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...
There are still some things about living in America that continue to boggle my mind. And while I'm already getting used to the commercial overkill of Halloween, with aisles in HEB, Eckerds and Walgreens already taken up with trick or treat goodies, monster make-up and candy corn, I cannot get my head around halloween costumes for dogs.
A slightly new look for this thing, that may possibly confuse pre-millennial browsers or those using steam-powered protocols. I think it works with Opera 6 and maybe IE5, but you brave pioneers of new tech and die-hard users of Netscape 0.01, Spyglass, Mosaic, Old Bob's Cobol Browser, etc, will have to tell me if it gives your browser indigestion. The rest of the weekend will no doubt be spend sorting out the near infinite bugs and goofs that inevitably follow even minor-league tweakery....
Another popular search that often ends here is for We are the Cheeky Girls. I escaped England before I was subjected to the Transylvanian twosome on Pop Rivals, but I'm sure the whole world will one day be singing their song:
I never ever ask where do you go I never ever ask what do you do I never ever ask what's in your mind I never ever ask if you'll be mine come and smile don't be shy touch my bum this is life we are the cheeky girls we are the cheeky girls you are the cheeky boys you are the cheeky boys
Public Information Service: A lot of searches for pictures of PETA's poster-girl and spokesperson Liza Franzetta seem to end up here, when they really ought to go here. I'm not sure which one she is, but there's a selection of pale, pleather-clad tofu-gobblers for the curious. I'm not sure that a shiny mini-dress, fishnets and a limply held novelty flogger really makes the wearer a dominatrix but if it gives them a frisson of righteous naughtiness then who am I to scoff?
Synchronicity alert: Hydrogenic wrote about Mary Margaret O'Hara and her soundtrack to Apartment Hunting on Monday. He's got it and has no hesitation in recommending it.
Dadburnit, every time I sit down to write about one of my favourite albums he beats me to it. Today it's Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom, a record I've only had to play once in the last fifteen years as it is burned into my brain as perfectly as any MP3 download.
Nodding and smiling wistfully all the way through the "director's cut" of Simon Reynolds' Independent's Day: Post-Punk 1979-81 article, I have to come to the conclusion that I'm turning into an old fart.
"Post-punk was a time when there was so much electricity in the air that even the era's unrealised experiments and failed pretentiousness seem more suggestive, and more cherishable, than the present's perfected product."
Of course elsewhere on his Blissout site (which I've spent most of the afternoon reading in full-on fanboy mode) he raves about several million albums releases this year. And I'm sure I would too if I had access to new stuff. I don't think you necessarily lose interest in new stuff as you get older, just that if it doesn't distinctly differentiate itself from the stuff you've already got then you can't be arsed to track it all down, scour the import racks for obscure goodies and/or go without toothpaste because you'd rather spend the money on that ultra rare limited edition helitrope 6 inch vinyl remix of I Gave At The Office's "Plasmic Extremities Part 2" on the Schoolgirl Custard label like you did when you were 19. (Or 37.)
I had given up hoping after fourteen years but Mary Margaret O'Hara has a new album out. 1988's breathtaking Miss America(which Virgin sat on for 4 years - "the label offered me all kinds of things if I wouldn't put it out because they said it was really bad") was followed by an EP of Christmas songs in 1991 but after that there's just been guest vocals, a couple of tracks on tribute albums and some legendary and weird live appearances. Apparently dealing with Virgin and intractable musicians was such a rotten experience that all the praise, raves and fanish devotion she's received since hasn't been able to lure her back into the recording studio for a second album.
Or so I thought.
Turns out that a new album sneaked out sometime earlier this year, the soundtrack to a film called Apartment Hunting in which she also plays a street busker. I'm a little worried about getting this, however. After so many year's anticipation will I be able to listen to it without falling prey to impossible expectations? Best to go back to that first album for the time being....
Miss America remains the post-Horses album to which - in my humble opinion - all female singer-songwriter ought to aspire, the companion piece to Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter. Over a deceptively smooth, seductively warm, yet sparce and mostly acoustic backing that mixes elements of country, jazz and torchsong, O'Hara seems to take her perfect, Patsy Cline voice for granted and challengers herself with the task of re-inventing singing from first principles. If that sounds silly then you haven't heard "Year in Song". There are moments where she sounds like she's channeling Monk (Thelonious that is, although you might find the influence of Meredith on some tracks) or even Derek Bailey, testing both the text and the instrument of her voice to see where they will go, although she never loses the over-riding shape of the song or descends into faux-Schoenbergian Sprechgesang or angst grrl yelping. No matter what she does with her voice, whether she's babbling in dervish-like idiolalia or teasing a note towards ethereal silence she never loses the essential melodic line. It's astonishing stuff, all done with such precision and conviction that you don't notice she's doing things that really ought to be unlistenable or just plain wrong unless you're taking notes. It's such a freakishly brilliant, one-off masterpiece that even after 12 years I'm still reduced to fanboy gibberish trying to write about it.
