Just A Quick One Before We Go

There is not much left to do around here before we sign off for 2006. We should briefly mention three notable albums from this year which haven’t otherwise been mentioned around these parts:

Charlotte Gainsbourg, “5:55”.
Beach House, “Beach House”.
Peter, Bjorn and John, “Writer’s Block”.

We didn’t get too inspired by films this year, except for “Who Killed The Electric Car?”, and, of course, “Borat”; we read, in effect, no novels. We created a small vegie garden. We watched the boys move into new stages of their lives.

The only other duty is to say Thank You to all who click here from time to time. We do this for ourselves, as a kind of mental clearing house, but we also do it for you, as a way of maintaining some form of communication without confronting our fear of the telephone.

Stay safe.

A few words about "Coles Corner" by Richard Hawley

I finally got a chance to listen to “Coles Corner” by Richard Hawley. If you have ever found anything to love in, say, the first three Blackeyed Susans eps; Mick Harvey’s takes on Serge Gainsbourg; the Blue Nile; the first Lloyd Cole and the Commotions lp; Lee Hazlewood; Tex Perkins in introspective mode; Dave Graney ditto, then I am sure you will find something to love here, too; the above being not so much a list of names as a particular state of mind.

Och Aye The Noo: it's the October 2006 hypothetical mixtape

Miho Hatori, “Barracuda”: this first appeared to me as a stunning piece of video animation. Of course, I have long been very fond of Cibo Matto and, more recently, Miho’s work with Smokey Hormel and her vocals on the Baldwin Brothers’ sublime “Dream Girl” (swoon). Suffice to say, this song is no disappointment. She even, perhaps, nails the sense of updated tropicalia that Beck has been striving for, and makes it sound easy.

The Passions, “I’m In Love With A German Filmstar”: there is no way anyone can ever successfully argue against my firm conviction that this is, quite simply, the greatest song of all time. It never fails to take me back to where I was the first time I ever heard it: well, I actually have no idea where that was, but it at least brings to mind very clearly, and for once in a not negative way, the latter years of secondary school. And, for historical value, it totally nails a certain aspect of that post-punk sound.

King Tubby Meets The Aggrovators, “Dub Station”: the other thing I was listening to round about that time was Jamaican dub. There is good dub and bad dub (e.g. I never warmed to the more digital end of the spectrum, witness later Lee Perry, and much of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U-Sound stable). This, however, is clearly good dub although, unusually, it doesn’t start with the usual couple-of-drum-whacks-and-into-it: we get a full minute of mood and atmosphere before the rhythm section kicks in. Which kind of makes it a novelty, I suppose. But not a gimmick.

Donovan, “Season Of The Witch”: you can slice this number any which way and make it work. But you can also listen to it au naturel.

Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, “(Ghost) Riders In The Sky”: sometimes loud fast rules. I could have said “sometimes pleasure heads must burn”, but that would be stealing. Nor would it make much sense. This song demonstrates the literal meaning of the word “cowpunk”. I once imagined a thrash-metal/speedcore cover version of “The Sounds Of Silence” which, if actualised, might have been in a similar ballpark.

Feathers, “Old Cutler”: I have no idea what this is; or when; or where; or even why. But it has a beautiful horn bit two minutes in which I can’t resist.

Lindstrom, “The Contemporary Fix”: they call it Space Disco. That’s fine by me. What Lindstrom brings to the party is a sense of joyfulness, and some lovely chord changes. And just a hint of real people playing real instruments. What???

Regina Spektor, “Edit”: my reverse autobiography. “You can write but you can’t edit” as opposed to, in my case, “You can edit but you can’t write”. That hurts.

Minimum Chips, “Know You Too Well”: we don’t seem to listen to much Australian music any more. Whether that’s a factor of our advanced age, the way we acquire/hear new music these days, or living in the Nation’s Capital, which is, of course, devoid of any form of live entertainment now that Tilley’s seems to have lost interest, it’s difficult to tell. Min Chips are from Melbourne, like us, have been influenced by Stereolab, like us, and come across as quaintly homespun in all the best ways, like, um, us?

My Robot Friend, “One More Try”: cute; with Antony of the Johnstons on vocals. They say he is the new Nina Simone. I can’t hear it myself. More like the new early Bryan Ferry.

Vetiver and Hope Sandoval, “Angels’ Share”: hailing from the school of, say, Calexico, Iron & Wine, and others of a quietly acoustic and pastoral bent. This song in particular caught our attention on account of, well, I think you can guess why.

The Velvet Underground, “I’m Sticking With You”: Mo Tucker’s finest moment. Apart from every moment on each of the first three Velvet Underground albums.

“Hollaback Gun” (Commodores vs Gwen Stefani): it seems that “Hollaback Girl” can have anything mashed with it to mutual benefit. Not that it wasn’t a great song to begin with.

The Louvin Brothers, “The Christian Life”: these guys took vocal harmonies to the next level. Elvis Costello covered one of their songs on the underrated “Kojak Variety” (since when can an album featuring Marc Ribot be all bad?). Elvis may have suffered from identity fragmentation in recent years, but he has always had impeccable taste in music.

John Martyn, “Cool Tide”: I can’t actually make my mind up as to whether this is any good at all, but when you enter 12 minutes of slowly drifting John Martynisms, well, you are in a place beyond good-vs-evil anyway.

Ricardo Villalobos, “Fizheuer Zieheuer Part 1”: as previously mentioned on these pages. I love the fact that after 15 minutes it ends, roughly (in both senses), mid-beat. Well, where else could it have gone? (Onto the other side of the record, abruptly restarting as “Fizheuer Zieheuer Part 2”, of course.)

Curiouser and curiouser

Readers of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's "From Hell" will be amazed at the extraordinary coincidence (if coincidence it be ... dun dun DUNNNN) that, unless I misheard the radio this morning, the policeman in charge of investigating the latest round of English prostitute killings has the surname "Gull". Life imitates art imitates etc etc.

Seven And Seven Is

For me, the best thing about the Greatest Test Match Of All Time occurred while I was on the bus coming home from work. For some time now, the boys have been interested in the idea that you can score seven runs from one ball. I'm not even sure where they got the notion from; it hardly ever happens in real life. So we have talked about "hitting a seven" quite a bit.

When I got home, the boys ran to the door screaming "Somebody scored a seven!" In normal circumstances I wouldn't have believed it, but the way the wheels had fallen off the England jalopy that day, nothing would have surprised me. I only wish I could have seen it with my own eyes.

Come on Doctor Jim, what are you bidding?

Many eyes are on this.

As I said to someone else, this would appear to put the Velvet Underground on a par with John Lennon Memorabilia, notwithstanding that the Velvets presumably have sold a very small fraction of the number of records sold by the Beatles. (I have done no research whatever to back up that last statement.)

A few more words about "Ys" by Joanna Newsom

Here.

A few words about "Ys" by Joanna Newsom

Well, it’s a real spectacle, isn’t it? Everybody seems to have an opinion about this record, even (or perhaps especially?) people who haven’t heard it. Or maybe it is only those users of Internet message boards and weblog comments boxes. What is unfortunate, but seemingly inevitable, is that much of that discussion is of the nature of “If you don’t like this record you must be retarded” versus “This is a steaming pile of dung and only a cloth-eared idiot could possibly like it nyah nyah”. Either that, or grown men who should know better find themselves putting a week-old record in the same space reserved for cornerstones like “Astral Weeks” and “Horses”. In short, Joanna Newsom’s new album is a field of discourse distinguished by hyperbole and extreme opinions.

To like Joanna Newsom, first you have to have a Joanna Newsom Moment. Mine came when the Dirty Three, while guest-programming “Rage”, showed a clip of her playing “Sprout and the Bean” from her first album, a song which I had downloaded some months previously, listened to a couple of times, and put on the too-hard pile. But now I watched, transfixed, as the camera circled around this harp-playing waif, as she sang (about who knows what) above, around and beyond the music, which itself was mesmerising. I was hooked.

