march or that paused to wave in support from cars or cafes were just "ordinary" folk rather than the card-carrying, freedom-hating, treasonably liberal bogeymen that lurk in the tragic minds of those on the right. They are people who think Saddam is an arsehole and should be dealt with; that Islamic fundamentalism is dangerous and should be dealt with; who have never heard of Chomsky; who regard themselves as patriots and would punch you in the mouth good and hard if you suggested they were anti-American -- but who nevertheless don't think declaring war on Iraq is a good idea just because a bunch of dubious billionaire frat boys who wanna show the world who's boss reckon it's the answer to everything.
I didn't like being associated with people who think "Nazism = Sharon-ism = American Imperialism" is a smart line even if they have got a cool puppet; nor with anyone who thinks John Lennon's vapid lyrics are worth marching beneath. I don't believe "Bush Knew". I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next paranoid but see nothing in this particular meme beyond cock-ups, coincidence and hierarchies of buck-passing. I don't even think it's all about the oil, although if Iraq is invaded and conquered I can't see the big oil companies turning up their noses at what's suddenly on offer.
Have I mentioned that I don't understand Texas politics? For example:
Tony Sanchez has been a lavish supporter of George W. Bush. During the last election, Sanchez even worked as a Pioneer, raising more than $100,000 for the Bush cause. According to the watchdog organization Center for Public Integrity, the Sanchez family has given Bush a total of $323,650 over the years, making them the third most generous patrons of Bush's political career, surpassed only by the contributions of Enron Corporation of Houston and MBNA Corporation of Delaware. Sanchez, like Bush, is an oil man, and that loyalty, more than any particular party affiliation, has probably defined his political leanings. (Texas Observer, 25 May 2001)
Tony Sanchez is the Democrat candidate for governor of Texas this November.
It still amazes me how many people were taken in by this picture last week. Look closely folks and you might just spot a tell-tale sign or two that it was in fact a hoax:
Now this really is news -- state of British pop music to get worse. Next week, other scoops like beauty contest winner chosen for her looks rather than "what's on the inside", Tony Blair revealed not to be a socialist, scientists discover water is wet, etc....
When the results of the latest census were announced this week, it emerged that a million young British men had 'disappeared'. The man in charge of the count thinks they're all at 'raves' in places like Ibiza. We sent Emma Brockes to the island to find them.
Earth to National Review! Earth to National Review! This -- via your man at TMFTML -- is just plain hilarious. Seems just about everything we thought we knew about music was wrong, that the music industry forced leftwing disco and punk onto us when we could have been listening to all kinds of complex, medieval-influenced compositions with unusual time signatures. If you can read this piece without crying with laughter you need help. And it's reminded me exactly why the Sex Pistols were a good thing.
Not that I condemn all prog rock as essentially useless -- just that after Caravan's 1971 classic, In the Land of Grey and Pink. (I don't consider Hatfield and the North, Henry Cow, Soft Machine, etc to be prog rock. Wanna argue about it?)
This is what makes Austin cool -- our favourite BBQ, Ruby's, get the thumbs up from vegetarians. Until I saw this I didn't know they did veggie dishes as the mere thought of their brisket or hot Elgin sausage plate brings on a meat-fueled blindness to anything else -- we've been there about a dozen times and always order exactly the same thing. But it's good to see that blood-drenched carnivores and tofu-munching saladheads can co-exist here in the heart of Texas. (They also play Howling Wolf rather than cheesy C&W and the sides of creamy coleslaw with poppy seeds and decidedly non-vegetarian BBQ beans are enough to make a supermodel drool.)
Call him what you will: househusband, stay-at-home dad, domestic engineer. But credit him with setting aside his own career by dropping out, retiring early, or going part-time so that his wife's career might flourish and their family might thrive. Behind a great woman at work, there is often a great man at home. He is the new trophy husband.
I don't know if I should be, but I'm cheered to discover you can get imported black pudding in Austin -- should you want it. It's in the speciality meat section at Central Market, between the rattlesnake and the alligator, just above the
I know I've got a giant-sized heap of better things to do but I've signed up for the 
Attended the 