More on M2OH - as we gibbering fanboys call her - here:
The Church of Me on the glory that was Kim Wilde, the early years. There was a disturbing beauty about her early singles, right from "Kids in America," such a perfect slice of that season's pop anomie that sounds even better now than it did then. Of all the pop that mixed sweetness with near apocalyptic unease around the start of the 80s, "Kids in America" was the finest, most spooked example. Sullen alienation was never such fun. "New York to East California/There's a new wave coming, I warn ya," might have been a silly lyric for an English girl, but it sounded like an otherworldy threat. That she looked like a porno version of a schoolgirl punk helped, but for three or four records Wilde was everything decades of would-be goth femme fatales have strived for, a Nico for the Smash Hits generation, putting songs that seemed to squirm in masochistic despair and neurosis at the top of the pop charts. Go read Marcello for the full thrill chill.
Time to brighten this blog up. More links to things of beauty and less gripes about twits, blowhards and hacks like Andr*w S*lliv*n. So I'll start with an old favourite, the online portfolio of Lisa Haney, whose distinctive scratchboard illustrations are an integral part of the New York Times - and spicy cheese sauce labels.
"You know you're X when..." lists are usually the lamest form of humour imaginable, but this one actually had me nodding in wry agreement (#22): "You know you're living in the 00'ies when..."
Especially this one:
"25. You got this email from a friend that never talks to you anymore, except to send you jokes from the net."
When I first saw Mr Food a few weeks ago I assumed he was some local hash-slinger who K-EYE were using because (a) he was cheap, (b) fitted in nicely with their own no-frills, make-do, downmarket ethos and (c) looked like he might cause trouble with his chopper if they didn't give him an early morning slot. But he's apparently been at it for over 20 years and is syndicated to at least 160 stations. This doesn't make him any less creepy and offputting. He's no Nigella. He's not even a Jamie. Or a Gary. He's more like Ainsley....
In print his catchphrase, "Ooh it's so good!" doesn't capture how scary he is at 6.45 in the morning, brandishing something that is usually fifty percent butter and tinned mushroom soup with an unspeakable glint in his eye. To my sleepy brain he'd be more appropriate in black and white, menacing Laurel and Hardy in a prison kitchen....
Like many other bloggers I've been a bit lax with news about the Norwegian third division football scene, but I trust this, from Aftenposten Nettutgave, makes up for my lapse:
"Two third division Norwegian soccer teams have agreed one of the oddest transfer deals ever. Vindbjart will sell striker Kenneth Kristensen to rivals Flekkerøy for his weight in fresh prawns."
Much as I love to chortle at the stream of Dubya malapropisms, that latest one (that has already been quoted just about everywhere) has an almost Joycean density:
"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
The last sentence alone, in a mere seven words, subverts a rather silly traditional saying by slipping in allusions to the Who and Thomas Wolfe. If someone could teach him to pause and stroke his chin sagely after saying these things rather than smirking he'd get a lot more respect from the beastly intellectual elite.
Don't be a bongo. Now this is weird and worth investigating, ladies. A few peeks at what awaits you at Aristasia:
"ARISTASIA is a feminine Empire; a world without men. It has two sexes, blonde and brunette. It is an elegant, gentle world, and yet also a world of strict discipline. It is an attractive world, a world of music and song; a world of intelligent conversation and serious thought; a world of kindness and courtesy; a world of loyalty and honour."
"On first encountering Aristasia There is often some confusion about what Aristasia actually is. On the one hand it appears to be a fantasy-world made up of strange queendoms ruled by a high Empress, a world with two female sexes, a world where time and space in some respects appear to have changed places - in short, a world that, to say the least of it, does not really exist. "On the other hand, Aristasia also seems to be referred to as if it were a real place in which real girls live their daily lives - the world, indeed, from which this very page comes to you; the home of the writer of these words and of her friends and intimates. "Which of the two Aristasias is the real one? The answer is that they both are. The 'real Aristasia' - the one in which the marital conjugation of blondes and brunettes leads to the issue of tiny brunettes and blondes and trains run from Trent to Quirinelle - is certainly (at least from the perspective of our world) an imaginary place; but it is also the inspiration and the guiding image of another Aristasia, the one which does exist in this world and which is sometimes known as Aristasia-in-Telluria. "Aristasia-in-Telluria exists wherever two or three Aristasian girls are gathered together. It is a self-created world which rejects the ugliness of the late 20th century and adheres to the dress and values of the pre-Eclipse world."