“Ys” appeared second-hand before me, and I suspect before it had actually been released (a review copy, I presume). Others whose opinions I respect enormously are not convinced. Marcello Carlin has shown his hand early. When, as he has promised, he writes down his reasons they will be cogent and compelling. I imagine that they will to some extent involve a negative comparison with remote corners of his own listening experience such as I have never ventured into, and possibly may not even have ever heard of. (I also predict he will see “Ys” as an affront to the Emily Haines album which, in any other year, would be generating the buzz that "Ys" has generated, but which instead seems to have sunk, unfairly, without much trace. But surely there is room for two albums in one year by gifted and thrilling female composers/performers. “Aerial” was more than enough for last year, admittedly, but in a sense that was two albums anyway.) Why am I speculating about this? Because I genuinely want him, and him in particular, to like this record, or at the very least not to dismiss it lightly.

Me? Well, it seems to me that this is a record beyond rational criticism. Words are not enough, not least because any words you throw at it are dwarfed, reduced to pale imitations of words, by her own finely wrought lyrics. I find that I am unable to have "Ys" on in the background, or even when other people are in the house. It must be mine, and mine alone, in a way that very few records must be: “Tilt”, perhaps. “Music For A New Society”. These are not being held up as same-shelf comparators, just records that work on me in similar ways. There are large swathes of the record that I just don’t get, that may not in fact be “gettable”. But then there are moments, fragments even, of such sudden and shocking beauty that I am so instantly overwhelmed that I must sit down lest I fall over.

As for the words, and this is an album of words, knitted together by dense passages of (frequently gorgeous) music (and I don't buy the argument that Van Dyke Parks has simply taken the money and provided by-numbers "Van Dyke Parks" arrangements; what he does here is just what he does, as was the case in his work on the Chills' sublime "Water Wolves"), well, for my purposes (and, with the possible exception of Dylan, and possibly even then, the words of a song can’t be separated from the song; meanings and so on are based not on what the words say but how they sound, in the same way that I extract “meaning” from, say, the sound of a Hammond B-3, or the echo chamber on a particularly solid dub plate, or the sound of a finger sliding along a steel guitar string; so what she is singing is at once the whole of the album and a small part of the album; I know that doesn’t make much sense, but I’m doing my best) they are close to perfect, whether you call them “poetry”, “lyrics”, or some other category, invented by and for this album alone. Sui generis.

Listening to a live (possibly solo) version of “Emily” I recently acquired, I was able to find the comparison that had eluded me: Captain Beefheart. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I think it works: it’s the way the words and music combine together in such a way that the listener is given no room to move; no breathing space; no respite. I don’t know if anybody else would agree with me, though. Agreement and “Ys” don’t seem to go together.

Arachnophobia

Our house is presently inundated by tiny red spiders. They look like little full-stops with legs. Because of their colour they are actually quite cute and cheerful, but I can see how you wouldn't want them to end up as plentiful as the dust mites in Miyazaki's "Totoro".

Stumps, Day Five

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Australia win the first test in England too?

Nevertheless, the past five days haven't augured well for England's chances. I suspect it may be time for the Full Monty.

By the way, there is nothing I could possibly write about this series that hasn't been said, or won't be said, much more authoritatively and eloquently by Gideon over at Cricinfo.

Stumps, Day Four

We are building a no-dig garden (it wasn't my idea). It involves alternating layers of straw and poo. In one bag of chook poo there was an intact egg. It weighed almost nothing. It was probably very old. I accidentally stuck the spade through it. It didn't just break; it went off with a BANG. This dark grey slimy substance oozed out of the egg, which was bad enough, but nowhere near as bad as the smell.

If you choose to find an analogy here with England's campaign to retain the Ashes thus far, well, that's up to you.

"Joke" of the Week

"Kim Beazley has congratulated Steve Bracks on his election victory."

Yes, but what did he call him?

Stumps, Day Three

A week is a long time in cricket.

This morning's Under Sevens saw the emergence of a new addition to the bowler's arsenal, unknown before the start of this test. Aimed in the general direction of second slip, this ball is called "The Harmison". It is a not infrequent delivery in the U-7s, but its coincidental appearance in the repertoire of a test-level fast bowler is somewhat surprising.

Stumps, Day Two

It's interesting how the start of a test series, and particularly the Ashes, brings with it a sudden urge for a man to grow a moustache, in deference to the great mustachioed Australian cricketers of the 1970s (and beyond - Boonie; Big Merv).

It is, obviously, an urge that must be stared down and defeated.

Stumps, Day One

Not wishing to be insensitive (but being insensitive anyway), but I can't help thinking that Marcus Trescothick had the right idea.

"We stagged our T3 shares"

How cool is it to say stuff like that? Makes me feel all kind of grown up, in an alpha-male never-actually-grew-up-at-all kind of way.

Doctor Robert

I wake up this morning and the radio is talking about Robert Altman. In the past tense. And another one is gone.

I probably haven't seen as many Altman films as you. And I'm no cinephile. I remember watching "Nashville" and thinking it was never going to end (and kind of hoping it wouldn't). I remember the loooooong tracking shot that led us into "The Player". I remember the unbelievable casting and performances in "Short Cuts", a film I was prejudiced against, until I saw it, on the spurious ground that Raymond Carver should not be messed with. And "Gosford Park" was, quite simply, perfect.

Who can take up the baton?

Workers' Playtime

So, what were you listening to in August 2006? Some of us were listening to this:

Eddie Fisher, “East St Louis Blues”: this borrows the whistle from the start of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”, then goes straight into a kind of slow blues funk, with some of that wukka-wukka guitar we all know and love.

Dwayne Sodahberk, “Whiskey Eyes”: this is backgrounded by a warm bed of glitched-about acoustic guitars, in the style, loosely, of Four Tet or perhaps the Books, but unlike Four Tet the sounds are in support of an actual song, and a real nice song at that.

Dom Um Romao, “Lamento Negro”: if you could imagine a mash-up of “Linus and Lucy” with something from Martin Denny’s “exotica” records, you would be somewhere in the ballpark of this track. A minute or so in, we are gifted a nice electric piano solo and, I dunno, some piccolos or something. And it even tails off with some more of that wukka-wukka (not to be confused with Fozzy Bear’s trademark “wokka wokka”). Anyway, it clears the cobwebs out of your tired brain. Downloaded, some time ago, from the we-can’t-thank-you-enough Bumrocks (link at right).

Jorge Ben and Toquinho, “Carolina Carol Bela”: perhaps the only song I can think of that might have enhanced the unenhanceable quality of the “Tropicalia” compilation, a CD that continues to run and run, at least at our house. Although time-wise I’m not sure if this fits in or perhaps slightly pre-dates that very time-specific movement.

Caetano Veloso, “London, London”: Veloso split the Brazil scene when it got dirty, but continued to make great records. If you substituted Van Morrison’s voice, this would sit quite comfortably on “Astral Weeks”, I reckon. (Sorry, purists.)

Nathalie Nordnes, “Join Me In The Park”: to which I can only respond, “Name the time and I’m there”. The most gorgeous pop song I have heard in a long time, perhaps forever. Enhanced, as all the best pop songs are, by the strongly accented English of the vocals.

Kelis, “Bossy (Alan Braxe and Fred Falke remix)”: hot off the broadband, this one. Braxe and Falke have done some great remixes and some that don’t do much for me. This one is clearly in the former category, perhaps not least because of the undeniable quality of the song on which it is based.

Moonbabies, “Arnold Layne”: this wouldn’t be a Farmer In The City hypothetical mixtape if it didn’t contain at least one cover. So here it is. In memory of Syd.

