1. For those of you, like me, suffering from Marcello Carlin withdrawal, he can be found here, writing with typical astuteness, perception and openness about Pink Floyd's Live8 set. I have also discovered that his thoughts can be found from time to time in the comments box over at the popular Popular. (Mind you, some of us are still suffering from Ian Penman withdrawal. Every so often, just for the sheer futility of it, I click on over to The Pill Box just so that I can gaze once more upon those indelible words “NB: AEON VOID SHATTERS”.)
2. Out goes James Ellroy’s “The Cold Six Thousand” (which I cannot recommend highly enough; for whatever reason I took to this much more than I ever took to “American Tabloid”, even though at face value they are very similar in structure and in subject matter; but crikey it’s a monster of a book, 700-odd pages of sentences of seven words or less, not an adjective or adverb anywhere, nothing in the nature of descriptive scene-setting: it probably expands to a “normal” novel of a length far exceeding a thousand pages); in comes Philip Pullman’s “Northern Lights”, the first in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. This is being devoured extremely quickly; Pullman, leaving aside any views he may have on politics and/or religion and their place in what may or may not be “children’s literature”, he is a cracking storyteller, and it is impossible to put this book down. It’s particularly pleasing to think there are two more books to come.
3. We were wrong dept: I seem to have made the following mistakes (among many others).
(a) Some months ago I unthinkingly slighted a band called Joy Zipper, whom I had never at that stage even heard of, because Alexis Petridis, in the Guardian, had suggested that they were better than Yo La Tengo (nobody disses YLT in my presence and gets away with it). I have now heard a few songs that they have done and they do seem to have something going for them, noting in particular a terrific song called “Baby You Should Know”, which has a languid charm all its own (well, the ghost of My Bloody Valentine lurks, but where doesn't it?).
(b) I once flicked through a book called “Epileptic” by David B, at Minotaur bookshop in Melbourne, deciding that it was, and I quote, “Not the sort of thing I'm into”. Late last year my comic book pusher-man, Peter Birkemoe at the Beguiling in Canada, foisted upon me a copy of David B’s first book for Drawn and Quarterly, “Babel No 1”, which I devoured over Christmas at a cafe on the Geelong waterfront. Give me more, give me more.
(c) In a similar act of spectacular misjudgment, I passed on Mr Birkemoe’s earlier recommendation that I buy a book by Ron Rege Jr. At the time, I had a quick trawl around the Internet and didn’t take instantly to what little I found. (To quote from one of the memorable, but unnamed, characters from "Little Britain", "Computer says ... no".) Having now been exposed to his work at some length, thanks to the mini-comic attached to “McSweeney’s No 13”, a page of his work in “Kramer’s Ergot No 5”, and some of his stuff that I have latterly discovered lurking in the pages of the “Comix 2000” anthology, I am now Ron Rege Jr’s number one fan and would be proud to call him "dad".
4. It is nice to welcome back Gabba, although I am not entirely sure that too much democracy is necessarily a good thing. When the usernames after the songs were either "jk" or "krg" you knew where you stood. Now, it can feel a bit like having a total stranger coming up to you in the street and saying "drink this, it will change your life". At least two people have put up work of their own (at least they were honest enough to admit it). Still, free off-peak downloading allows one to discard the non-starters at little cost. (Also, some of the entries seem only to allow me to stream, not download, the track, but I assume this is something peculiar to the Macintosh?) And it's unfair to be critical of jk, who might just as easily have abandoned the entire project after the loss of his partner in crime. Better this Gabba than no Gabba at all, what?