"The cultural and spiritual collapse of the early 1960s. Civilisation proper ended at this time and the Void (or the Pit) took its place. The process, obviously, was not instantaneous, and some elements of civilised life remained throughout the First Decade of Darkness and even into the Second, among the population at large, as opposed to the mass-media. Some hold that a second Eclipse took place at about the turn of the Second and Third Decades, after which deformism and moral inversion were complete and spread rapidly to every level of the populace, leaving very little intact."
It's a rum do, and no mistaking. But is it an agreeable Sapphic fantasy world where lesbians dress like flappers rather than truckers and while away languid evenings debating "The Length of a Girl's Nylons" or some scary rightwing mind-cult? You tell me.
More in a similar but wordier vein at Secession. What have I stumbled on here? A rum do, indeed.
Okay, I passed my driving exam this morning so I am no longer the oldest person in Texas who can't drive. It's a great relief. Driving instruction here is very different to how it is back in England - after four 90 minutes lessons I drove to the Department of Public Safety, joined the queue, had a ten minute test and got my permit. Back in England it was a horribly drawn-out experience. I seem to recall that it wasn't until my sixth lesson that the instructor let me get behind the wheel. Maybe that's an exageration - it was a very long time ago. But the randomly selected Tim Clark Driving School - "Your Barrow in Furness School" - recommends 40 lessons. I gave up learning to drive in England twice. Once because I ran out of money and the second time because I got a job in London and only a masochist of the most boring stripe would drive or own a car there. I now feel that I have belated joined the mainstream of (American) society. I can drive my highschool sweetheart to the prom and we can head off to Inspiration Point and make out under the stars with the Beach Boys on the radio....
"Does she have plans to work on the other side of the camera? She shakes her head. Producer? 'I don't think I'm interested in that. Director, I'm not sure I'm capable. The thing is, I love to play the piano, and I love drawing.
"'But what I notice is that I have no imagination. For the piano I can't improvise, and for acting I need a director and a text. I have no ability to create from my own imagination, so all I do is follow other people's ideas.'"
Charlotte Gainsbourg in the Telegraph seems comfortable saying the words I'm sure we'd all like to hear repeated by about 95% of all actors.
Just cancelled our New Standard Cable so we can live normal, civilized lives without the distraction of Leave It To Beaver, El Gordo y la Flaca and the curious world of CMT, the soft-rock-pretending-to-be-country-music channel. The Fall season is upon us, anyway, and there might be a few new goodies to replace the wall-to-wall Friends and Third Stone from the Sun repeats. Back in England I always liked reading "Aerial view of America" at the back of the Guardian's weekly Guide, especially when he was previewing/reviewing the new season's shows. There was always a whole tranche of shows that either didn't make it to British TV or else went to cable and they always sounded so exciting, exotic or wonderfully stupid compared to the dull plod of what the BBC and ITV churned out. Looking at the list of forthcoming stuff, I'm looking forward to Firefly, John Doe, Hidden Hills and Boomtown, plus Birds of Prey, which might be watchable for rather dubious reasons. Fastlane looks like it might be an update of Miami Vice with added nu-metal for people with Attention Deficiency. Push, Nevada, which previewed last night, looks like a decaf Twin Peaks, which isn't necessarily a putdown. There are new seasons of Buffy, 24 and Alias (which I never got to see). Some of the comedies, like The In-Laws look really bad. But back in England all you've got to look forward to is another Potatohead Mitchell and Banana Boy Fowler showdown on Eastenders, innit?
It's three months since we left the UK and I'm think I'm starting to feel detached from the place. Especially when I read this in today's Daily Mirror:
"Home Secretary David Blunkett has taken Liz Hurley's advice and told police they can eat in coffee shops and burger bars on duty."
Ignoring the surreal aspect of the home secretary taking his lead from the star of the summer's worst movie, the lovely Liz's point was that having a visible police presence makes people feel safer. But I can't help feeling there's another motive when I read this later paragraph:
"Chief Superintendent Bruce Gilbert supervised a pilot scheme in West Bromwich, West Midlands, six months ago after privatised police canteens started closing at 2pm."