Judy Henske and Jerry Yester, “Raider”: there is something in this song, beyond the title itself as if that wasn’t enough, which makes me think that Kendra Smith must have been in some way influenced by this song when she put together “Five Ways of Disappearing”.

Madder Rose, “Car Song”: and speaking of Kendra Smith: with its post-Dream Syndicate guitar sounds, and a female voice, the obvious reference point here is Mazzy Star, or more likely its cruelly lesser-known precursor Opal. The sound here is a bit fuller, a bit more Indie Rock perhaps, but it gets away with it.

Pajo, “Who’s That Knocking”: Carl can watch a movie for, like, 15 times and still run from the room at the scary part, even though he knows exactly what’s coming, and how whatever it is resolves itself in a nice way (all children’s films must have a happy ending - except “The Empire Strikes Back”, which may or may not have been a children’s movie). Similarly, this song continues to get under my skin, to mesmerise and slightly wrong-foot me each time I hear it, even though I know what’s coming.

Low, “Transmission”: oh look, it’s another cover version. I generally run a mile from Joy Division covers, holding the originals, as I do, in a highness of esteem that is probably a bit unhealthy. But this Low-ification of one of their more uptempo (or, at least, aggressive) numbers takes it so far from its roots as to make it a brand new song, with its own (very different, but wonderful in its own way) dynamic.

Paul Revere and the Raiders, “I Hear A Voice”: which more or less leaves me speechless. A big, big song, heavy on the emotion and drama, cavernous piano, leavened by some rather lovely tapping on something like a marimba. In my ignorance I didn’t ever suspect a band with a name like Paul Revere and the Raiders of being capable of something like this.

The Sonics, “Have Love Will Travel”: as namechecked in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge”. (But then, who wasn't?)

The B-52s, “Mesopotamia”: the story that I heard was that David Byrne was enlisted to produce this record and they had a major falling out. Well, you couldn’t tell from the joyousness of this song, and the crispness of its sound. I should have acknowledged this for what it is years ago.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, “Red Frame/White Light”: from memory this was the first we knew of OMD. Didn’t radio DJs and television pop-show presenters make as much mileage as they could out of the band’s “weird” name? Those were much simpler times, those were.

Andreas Dorau and Die Marinas, “Fred Vom Jupiter”: the constantly amazing thing about trawling the internet for nuclear-weapon handbooks, erm, music, is the number of times a song can appear that you had long forgotten that it ever existed. Enter “Fred Vom Jupiter”, which was on very high rotation on 2JJ many a long year ago, and then disappeared from view. What I didn’t know was who was responsible for it, and it is curious that another Andreas Dorau track has coincidentally appeared on another one of these playlists. Just goes to show what good, or at least consistent, taste I have.

Das Bierbeben, “Hauser”: I hope “bierbeben” translates as “beer babies”, I really do. Okay, you all know I’m a sucker for breathy girl vocals, especially those hailing from Europe somewhere. This one sits atop a bed of dreamy electronica ...

Safe Home, “Dear Dusty”: ... whereas this one is more acoustically based. Just to mix things up a bit.

Lalo Schifrin, “Most Wanted Theme”: and to finish off, some 60s soundtrack sounds, suitable for framing, heh heh.

Friends

I have now lost two friends to cancer in the last 12 months. They say these things come in threes. So, if you were my friend, and I were you, I would be taking steps to sever that friendship. Just in case. Send all insults, taunts and fightin' words to the email address on the right-hand side of this page.

Thinking Outside The Box

Six-year-old: "Mum, how come you never finish your sentences?"

Mum: "I suppose I've got a lot on my mind most of the time."

Six-year-old: "I think it's because you have a vagina. That's like a big hole, and things probably fall out."

I Can Hear The Grass Grow

Well, I'm glad that's over. Seventeen straight days at work (long days, too) and still it was a race against the clock. But, like the Canadian Mounties, we always get our man.

On a not unrelated note, tonight I have been invited to dine with one of the ten most important people in Australia - at least according to the Financial Review. I can't help thinking I would be much more comfortable with one of the ten least important people in Australia. But then, it's not something you would get to do every day. Unless, that is, you happened to be married to him.

I just hope I don't pass the port in the wrong direction.

Hiatus

Good morning. As you know, here at Farmer In The City we strive to help you keep up with what's going down.

However, we also have bills to pay, and just at the moment our work has us in a headlock, a squirrel grip and a step-over toe-hold, and just won't let go.

Until next week.

Be strong.

Musical Notes

Clearing the decks, then:

So, LCD Soundsystem has put out a 45-minute “song”, financed by, and badged with, corporate money (viz., N*ke). Screams of “sell-out” have long been a rallying cry amongst the hipster cogniscenti, and they can be heard again now. First things first: it is a great track, designed to accompany the iPod generation on their jogging routine, but unlikely to be tested in that environment by me, given that I am now of the age where if I break out of a walk I can feel my man-boobs bouncing up and down, and I don’t even have man-boobs.

Ahem.

Patronage in the arts goes back hundreds of years, and you don’t see your average Renaissance painter being criticised for having taken “corporate” (or whatever it was then) bucks. I rather rashly formed the view, while on a visit to London 10 years ago, that advertising would be the dominant art form/medium of the 21st century (mainly on the strength of UK cinema ads, which were quite brilliant compared to anything seen in Australia), and promptly forgot all about it. But I think I may have been onto something. With the rise of the Internet we have seen “name” directors putting together tiny movies promoting (albeit loosely; remember we are now in the era where everything has to be soaked in “irony”) American Express and BMW. Locally, the cleverness of the “Flashbeer” ad and attendant campaign cannot be denied. (That is, if you don’t completely miss the point, as was the case for almost an entire table of people I was out to dinner with recently.) And I can’t see how doing something like this is necessarily any kind of compromise for an artist. James Murphy is one of the cleverest musical minds around, at least in terms of someone who has the uncanny ability to give you (i.e., me) exactly what you needed to hear even though you would never have realised it before he gave it to you. The offer to do a long track for jogging to would, I imagine, be just the kind of creative challenge he would have jumped to, no matter who was behind it. Unless the suits were in the control room holding a gun to the engineer’s head, it’s hard to imagine that his musical decision-making would have been any different whether he was doing it for himself or for corporate America (except for this: he would never in a million years have done something like this under his own steam, and that would have been our loss, not his). Anyway, as soon as you opt to release anything other than a home-made recording on a back-yard record label, you are most likely a cog, however small, in the big business machine. After all, in Australia the DFA catalogue is badged under the EMI moniker, hardly the last of the good old-fashioned steam-powered trains.

All of which is to say: the title, “45.33”, presumably echoes John Cage’s most well-known composition, while the cover art (and perhaps the concept behind the piece) brings to mind “E2-E4” by Manuel Gottsching. Which is very much in keeping with the LCD Soundsystem corporate strategy. Bitchin’.

Next!

Ricardo Villalobos is clearly mad. He looks mad. He does mad things. He djs for, like, six hours at a stretch. He puts out mad records. His last record, “Achso”, was almost more musique concrete than techno. And now there’s something called “Fizheuer Zieheuer”, part one of which I have had the opportunity to listen to. And it is not so much mad as completely fucking batshit crazy. (Sorry.) What you have is 15 minutes of counter-rhythmic percussion and echo-chamber dub, held together by a looped fragment of something that sounds Russian classical, “Peer Gynt” or some such, and occasionally something else of a similar vein but inna slightly more baroque stylee. It’s like a fast-paced fairground ride that you want to get off and yet at the same time you never want it to stop. And this is only Part 1?

Next!