Suddenly, because they've said they'll permit strikes against Iraq to be launched from their country, those Saudis aren't such a bad bunch, sez you know who.
Much as I dislike the Beatles and John Lennon in particular - more for the cloying sycophancy that has smothered them over the last thirty years than their music - I would really like to hear John and Yoko's Unfinished Music #2: Life with the Lions, at least the first 26 minute long track. It's supposedly so horrible - nothing but screaming from Yoko and guitar feedback from Lennon - that even fans of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music beg for it to be turned off, but this review on Julian Cope's groovy Head Heritage site intrigues me - and I always had a soft spot of Sonny and Linda Sharrock's Monkey-Pockie-Boo.
Stuart Jeffrey's guide to Members of Parliament's web pages in today's Guardian:
...welcome to the crazy world of Austin Mitchell. Go to www.austinmitchell.co.uk and you will be confronted by a middle-aged man sitting on the floor waving at the camera like a jaunty drunk in a gutter and sitting next to a large neon sign that reads "Friendly" but could be changed helpfully to "Disturbing". This, Grimsby, is your MP.
However, his online diary is dandy stuff. Can you imagine an American politician publishing stuff like this on his or her webpage? (Or wanting to?)
"June 2002: Is it time to give up on the high hopes of low office which have kept me going for so long? Tony's now appointing teenagers, so as someone over 35 (just), I'm out of it. There are plans to create paid career positions in Parliament as an alternative to the power ladder, but none at all for an awkward squad paid danger money to be H.M.'s Official Poo Stirrers. Is my future behind me?"
"My Career Development Adviser, Tommy McAvoy, is too busy to see me. Tony's on detached duties overseas, bombing wherever President Bush wants him to. There's only Shona to advise me. She always says the same thing, "Be loyal and virtue will get its reward". After 25 years I'm beginning to wonder if she's right."
(By bombing, he means "going very quickly". I think....)
I want to travel the world and help people.... or not travel to Nigeria and help people. Miss World contestants against sharia law. Shame the UK and USA entrants aren't amongst them... yet.
When I read somewhere that there was supposedly a Saddam Hussain mosque in Birmingham I thought it was some kind of urban legend, but it really exists. If I was a self-righteous warblogger I'd get all huffy now and ask if there's a Tony Blair chapel anywhere in Iraq.
When I last complained about people finding my website using a certain search phrase, I deliberately mispelt it. But it seems that a large proportion of one-handed web users really do think there is such a word as "amatuer". It occurs about 1,450,000 times. And even "huosewives" crops up 54 times on Google - with me at number one.
"In the cosmic sense, Falwell was correct." Boy columnist, Ben "civilian casualties ok by me" Shapiro, strikes again and sez "Without God, 9-11 is only the begining". Anyone wanting a nice easier target to ridicule could do worse than go through the archive of Shapiro's dribbles at townhall.com.
I was going to go off on some jolly fantasy about Shapiro being the mutant lovechild of Andrew Sullivan and Ann Coulter but the imagery this evoked was too X-rated for this website....
I'm revamping the look of this page right now and putting up a few thousand old and new links, at least one of which won't work, so do not adjust your browser. Looks like I've screwed up the archives, but that'll fix itself I'm sure.
I know some bloggers make a virtue of not going back and changing entries, but they don't have the habit as I do of repeating the same phrase ("these days") three times in two sentences as I did... well, I've gone back and changed it so you'll never know what a syntactically challenged doofus I can be.
Hazards of web browsing #1: the involuntary nasal ejection of coffee. (This has never happened to me, but neither have I ever "flipped my wig", "split my sides laughing" or "cracked my shit up".)
RIP Kim Hunter, American star of the greatest English film ever made, A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945), a film I'll have to write about at length soon as it's the reason why I really can't be bothered with the cinema these days. Watch this a few times and you'll want to grab everyone currently involved in making movies and yell "look, this was made in 1945. It was commissioned by the British Ministry of Information to help promote Anglo-American relations at the close of the Second World War. If they could make this then and under those conditions and restrictions then why are you clowns churning out yak phlegm like Serving Sarah and Stealing Harvard?"
Dropped into Fiesta yesterday to see if the delights in their British aisle would get me all teary-eyed and nostalgic, but I only recognised about half the products. A lot of them are distinctly Irish or Scotish and not the sort of things you'd see back home in Leeds or London. I was hoping to find Seabrook's crisps but they only had Tayto, which just aren't the same. I've probably mentioned Seabrooks before but they are at the top of my list of three and a half reasons to miss Yorkshire. Stick with the plain and cheese and onion varieties though - their attempts at other flavours are a bit too wistful (e.g. they try to make their chicken crisps taste like chicken rather than other brands of chicken crisps).
Caution: Seabrook's own web page is quite possibly the most disappointing thing on the internet today and may make devotees (and anyone else) cry. And it doesn't tell you that the name comes from the founder , Mr. C. Brook.
A rambling debate (the best kind) on crisps at I Love Everything. I like the description of the old McCoy's packaging: "ridiculous olde-worlde-paper-bags-lined-with-space-age-metal-for-freshness. I also liked the picture of the big fat fellow looking happy with his cholesterol-soaked lot in life." Now that's a real cue for potato-based nostalgia....
Listening to The Best of Paulo Conte (Nonesuch, 1998) after coming across a brief but effective rave for it on The Minor Fall, The Major Lift. It's not quite what I was anticipating, having built up a mental picture of him being some sort of Italianate blend of Serge Hazlewood and Lee Gainsbourg, but sometimes it's better to be completely surprised than to have your expectations met. Conte is more like Tom Waits crossed with Charles Trenet if you must have a musically hamfisted pointer. Like a warm, comforting armagnac rather than the expected shot of absinthe, a smoke-matured voice growling from the piano stool in a sleepy public bar at sundown, surrendering to nostalgic dreams and faraway thoughts of ragtime and tangos, an underlying bittersweet regret that he'll never leave the smalltown comfort of his home.... Some pretty damn gorgeous tunes here too. "Sparring Partner" is probably what every half-arsed ballader hears in his head every time he tries to get anthemic. The gnomic "Max" turns into the most beautiful and lopingly uplifting melody since the horn theme in the final movement of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony. And you probably already have "Via con me" stuck in your head without knowing it from some TV commercial....
prendi il primo pullmann, via / tutto il resto è giè poesia....
Yes I am deliberately avoiding writing about 9/11. Sometimes silence or even distraction is best.
But...
I hear planes flying overhead as I type this but no-one is rushing to their windows in fearful panic. So it looks like the terrorists didn't win after all. No one's scared. Resentful, sad and disgusted maybe, but not scared. So they weren't even successful terrorists. Just psychotic murderers from the stone age.
Since my driving lesson has been moved back to next week I may go out now for a taco and an iced latte. Life goes on. But people won't forget what happened. Everyone has their own way of respecting and honouring the dead. They certainly don't need jabbing in the chest and lecturing by emotional bullies like Andrew Sullivan. I thought the guy was a jerk before but after reading today's Soapdish it's confirmed. Remember the dead by taking hold of life hard and not letting go. And if we are better than "they" (choose your own "they", I know you've got a list) are let's prove it by living better and behaving better - not by using today for an extra-special wallow in useless hatred, self-righteousness and blame-fests as Sullivan does.
Now this turned up in my log this morning and is what I call a serious Google search. (Well, it makes a change from all the searches for "amatuer huosewives" and the Revo Styler).
"The US State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have granted TransOrbital, Inc. of La Jolla, California, permission to send its TrailBlazer probe to map the surface of the Moon and photograph Earth. The launch is scheduled for June 2003 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan."
No mention of whether a member of N-Sync or any other teen pop-idol will be onboard.
Cow-chopping art-fraud Damien Hirst reckons the WTC attack was "kind of like an artwork in its own right". You can almost see what he's getting at in his usual Brit Art "it's cool to be thick, innit?" way - if the purpose of art is to provoke awe then shouldn't aweful events be considered art? - but it's a thought that is simultaniously so heartless, meanspirited and essentially banal that it should have been reserved for his own inner circle of sycophantic creeps.
And a complete Serge Gainsbourg discography containing stuff I've never even suspected existed - like an LP called Cannabis from 1970, arranged by the guy who did melody nelson....
Oh boy, as well as The Tapestry of Delight mentioned below, Borderline Books also has online versions of three other reference works on the heady backwaters of rock:
Groovy baby, indeed! The "e-book version" of Vernon Joynson's The Tapestry Of Delights, a guide to U.K. psych, beat and progressive music between , containing "band histories/musical analysis on over 3,400 UK acts of the era with personnel and discographical information, where known". An obsessive's delight if you want to know about fabulous but long forgotten bands like the Accent, Tintern Abbey, 23rd Turnoff and Virgin Sleep. And who in their right mind doesn't?
Sanity has returned to England in my absence. Spotted Dick is back on NHS hospital menus after being replaced by Spotted Richard for a while. No news of the return of that old favourite, Pustulated Scrotum yet, however....