Barbara Manning has always been slightly off my radar. The closest I got was Peter Jefferies’ version of “Scissors”, on his “Electricity” lp. This week I discovered that while she was in New Zealand she put together a record of seven songs with some of Dunedin’s rock royalty. This was cause enough for excitement, even without the added attraction that she brought with her messrs Burns and Convertino, a.k.a. the core of Calexico. Too good to be true, perhaps, but it is in fact true, not to mention extremely good. I never thought I would make another discovery as personally significant, in an I-can’t-believe-I-didn’t-know-this-existed sense, as Arthur Russell’s “Kiss Me Again”. And yet here, at the end of Barbara Manning’s “In New Zealand” album, lies perhaps the unsought-after-because-unknown Stan’s Holy Grail: “Aramoana”, a completely beautiful, spellbinding 11-minute pastoral instrumental featuring David Kilgour. Thank you, Barbara Manning, thank you.

Next!

And while we’re at it, we may as well do another This Goes With This. This time I imagine it is purely my own mind making dubious musical association between one song and another, but whenever I listen to “The Valleys” by Electrelane (a rather beguiling song which I like very much, the way it puts something like The Raincoats together with something like Kate and Anna McGarrigle [or maybe that’s The Roches] and comes up with something else entirely) there is a certain point at which what comes into my head is the bit in that song by Spacemen 3 (I don’t have time to dig it out in order to find the title, you will either know it from the description or this won’t mean diddly) which goes, I think, “well come on, don’t let it happen to you”.

Next!

Oh. That’s it.

Gosh it's ... Moomins

Has anybody ever been as excited about anything as I am about this?

Coming soon to a letterbox near, um, me.

Kids say the darnedest things department

Carl has pointed out that the vocals on "Golden Brown" by the Stranglers (yet another one of the Greatest Songs Of All Time) bear an uncanny resemblance to Ewan McGregor in the most recent of the "Star Wars" movies.

This Goes With That (one more time)

It has recently come to our attention that Ed Kuepper's mighty "The Way I Made You Feel" borrows quite liberally, and blatantly, and in a way that makes me feel that what Ed is doing is not "mere" appropriation (intentional or accidental) but, rather, genuine, honest homage, or a nod-and-wink "hello", from "Sunny Cellophane Sky", which appears at the end of Status Quo's "Messages From The Status Quo", a Quo album from way back in the days when they were not yet the Quo who produced enlightened lyrics along the lines of "Roll over lay down and let me in" and "Down down, deeper and down" (which latter was known to my father as "Down down, diddly down", which, I suppose, makes about as much sense, really).

What I Like

I like that there is an Australian motor-racing driver called Will Power.

I'll bet he's a winner (the reference here is to "Little Miss Sunshine", which I saw on Friday night and which was actually quite good in a low-budget, "quirky" Amerindie kind of way; the pageant at the end might have fallen into David Byrne "True Stories" territory [not good] if it wasn't for the magnificent awfulness of the host, who is kind of like Richard E Grant after a visit to Dr Frankenstein's surgery).

"Unspecified consequences"

So, the United Nations has said to North Korea, as far as I can gather, something like "If you do something that we don't want you to do and that we would have no way of knowing whether you have done it or not, we're going to do something but we're not going to say what it is".

As potentially diabolical as the North Korean "crisis" may be for the stability of an already pretty darn unstable world, I can't help thinking about this idea of "unspecified consequences" and what that might mean; and what comes to mind is the scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" where the French soldier is standing up on the battlements, railing against his English visitors, throwing at them such lines as "go and boil your bottoms", "your mother was a hamster", "your father smelled of elderberry", and the famous "I fart in your general direction".

Yes, I can see that as the kind of response that would have the Eternal Bosom of Hot Love quaking in his boots.

Broad Sweeping Statements Dept

Is it just me, or is "Robotboy" by Robyn the greatest pop song of the modern era (at least, as of today)?

(Actually, it could only be the greatest in a world where "join Me In The Park" by Nathalie Nordnes didn't exist.)

Be the last on your block

It has been pointed out to us (no it hasn't) that we have never linked to a YouTube clip.

Until now.

Watch in amazement as someonce called Stephen Colbert, whom we've never heard of (our loss, obviously), provides some "intelligent", "enlightened" comment about Zorn's Macarthur Foundation grant. No cheap shots.

(Thanks be to Sukrat for the tip-off.)

Sydney: at last it can be told

[Warning: contains ranting.]

We took the bus to Sydney. I figured it would be me, Adrienne, and a couple of old-age pensioners, and that would be it. I was wrong. The bus was packed. Maybe a story remains to be told: three young children, two in school uniforms, and their mother bought tickets while we were waiting. “We’re going on a holiday”, one of them said. “Mummy was in such a hurry that she didn’t even have time to pack any clothes.” And sure enough, there were no bags of any sort, even school bags. They caught the bus with us, and immediately vanished when we arrived at Central Station, in Sydney. I wonder where they are now.

Sydney. We walked to our hotel, on the edge of Hyde Park and near the top end of Oxford Street, and immediately had a sense, which you just don’t get in Canberra, of the huge waves of people that move into, out of, and around, the centre of the city at the start and end of a working day. I find it overwhelming. It takes me a couple of days to in any way adjust to the pace of the place. But this time, after a stay of four days and doing a sort of reverse commute, out of the city each morning and back into the city each afternoon, I finally felt back within my comfort zone.

Observation: as the world teeters, perhaps, on the crumbling edge of climate change of such magnitude that large numbers of species, including perhaps our own, are in immediate danger of extinction, it strikes me as strange, or perhaps it is just further evidence of the irreversible nature of this process and the impossible struggle “western” man would have to take even small steps to curb his rapacious destructiveness, that we now see, in a modern, “enlightened” city like Sydney, an astounding, overwhelming, and fundamentally new pattern of consumption of (a) bottled water and (b) take-away coffee. Both of these things seem to drive the city. We even saw, to our continuing amazement, groups of uniformed boys walking to school sucking on take-away coffee containers. Say what? I’m not so far away from being a schoolboy (okay, yes I am), and I am sure that coffee was one of the furthest things from any of our minds in those days. Alcohol, maybe. Drugs, maybe. Girls, certainly. But, coffee? We have, clearly, gone mad. J G Ballard was right all along. It’s not enough, I don’t think, to rely on the fact (if fact it be) of the recyclability of all these disposable containers. For a start, I would be sceptical of how many are in fact put out for recycling. My concern is, why these things? Why so many? Why now? Can we really be so stupid, so unaware? Maybe we are just selfish. In which case we will get what is coming to us. And you don’t need to be a person of religion to see this. [Speaking of which, someone I know said to me that someone they know said that she “doesn’t believe in global warming”. This, apparently, is a person of some intelligence, a person in the media, and they don’t “believe” in global warming. You might as well say you don’t “believe” in the laws of physics: when Ballard’s “The Drought” and “The Drowned World” combine into the final narrative of humankind, she will still go down with the rest of us. “Believe”. Huh.]

But we did have fun. Lots of fun. And we did consume (but not take-away coffee or bottled water). We found Gleebooks, which has the best children’s section I have ever seen; knowledgeable, too. They even had a Moomin book we didn’t know of, and we know a lot about Moomin books. We marvelled, as we always do, at Sydney’s physical beauty and stunning geography, its lushness. We fantasised about the sign we saw twice each day on our trips to and from the workshop we were there to attend, which invited us to “ALIGHT HERE FOR BEAUTIFUL BALLS HEAD”. Maybe next time.

We ate at Wagamama. Twice. (Ten years to the month since we previously dined at Wagamama, in London.)

We discovered Kinokuniya bookshop, which had an extraordinary range of graphic novels and suchlike. It even had Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls”, although I baulked at the price and anyway I’m not quite sure whether I’m quite ready to go there yet.

Bookshops being both the theme and the improvisation, we also managed a visit to Aerial and two visits to Berkelouws. The latter, we had been tipped to, has a lovely little cafe whence one can gaze down at the shenanigans along Oxford Street, and count the number of Mercedes Benzes driving past.

The four-day autism workshop which was the purpose of our trip (although we also felt no guilt about having a good time while the kids were farmed out to Canberra friends and neighbours) was held at a conference centre situated up an industrial side lane at Crow’s Nest. As a child I often wondered what would be at Crow’s Nest (well, obviously it would involve pirates), a name which inevitably appeared as the postal address at the bottom of those ads on the back pages of comic books, the ones that tried to sell you (and tended to succeed in my case) bags of stamps from the world over (but especially, it seemed, from countries like “Magyar Posta” and “CCCP”, they all sounded pretty exotic, really, to a boy from Fish Creek). We also, coincidentally, saw an ad on SBS one night, back in our hotel room, which carried a Crow’s Nest postal address. That must be some post office.

Record shopping? I actually ran out of steam after some hard days’ workshopping, but I did drop into Birdland Records, located upstairs somewhere on Pitt Street adjacent to a monorail station, where I had hoped to find some Zorn, and in fact found in the vicinity of 250 Zorn and related CDs, many of which I would, in an ideal world, “need”, but only three of which I could take home. It was a not-quite-arbitrary choice: the Masada pieces are what I keep coming back to, and it was nice to find two of the 50th-birthday discs, by the Masada String Trio and the wickedly awesome (or awesomely wicked) Electric Masada “downtown supergroup”, along with another of the live quartet recordings, this one a two-disc set recorded in Taipei, of all places. It is bound not to have the intensity of “Tonic 2001” but perhaps given the beatnik obscurity of the venue I am expecting, and anticipating, a good amount of testing and experimentation. I may, of course, be disappointed. [Postscript: initially disappointed by the sound quality, most un-Zorn-like, but once you get through that barrier you can see why it had to be released: they sound unusually relaxed and playful, taking familiar Masada pieces in unexpected directions and bringing some less commonly played pieces out for an airing.]

The bus back to Canberra was equally packed, and was also half an hour late on account of Sydney Friday peak-hour traffic, so the boys, although they were (and in Jules’s case almost apoplectically) excited to see us, were also pretty damn tired and happy just to climb into their own beds (but not without demanding to see what we had brought back for them first).

And we also learned a lot, although I found the entire “conference lifestyle” experience a bit, well, quite, actually, disconcerting, like being hermetically sealed away from the rest of the world, even from the elements. Which I suppose is the point. (Those who stayed at the “recommended accommodation” nearby, and who were bussed to and from the workshop each day, must have found it even more surreal; at least we were able to suffuse ourselves into the life of the city during the after hours.) But I am glad to have had the experience, and to have done what we did. We met a lot of nice people from all over Australia, all of whom share the common bond (and it is incredibly strong, actually) of having to live with a child with autism. We are very optimistic that some good will come from the experience. Either that or we will immediately fall back into our bad, counter-productive habits and self-imposed isolation ...

This goes with that

The ongoing series that refuses to die.

Today:

"20th Century Boy" by T Rex goes with a song which may or may not be called "Revolution (Time Is Now)" by Leroy Sibbles (Wackies), well at least the "20th century boy / I wanna be your toy" bit does.

Next up, in the red corner, we have the bass line in "Bright Neon Payphone" by Cut Copy, which sounds mighty like the bass line in Devo's "Mongoloid". Other parts of it sound mighty like New Order's "Age of Consent". None of which is a bad thing. And, obviously, we're not saying anything here, we're just like, uh, y'know, saying.

And while we're on the subject, there are echoes of New Order's "Temptation" in "Alive Until Saturday Night", a fine pop song by Hexes and Ohs. Whoever thought the influence of New Order would have spread so far?

Taking a step off to one side for a minute, we might also point out that we recently had a listen to Justus Kohncke's "Shelter", in which the usually reliable German (we assume) minimalist dance/electronica exponent takes the opening four bars of "Gimme Shelter" (which constitute the best thing the Rolling Stones ever did) and does, well, not much at all with them, really. Which is a bit disappointing because the premise is at once brilliant and impeccable.

How to win hearts and minds

I'm not sure that there isn't a better way than this.

Three Feet High And Rising

Three best opening chapters:

Martin Amis, "Other People".

Don DeLillo, "Underworld".

Ian McEwan, "Enduring Love".

All I Ever Wanted

... was my morning cup of coffee.

I went to the cupboard.

The cupboard was bare.

I got ready for work early and caught the 8am express bus that drops me off near the National Library, which, until recently, made coffee as good as anywhere in Canberra, but now Jeremy doesn't seem to be working the machine it has gone off somewhat.

I had to wait 10 minutes for the Library's cafe to open.

I sat near a lady with a baby.

The baby made a sound somewhat akin to an elongated "splat".

There arose a smell which overwhelmed the size of the Library foyer and the air conditioning system.

But I wanted coffee.

One of the cafe staff unlocked the door of the cafe and announced that the machine was broken.

There would be no coffee.

I walked to work, a thick black cloud of blackness hovering somewhere above my head.

All I ever wanted was my morning cup of coffee.

The many moods of Yo La Tengo

If you catch a fish, cut it open, and examine its guts, you can tell what it had for dinner. But it is still a fish. If you trawl through the entrails of a Yo La Tengo album, you can tell what music they have been digesting, but what you are listening to is still a Yo La Tengo album.

And so it is with “I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass”, the nicely titled, nicely adorned (cover art by our man Gary Panter) new YLT long player. A cursory first listen, under suboptimal conditions, reveals the following ingredients:

Stereolab circa “Lo Boob Oscillator”

mid-80s Prince

John Cale’s “Paris 1919”

Brian Eno, with and/or without Harold Budd

“Sea Breezes” by Roxy Music

some Ramones

The Byrds of “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” vintage

The Clean, solo David Kilgour and any number of vintage Flying Nun recordings from the late 80s

and I suppose we might as well acknowledge the Velvet Underground, although they are perhaps more in the nature of DNA than influence these days.

Other ears will, no doubt, hear other things.

The other thing about Yo La Tengo is that they care nothing about sequencing their albums, setting and maintaining a mood, and all those other things that lesser beings put effort into. And it works in their favour: YLT records aren’t so much albums as collections of songs, and songs is what they are good at. (Except, their best album, “And then nothing turned itself inside-out”, is in fact an extended mood piece in which all the tracks do hang together and feed off each other - thus does the critic successfully puncture his own argument.)

You want another thing? Song length. Whether it’s two minutes or twelve, a Yo La Tengo song takes just the right amount of time. I’m not sure how they do that. The new album is bookended by 10-minute-plus workouts, and I can’t imagine anyone else being able to get away with this without causing me to look at my watch at least once or twice.

I must admit, I had been developing a sense that Yo La Tengo may have been falling into a kind of elder-statespersons pattern of releasing fairly uniformly “tasteful” albums every couple of years, punctuated by one-off releases as an outlet for their more experimental, uh, experiments, kind of in the way Sonic Youth have latterly operated. I was a fool.

Generals and Majors

We don't know this Macarthur fellow from squididdly, but we are amazed, and delighted, that he has decided to send John Zorn a cheque for $100,000 annually for the next five years (that's American dollars, which these days equates to roughly twenty squidillion of the Australian variety). That is going to put a little excitement into trips to the post office.

What will Zorn do with the money? For one thing, he could put it towards making Tzadik discs a bit less expensive. In Sydney I handed over $110 for three Zorn discs. Admittedly one was a double, but still.

I'm not sure he could put it towards increasing his already phenomenal work rate, but if he did, we would have to mortgage the dog. Wait, we don't have a dog. Can you mortgage children?

(A couple of years ago Macarthur made one of these grants to Ben Katchor. He is obviously a man of good taste and distinction.)