Although he's only encapsulating what countless neocon bloggers and other blowhards have been repeating for much of the last year - that the problem with most declaredly post-modernist and post-colonial thinking is that the only idea most people take from it is that "western imperialism" is to blame for everything - it's good to see Ian Buruma's piece in today's Grauniad putting it across without all the usual spittle-flecked namecalling and ideological baggage.
Bah, the Guardian has reprinted that lame-o "interview" with Mr and Mrs Madonna I mentioned yesterday. Or most of it, They miss out the hilarious line from Ritchie where he seems taken aback by the suggestion that some cinematic remakes aren't as good as the originals. "I mean, give me examples of films that were a disaster when they were remade," sez he. Jeez, there probably isn't room on the internet for that list....
Nice to see that Andrew Sullivan has found a piece in the New York Times that doesn't offend his delicate sensibilities. It's a vacuous bit of chit-chat masquerading as an interview with Madonna and Guy Ritchie. Sullivan gushes:
Mr and Mrs Ritchie are another Blair-Bush, Thatcher-Reagan miracle of trans-Atlantic complementarity. You can see what Madonna sees in Ritchie - that working-class gruffness, the testosteroned good looks, the utterly un-p.c. and therefore almost exotic machismo.
And he's about the only director on this planet who'd give her a lead role in a movie these days, of course.... Also, Ritchie is about as working-class as Prince Edward, having " spent much of his childhood at Loton Park, in Shropshire, the 17th century home of his baronet stepfather. Ritchie was born in Hatfield in Hertfordshire in 1968. His parents divorced when he was five, and he went to live with his mother, Amber, who was a model, and her new husband, Sir Michael Leighton, until she divorced again when he was 12." But I guess that proves Sullivan's point about their "complementarity". They're both fakes.
(Obligatory link to everyone's favourite Julie Burchill piece about Madonna....)
Two stories I missed until today that don't really need any commentary:
A sportswear firm is to review policies after learning that one of its trainers was given the same name as a gas used by the Nazis to kill people in the concentration camps.
The Zyklon trainer provoked outrage from Jewish groups, prompting manufacturer Umbro to apologise for the mistake and "regret any offence caused".
Zyklon B crystals were used to exterminate millions of Jewish people across Europe as part of Hitler's Nazi regime.
German engineering giant Siemens has hastily abandoned plans to register the trademark "Zyklon", the same name as the Zyklon B poison gas used in Nazi extermination camps, BBC News Online has learnt.
A year ago, Bosch Siemens Hausgeraete (BSH), the firm's consumer products joint venture, filed two applications with the US Patent & Trademark Office for the Zyklon name across a range of home products, including gas ovens.
The single is dead and MP3s are so last week. Those crazy pop kids at New York London Paris Munich are reviewing the top ten mobile phone ring tones now.
My first driving lesson in America went fine, thank you for asking. An hour and a half of left and right turns amongst the leafy, squirrel-infested enclaves of Hyde Park without any pain. There was no swearing or screaming as happened the last time I got behind the wheel of a car back in England, circa 1985, and there isn't all that gear changing malarky to deal with. And the instructor isn't a tragic drunk mapping a route between off-licences and betting shops. I can even make a virtue of not having 25 years of driving on the left to cleanse from my mind as I would have to do if I'd learnt to drive the moment I was old enough to as everybody else did. Yeah, it went well. I didn't need to wear those brown trousers after all. Now, did we invade Iraq while I was out?
Sitting around, waiting for my first driving lesson in about 20 years, needlessly changing the font, fontsize and link colors on these entries and already thinking about taking the comment system down.... The power went off for half an hour, or at least it did in part of the appartment - the computer and the air conditioning continued to work....
Thinking about going back to keeping an online diary rather than a blog. There's something too stark and hurried about blogging and I want to go back to a slower, more organic style of writing, where each day is a separate entity rather than just part of an endless stream of mostly unadorned text. I can't keep up the consistency a good blog needs, the long thoughtful articles on the future of western civilization, the blam-blam-blam of links to the cream of the, uh, blogosphere, blogoverse, blogmos? Sometimes all I want to do for the day is post a pointless link to some scary beer....
Despite the fact that the only people who ever visit this blog are disappointed seekers of "readers wives", I thought I'd set up enetation comments. Hey ho. I'll probably remove them by the weekend if no-one uses them....
In 1979 an album was released by a bunch of postpunk weirdoes who had never owned music instruments before they went into the studio that weekend to record it. Only five hundred copies of this record were made.
Well, this isn't that record. This is even more obscure and strange. For years Fille Qui Mousse was known only as a name on the checklist of influential "electronic experimental music" that graced the aforementioned record, Nurse with Wound's Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella". Fille Qui Mousse never released an album - they recording one for the little known French Futura label in 1971 but its release was shelved and apparently only ten test copies were ever made. The last known copy was sold for $3,000. Of such things are legends made, amongst obsessive record geeks with a tolerance for this kind of malarky, at least.
After two dubious appearances on different labels under the title Trixie Stapelton 231 and with incorrect track titles, the album finally has a fully authorized release, 31 years after it was recorded. I'm not sure who is going to buy it, however. The sort of person who feels a need to stockpile this sort of arcane, esoteric and willfully obscure racket will no doubt have already grabbed one the earlier reissues and you'd need to be an obsessive of a very special genus to want to buy it again just for the definitive track listing - and a new cover showing a cat and a glass of beer.
But what about the actual music on this thing? Do the experimental squeaks and clatter of 1971 have anything going for them today, beyond a quaint, nostalgic charm or mere curiosity value? Is it just another cacophonous diversion for those of us who get our kicks from disdaining everything contemporary, reasonable or popular, to play once or twice and then file away amongst all those other supposedly important classics of collectible avant-rock?
It starts almost conventionally. A drawn-out cymbal roll leads into plodding bass and nervous drums, neither played with any degree of compitance. A trebly, spacious electric guitar worrying away and mixed too far back - like a wary, before-its-time version of "Graveyard" from Public Image Limited's Metal Box. A similar piece ends the album only with some sort of flute activity and a more confident guitar. If you skipped what come between these two tracks you might mistake it for some kind of half-assed but endearing jam session, maybe Amon Duul I trying to be Quicksilver Messenger Service....
The rest of the album is just plain freakish, slabs of sound that neither develop into anything nor connect to what precedes or follows. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that someone has put together from a dozen different puzzles - and on closer examination some of the pieces turn out not to be from jigsaw puzzles at all.
Springs twangs - or is it a detuned guitar? Interludes of two-fingered keyboard noodling that makes the piano tracks on the last Aphex Twin album sound like Liberace. The track titles hardly help. A female voice recites something over faint street sounds - fabulously atmospheric, actually, especially if you don't speak French. At the centre of the album is a single, unplaceable roar that goes on for at least six minutes and feels like it'll never end and probably causes brain damage no matter how quietly you play it. Is it a tape loop? Layers of barely human groaning or an industrial process? Does it change at all or are the metallic creaks and fluctuations some kind of audio-hallucination? More piano doodlings drop into the sudden silence at the end of this, awash in wobbly echo. Chanted gibberish. A blast of dirty reverb-drenched guitar noise that sounds like Link Wray's amplifier being kicked around a shipyard. Some sort of sackbutt freakout....
It's not recognizable as rock music, not even if you stretch your parameters to include the wackiest stuff around today or yesterday. And unlike many of the German bands of the early 70s who were chasing their own freaky vision of hard (American) electronic rock out into space or deep into their own acid-tweaked heads, the mostly unknown pioneers of avant guard 70s French rock - like Mahogany Brain, whose determination not to be able to play their instruments somehow gave them (in hindsight at least) a pristine, darkly poetic insouciance that made the Velvet Underground seem like Herman's Hermits - aspired to something that wasn't just anti-rock but flagrantly anti-music/non-music.
Whether this was born of a genuine revolutionary spirit or just to épater les bourgeois probably no longer matters. Se taire pour une femme trop belle, is, ultimately, even after trying to place it in historical, cultural or goddamn psychogeographical context, just too detached from anything recognizable for me to be able to venture an opinion as to whether it's good or bad, whether I'd recommend it even to the most curious, open-minded and least prone to violence of listeners. It just is, something a bunch of people decided ought to be recorded, and right now I love it more than any other album, if only for its bloodyminded audacity.