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, Iran may be on the nuclear precipice, George W Bush may be President for two more years, global warming may be almost upon us, Iraq may be in civil war, millions of people the world over may be sick and/or starving, but ...

Seth is in the New York Times.

... and the winner is ...

I have been putting together a weblog entry (albeit entirely in my head) involving Doctor Jim, and specifically how hearing for the first time, recently, the aural assault of the opening bars of "At The Mountains Of Madness", John Zorn's latest Masada-related star vehicle, put me in mind of an afternoon I spent, a long time ago in a batchelorhood far far away, at Jim's pad being bludgeoned by Zorn's "Spy vs Spy" and Big Black's "[sound of impact]" live bootleg.

So there I was thinking about this on Saturday afternoon, and playing around with the idea that for some time Jim and I were able to push each other in the direction of musics we hadn't otherwise considered or been aware of, and why he kept heading towards the outer limits while I turned back, when a familiar yet mysterious voice said to me, over the telephone, "You should watch tonight's 'RocKwiz'".

So I did. "RocKwiz" is SBS's superior music trivia show, hosted by the lovely, sharp and irrepressible Julie Zemiro, and including as contestants two actual musicians and four mugs from the audience. Doctor Jim was one of those mugs on Saturday night. And his was a sterling performance. It is possible that a couple of clangers (no, Jim, Boney M were not, in this or any other alternative universe, responsible for "Take Me To The River") were caused by some errant coaching from his celebrity teammate Kate Ceberano, or by nerves. But for the most part his approach of Hit the Buzzer First, Think Later paid off. His non-verbal communication skills came to the fore when giving the answer "Chris De Burgh".

Jim, you did us proud. In fact, I can say with some certainty that yours was the best (a description in no way diminished by the fact that it is also the only) performance on a television quiz show by someone of my acquaintance since the night that Ian Woolley wiped the floor with all comers on "Sale of the Century", only to do the completely unheard of and take the prizes and run, rather than come back the next night in search of more loot.

The one thing I would like to know, though, is the identity of the Doctor Jim Fan Club who were cheering him on throughout the show. Of course, we were cheering right along with them.

Where Have They Been?

So it's the "9/11" edition of the New Yorker, and they have rolled out most of the heavy hitters. This goes a long way to explaining, and excusing, the unbearable lightness of the bulk of the last few issues (although the recent piece on feudin' mathematicians was a fascinating window into a world most of us never see). Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Goldberg, Lawrence Wright, George Packer: all have valuable insights into everything that has gone wrong in the last five years. (No Jon Lee Anderson, but he is excused, having filed at length recently from both Lebanon and Cuba.)

But the most amazing thing about this issue is the fiction, which is written by Cate Kennedy: man, I know Cate Kennedy. She was at one time the other half of a friend of mine from University, Phil Larwill (who in turn is a cousin of the artist David Larwill, one of whose screenprints hangs on our living room wall). Cate and Phil decamped to Mexico for a couple of years, from where they sent some very funny, and interesting, letters and emails, and Cate eventually wrote a book about those times (something I had tossed around in my mind as a possible publishing venture, although I never communicated that to them). We gave a copy of that book to Adrienne's mum, who herself had spent some time knocking around in Mexico in her youth.

Remarkably, this is the fourth appearance in the New Yorker of someone I know. John Adamson, brother of my very very very good friend Marcelle (who now lives much too far away, in London), was quoted in a profile of the then up-and-coming historian Niall Ferguson. Tim Klingender, whom I also knew at University, featured in a piece on Aboriginal art. And there was once a full-page ad for a book by Angus Trumble (and, as we all knew, if you removed the "GT" from "Angus Trumble" you got "Anus Rumble" - oh those crazy undergraduate days).

So anyway, Cate, wherever you are, very well done. I look forward to your forthcoming book.

"Stealing in the name of the Lord"

If you had an Internet connection, were sentient, and had sufficiently poor grasp on what are the important things in life, you, too, could have constructed the following mix tape (June 2006 edition):

Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”: is this the greatest radio song ever? Well, I can’t think of anything that would best it. It is almost as if the greatest pop moments of the last, what, 40 years had been absorbed into this one definitive three-minute perfect storm. It could have been made at any time over those 40 years and not have seemed out of place. I am not worthy.

Go Home Productions, “Papa Was A Clock (The Temptations vs Coldplay)”: perhaps not so surprising that the only song that could credibly hold its own with “Crazy” is something that doesn’t quite exist. We don’t much care for Coldplay, but by taking out those vocals and replacing them with one of the all-time greats you actually end up with something little short of wonderful.

Devo, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: it’s funny, but the last two songs for some reason make me think of “Bittersweet Symphony”, which makes me think of the Rolling Stones, and how they went the corporate heavy over that song’s use of ... well, you know the story. So why not follow up with this Devolution of the Rolling Stones, featuring the most counterintuitive drumming known to man.

Bobby Bland, “Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City”: and if we’re going to hate, we may as well play a song about no love.

Martin and the Moondogs, “Tropical Loveland”: and if there ain’t no love in the city, we may as well heed the call of Martin Phillips to choof off to his tropical loveland. (If you thought it was the height of “irony” for Abba to record a song about a tropical paradise, how about having that song covered by a bunch of reprobates from Dunedin, which may be as far from paradise as it is possible to get (geographically speaking only).) From an album of Abba songs covered by sundry New Zealand luminaries.

The Gist, “Love At First Sight”: and if you went to a tropical loveland you may find “love at first sight”. This, if I remember rightly, was Stuart Moxham’s first foray into the solo world post-Young Marble Giants. I have the album, “Embrace The Herd”, tucked away somewhere in my collection, unlistened to for many years. I have to say, hearing this song in the early 21st century gives me the odd sensation that I may have obtained my copy 23 years before its actual recording. It sounds in no way dated. Did Richard Thompson play on the album? That is something I will have to look into.

The Marine Girls, “A Place In The Sun”: I think we’ve taken the thematic approach way far enough for now, and it would have been too obvious to connect “a place in the sun” with a “tropical loveland”. So we won’t. What we will do, however, is point out the absurdity that Carl, the eight-year-old, has developed an obsession with this song, and has most likely listened to it more times in the last few weeks than the total number of times it was listened to by the total number of people who listened to it when it first came out. We can’t work out what he hears in it; it has no big air-guitar moments or dancefloor potential. He’s a good boy.

Hydroplane, “We Crossed The Atlantic”: full disclosure - Bart is one of the nicest people we know. And my mum knew Andrew’s mum when they were girls. None of which detracts from the indisputable fact that this song, this beautiful drifting thing, can, and does, more than stand on its own two feet. As featured (if I remember rightly) on John Peel’s Festive Fifty.

Ulrich Schnauss, “Suddenly The Trees Are Giving Way”: shimmering electronic beauty from somewhere in Europe from the recent past; and yet it follows on nicely from Hydroplane, adding to the sense of drift one of those simple drum patterns that Hydroplane used on some of their more (relatively) kinetic numbers.

Ratata, “Liv Utan Spanning”: bring your own umlauts. I bet you didn’t know there was a Scandinavian Ultravox.

Shimura Curves, “I Am Not Afraid”: this slice of gorgeously brittle pop has, buried in it, a nice trace of vintage Flying Nun. (The Dunedin sound is cropping up everywhere these days; viz. the latest Mojave 3 album.) There is a guitar line in here, too, that I’m sure I’ve heard somewhere before, which is driving me nuts.

Seelenluft, “I Come Along (Joakim Dub)”: I’m not quite sure why I chose to single this out from the seemingly endless parade of good electronic music coming out of Europe, but in terms of the sounds employed it cannot be faulted.

The Others, “I Can’t Stand This Love, Goodbye”: from the jungle (heh) to the garage, this comes from the Nuggets school of do-it-yourself proto-punk, and is as infectious as all heck.

Los Impalas, “Love Grows A Flower”: a slower, slightly trippier version of the above, the result, no doubt, of ingestion of the appropriate substances. If songs like this had been better received in their day, there would have been no need for progressive rock to have been invented; but then, there would have been no need for the jams to be kicked out by punkers either, so lets not go there.

The Master’s Apprentices, “Rio De Camero”: and some home-grown homegrown, if you know what I mean.

The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset”: it is too easy to take the existence of a song like this for granted and never really listen to it. I did the same thing with “Ride A White Swan”. My bad. There may be no better evocation of a particular time and place.

Jeremy Warmsley, “5 Verses (demo)”: okay, it may be cheap, but believe me it’s not nasty, to play this after the Kinks, who are an obvious reference point for this gorgeous slice of English pop; fashioned, it seems, by the human voice, understated post-punk-era guitar, cheap keyboards, and a seriously over-amped drum machine.

Mulatu Astatqe, “Mulatu”: fresh from his uncovering by Jim Jarmusch in his beautiful most recent film, “Broken Flowers”. It is easy to understand Jarmusch’s love for this guy: his music is entirely simple, charming and uplifting.

Dandolo, “Fire Breathing (Shit Robot Remix)”: which amounts, in essence, to one goddamn propulsive bass-line repeated ad infinitum or until the bass player’s fingers fall off. But what a bass-line. And with just the right amount of bleeps and washes threading under, around and over the top of it. What will they think of next?


Well, that's it for now. We're off to Sydney, sans kids, for the week to learn how to make our home, and perhaps the world, comfortable and inviting for an eight-year-old on the autism spectrum. Plus, I have a brand new credit card and an expectation of bringing home more than a little John Zorn product.

Trees and Flowers

"Mum, I'm going to sketch the blossoms."

[A few minutes pass.]

"Mum, can you stop the trees from moving?"

climb every mountain

I once made a vow that I would, one day, listen to "Sandinista" in its entirety. Even fans of the Clash told me I was mad. But I never lost sight of my dream.

And now I have done it.

The lesson here is, I think, just because you are in a position to force your record company to let you put out a low-price triple-album set, that doesn't mean it is actually a good idea.

Space-capades

We are, of course, sad for Pluto. It is always difficult to discover that something you took for granted as Immutable Fact is in fact nothing but a human construct, liable to be pulled from under your feet at any moment. Of course, the lump of rock is still there, it is still known as “Pluto”, but apparently it no longer justifies the title of “planet”. The given reasons for the change are entirely understandable (although I did like the idea of having a planet called “Xena”, but that’s another story), but it is going to take some getting used to.

What concerns me most is, how are today’s children going to learn the names of the planets and their order from the sun?

When I was at school, it was this easy:

My (Mercury)
Very (Venus)
Easy (Earth)
Method (Mars)
Says (Saturn)
Just (Jupiter)
Use (Uranus)
Nine (Neptune)
Planets (Pluto)

But now we find ourselves in a galaxy that is mnemonically challenged. You can’t just omit the “P” because the “Nine” makes no sense now there are only eight. Unless they change Neptune to a name beginning with “E”, which ain’t gonna happen, I fear we are doomed.

I suppose you could change it to, say, “My Very Evil Mother Says Jump Up Now”, but the beauty of the one I knew was that the mnemonic itself, in a kind of pre-post-modern way, contained the answer to the problem; I think it would be a struggle to come up with something that isn’t just completely random nonsense.

Oh the times we live in.

This Goes With That

The latest in a hitherto dormant, but continuing, series.

A few days ago 1,618 offered up "Genetic Engineering" by Orchestral Manouvres In The Dark, a song I haven't heard since at some point in my extended youth. What strikes me now, and didn't then, is the debt this song owed to the first two "pop" albums by Brian Eno, right down to the rhythmic structure, the crunching guitars, even the vocal delivery. And all cunningly disguised as an electro-pop frippery.

The listening post

Young people often ask me, “Stan, what have you been listening to lately?” Actually that’s not true, but it’s a good excuse to put down a few words about some things that have captured my attention of late. I should say, though, before we start, that, notwithstanding what David Byrne once intoned, first impressions are not always correct.

There has been a quartet of “electronic” releases over the last few months that have grabbed my attention and not let go. First is Tiga’s “Sexor”, which comprises good-natured and gentle sleaze, Canadian-style, atop a musical bed that could have been made in those golden days of the early 1980s and is all the better for it. The others, which I kind of lump together out of ignorance, although each one probably occupies a different sub-genre if you are “hip” to the “jive”, are “Orchestra of Bubbles” by Ellen Allien and Apparat (which has a certain warmth and charm, unusual for electronic music outside of Kraftwerk, and which may be the result of having a woman at the controls), “We Are Monster” by Isolee, which I have been previously restricted to hearing in isolated snatches, but which works much better as a unit, and the new CD by The Knife, “Silent Shout”, almost on the strength of the sounds it tosses up (check those marbles on “Marble House”, I have never heard anything quite like them and don’t expect I ever will again), but also on the strength of that voice (which I once described to Adrienne as being like a cross between Kate Bush and Bjork, a description I am quite proud of even if it might be totally wrong).

Then there is the imaginatively titled “Espers II” by Espers, which grabs me in a very special place reserved for records that don’t quite fit any particular mould but which are nevertheless clearly drawing from traditions that mean a lot to me. Espers seem to be lumped in, for convenience (as is always the case with lumping in), with the “freak folk” gang, the likes of Devendra Banhart and what have you, lots of guys with unruly hair and unhygienic-seeming beards, you know the sort (and what about the afro on that guy from TV On The Radio, whose new album has kind of left me feeling a little bit underwhelmed after all the hype, although, as with Belle and Sebastian’s “The Life Pursuit”, it may be a delayed-onset experience). Anyway the Espers disc is probably my little bit of excitement for 2006, in the same way M Ward and Gillian Welch have been previously, which is high praise I know, and I may regret it later, but that’s what blogging is all about. (And on a not unrelated note the self-titled record by Brightblack Morning Light is not half bad, either; likewise the latest from Six Organs of Admittance.)

(And I was a bit scared by what I had read about the new Sonic Youth, but having finally given in, I like what I am hearing. Have they mellowed? Have I? I suspect that all that has happened is that we have all gotten used to the Sonic Youth sound, and that if you put anything off “Rather Ripped” up against actual “classic rock radio” the punters would still run a mile with their hands over their ears. Still, since when has the most fitting adjective to describe SY been “nice”?)

Adrienne and I have, in the last few years, got into a bit of a habit of buying each other, for birthdays etc, books or CDs that we would like to read/hear ourselves. So the person who buys the present ends up monopolising it, and the person who receives the present never sets eyes on it again. (Leaving aside the infamous Three-Tiered Bean Sprouter Incident of 1989, which will never be spoken of again. Except by Adrienne, whenever she feels like twisting the knife just that little bit further.) Anyway, it all kind of backfired (but in a good way) this year when I used mother’s day as an excuse to acquire the “Tropicalia” compilation on Soul Jazz (home of the wonderful “Reggae Disco” set, “The World of Arthur Russell”, and a few thousand Studio 1 compilations). It dug its hooks into her straight away, and has barely been out of the car stereo since. Which is bad for me, because I almost never get to use the car. From what I have heard, however, it would be difficult to stitch together a better, or - crucially - more enjoyable, representation of a "scene".

Meanwhile there have been Bob Dylan’s radio shows, and a whole slew of old reggae plates and reissues have been turning up on the internet, which it is hard to say “no” to. And then there’s Zorn, about which, a bit more a bit later.

From our political correspondent

ITEM!