Rocket From The Tombs, "The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs" (Smog Veil SV37CD)
Considered as a murky slab of ur-punk history alone, this first legit/unlimited release of Rocket from the Tombs material has a prime place in every collection of American rock music that isn't purely ornamental. Formed in 1974, a time of bloated superstars and sensitive singer-songwriters, when rock first started to settle into its cosy role as the self-perpetuating soundtrack for harmless "youth" activities, Rocket From The Tombs lurched out of Cleveland and survived just long enough to play a few gigs and lay down a demo tape before splitting into the still thriving art-rockers Pere Ubu and thankfully forgotten sham-glam metal-punks the Dead Boys. That the embryonic components of these two bands could have cohabited for a year is pretty astonishing but the tension between them undoubtedly played a major part in what gave Rocket from the Tomb their full-on blaze of raw sonic intensity. With half the band into the stoned metallic excesses of Black Sabbath, Kiss and Alice Cooper, and the others into the art-from-noise experimentation of the Velvets and Stooges, and elements as disparate as Captain Beefheart and the New York Dolls coming in from who knew where, united only by a love of the raw. elemental power of hard electric rock, there was no-one to smooth the edges, keep the needles out of the red or think about finding a sympathetic record company. At odds with each other in a group that was at odds with the market, singing about self-destruction, alienation and all the other then unfashionable aspects of human darkness, it's surprising they managed even these primitive two-track recordings without exploding.
Aurally speaking, this is raw stuff and even old-time Guided By Voices and Sebadoh fans might be dismayed by the sound quality. I used to have the demo material that makes up the first half of this album on an n-th generation cassette tape back in the mid-80s and although it would barely make it through the deck without unraveling it didn't sound much worse than this. But the inexorable, vivid, overloaded energy of much of this music is so immediate it could have been recorded on a wax cylinder and would still deliver the fearless, near-epiphanic, fingers-in-the-mains-socket thrill of being alive that only the very best rock music can connect you to. It's a shame that you have to resort to being some sort of nerdy rock historian to appreciate something with the undiluted, visceral impact of this album, but there's little if any music of this kind around today, the dynamics and scope of hard rock having long since been appropriated and traduced by all manner of turning, hair-metal stadium chumps.....
You know, Molly Ivins doesn't write this sort of thing because she believes it....
09.03.02 - AUSTIN, Texas -- Excuse me: I don't want to be tacky or anything, but hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a "murderous dictator" is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy?
When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oilfield supply firm Halliburton, the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam Hussein, the evildoer "prepared to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists."
So if Saddam is "the world's worst leader," how come Cheney sold him the equipment to get his dilapidated oil fields up and running so he to could afford to build weapons of mass destruction? (more....)
...but because she's a Southerner and "Southerners overcompensate for the flaw of being Southern by abandoning all sense of reason and out-lefting anyone in sight." Another gem of wisdom from the Andrew Sullivan glee club.
While it's never too late to point out the multifarious crimes against music committed by men in leather trousers, it does seem a bit weird that PETA should be trying to get Judas Priest to change the title of their 1978 album, Hellbent for Leather to the more vegetarian friendly Hellbent for Pleather, using photographs of PETA’s 24-year-old Lisa Franzetta decked out in a black pleather "dominatrix" outfit at a biker rally as enticement. (Via No Rock&Roll Fun.)
A lapse in my usual frenzied posting there. Was going to do a blow-by-blow MTV Awards blog like about a million other bloggers did, but after failing to find the right words to encapsulate Jimmy Fallon's Billy Crystal "Frantic is Almost as Good as Funny" opening routine, Britney's addition of Nazi Dominatrix Barbi to her range, Michael Jackson's annual address to the people of Earth and the use of the phrase "singer/songwriter" to describe Jennifer Love Hewitt it didn't seem such an entertaining idea. (And neither did watching it.) We didn't go to Oatmeal for the Oatmeal Festival on Saturday because of car problems - instead of each component falling apart individually as before they've started attacking each other - in this case the water cooler tried to chew through the fan belt or something. Besides, like Britney in Miss Whiplash Lite leather gear, I'm sure an oatmeal festival is more fun to be imagined than experienced.
There was a disturbing beauty about her early singles, right from "Kids in America," such a perfect slice of that season's pop anomie that sounds even better now than it did then. Of all the pop that mixed sweetness with near apocalyptic unease around the start of the 80s, "Kids in America" was the finest, most spooked example. Sullen alienation was never such fun. "New York to East California/There's a new wave coming, I warn ya," might have been a silly lyric for an English girl, but it sounded like an otherworldy threat. That she looked like a porno version of a schoolgirl punk helped, but for three or four records Wilde was everything decades of would-be goth femme fatales have strived for, a Nico for the Smash Hits generation, putting songs that seemed to squirm in masochistic despair and neurosis at the top of the pop charts. Go read 
Time to brighten this blog up. More links to things of beauty and less gripes about twits, blowhards and hacks like Andr*w S*lliv*n. So I'll start with an old favourite, the online portfolio of 