A ten-year-old boy of our acquaintance recently spent the day with a friend of his, following his friend’s father, who works for one of the television channels, around Parliament House in Canberra. Somewhere in the endless warren of corridors they had a chance meeting with Mr Howard, our Prime Minister. Ever the consummate politician, he took some time to talk to the boys and foster their interest in politics (and maybe secure their votes for his party one day in the future). Debriefing later, the ten-year-old, when asked his impression of Mr Howard, said, “He’s very loud.”

ITEM!

Reading a piece by David Cole in the New York Review of Books about the ramifications of the US Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case, I came across a sentence that was at once beautifully understated, and horrifying (horrifying in the sense that you could never have imagined, five years ago, a situation in which such a sentence would ever need to be written):

“And it is quite possible that [US] government officials might actually decide not to commit war crimes - now that they know they are war crimes - even if prosecution is unlikely.”

Urgent update

Folks should head right across to Moistworks (link at right) and download "Who's That Knocking", a new song by Pajo (him of Tortoise "fame") which is, quite simply, incredible. What's with the rhythmic structure of this thing? The drums are strictly four on the floor (or three in some places) while the rest of it gets a little funky so that the whole thing is just slightly disconcertingly out of whack. But it's a thing of beauty, and probably the first song I've heard to make me take a sudden step backwards, "woah" style, since I first laid ears on the Junior Boys. You download 100 songs and hear something like this, it's worth it.

Gravity's Angel

Looks like it's Pynchon time again.

The facts on the ground

It was an almost warm afternoon, slightly muggy on account of a light rain that had fallen a couple of hours prior. I had obtained a ticket-of-leave from work in order to pay my nice Vietnamese barber a long-overdue visit. Beck had been playing on the car stereo, but he made way for Belle and Sebastian. Coffee was taken at Silo, in the company of a recent New Yorker, in which Alex Ross (link at right) attempts to listen to the complete works of Mozart. Silo is nice in the afternoon, it has emptied out by then and you can take in the ambience of the room itself, although the bread has invariably sold out long before. I had given up all hope of finding the new CD by The Necks, "Chemist", having scoured the record stores of Civic on the weekend to no avail (all likely establishments had had it, and had sold out: good news for The Necks, bad news for me). Something made me think of Abels, in Manuka. Well, I was on the road anyway. There I found what I was looking for, at something above the recommended retail price, I'm sure, but what can you do?

I walked past a handwritten menu board outside an Asian restaurant which contained the words "Pe...king duck", where a mystery third letter had been obliterated from the word "Peking". I wonder what it might have been: "Peaking duck", perhaps? Or "Peeking duck"? Something in me hopes that it had said "Pecking duck", but I very much doubt it.

Much later, "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" came up on iTunes, and for a few moments everything was right with the world.

The story of underpants

[Have been neglecting you guys lately. Apologies. Here's one I have been putting together over a long period.]



Whoever invented y-fronts must have had a cast-iron bladder. White undies, bog catchers, boston stranglers – call them what you will, they certainly don’t allow for any activity that is not tightly choreographed and premeditated.

(I would also like to have explained to me the distinction between “boxer” and “jockey” shorts. The two professions, as far as I am aware, make up a fairly small proportion of the overall male population – wouldn’t it make more sense to label them, say, “builders” and “accountants” shorts (although which would be which I could not say)? And what of that curious anomaly, the Jockette - a word that, or maybe this is just me, has certain feminine connotations, even though the Jockette is unequivocally a male undergarment.)

I managed to survive most of my primary school years wearing plain and structurally sound white underpants, the new coloured and skimpy variety - “jocks” by name - not arriving at Fish Creek until somewhere around the time that I was in grade five, by which point the Whitlam revolution was in full swing at our school (but that’s another story).

In the pre-jocks era, we boys were entirely comfortable and relaxed exposing our white undies on social occasions such as the changing rooms at the Foster Swimming Pool, or visits by the travelling school doctor. The principal source of underwear-derived embarrassment in those days was the existence and magnitude of brown skidmarks.

The obvious advantage of these newfangled coloured underpants was that they successfully camouflaged all but the nastiest cases of skidmarks – especially with brown being such a popular 1970s colour. However, the sudden appearance of choice in the underwear racks allowed, inevitably, for entirely new opportunities for social stratification, and ostracism, in the playground. The ongoing battle between the haves and the have-nots moved from footy cards and yo-yos to underwear.

This was particularly difficult for me. I grew up in relative isolation as an only child on a farm. My parents remained deeply scarred by the Great Depression and held firm in their resistance to my increasingly desperate pleas to be allowed to have a couple of pairs of coloured undies. My aversion to water can probably be traced back to traumatic experiences in the boys’ changing rooms during this difficult period (although it could also have something to do with the fact that I never quite got the hang of swimming, and, because I have been seriously short-sighted since I was five years old, never quite knew, in that pre-goggles era, where anything else was when I was in the water).

My crazy cousins who lived in Melbourne, and were therefore a few steps closer to what was fashionable than I would ever be, eventually came to the rescue, giving me a pair of black-and-white paisley jocks for Christmas. (I suppose mum could have had a bit of involvement in that, come to think of it.) My general demeanour must have instantly lifted, because the floodgates opened up and, before too long, I was also the proud owner of matching brown and green pairs, designed in a kind of late abstract-expressionist style.

And so it came to pass that I was able to go on the Fish Creek Primary School grade six camp, the undoubted highlight of the primary school years but which I had previously been facing with underpants-related trepidation, with some confidence. This camp, a five-day affair, took us to Phillip Island (about an hour’s drive away), where we stayed at the exotically named Island Bay Ranch. This turned out to be a kind of Wild West theme park, where we slept in covered wagons arranged in a circle, ate at long tables in a log cabin, and engaged in activities such as archery (heavily supervised, for obvious reasons), a flying fox (not for me, thanks), mucking about on inflated inner tubes in a dam, and hay-rides (the latter being particularly underwhelming for our group, given that most of us lived on farms, where “hay-rides” meant work). We even took a boat trip out to something called Churchill Island, where absolutely nothing awaited us, although I guess it filled up another half a day of “activities”.

Even though I was by now a fully fledged member of the coloured-underpants set, and therefore “okay”, the absence of older brothers in my life meant that I was deemed not quite “in” enough to be allowed into the tight circle around Tim Farrell, who had brought along his older brother Jonathan’s cassette tape of the first Skyhooks album, “Living In The 70s”. I was, however, accepted as a proud member of the massed air-guitar ensemble that, at the traditional “student entertainment” on our last night, performed a highly animated mime (Countdown-style) to The Sweet’s “Fox On The Run”.

Towards the end of the week, just when the teachers had begun to relax a little on the basis that we had all been reasonably well behaved, and therefore would all go home unscathed (physically, at least), Peter Napier poured himself a glass of what looked like green cordial but which soon revealed itself, as he began frothing at the mouth, to be dishwashing liquid. Several rounds of induced vomiting later, he seemed to be okay, but a number of us followed him around for a while, in the hope that other unusual symptoms might start to reveal themselves. We were, sadly, disappointed (which, in hindsight, was probably for the best).

Anyway – underpants. Having secured himself a fairly discreet spot on a top bunk in the back corner of one of the covered wagons, Justin Heyne (who was the son of the best teacher I ever had, someone who seemed to see behind my insecurity and weird behaviour, and who encouraged me to write stories and to read anything I could get my hands on; thank you, Mr Heyne, wherever you are) had managed to get through the first couple of days unobserved. Inevitably, though, he was “outed” wearing a pair of pale blue boston stranglers. He swore that they were bought like that, as if this would lend them an air of credibility, but a conclusion was instantly drawn that they were nothing more than white undies that had been dyed by his mother, and that this was, according to the Unwritten Law, not acceptable. A period of degradation and ritual abuse, like an unpublished chapter of “Lord of the Flies”, ensued until, eventually, the perpetrators ran off, pack-like, in search of the next victim, each one trying as hard as possible to make sure it wasn’t him.

Eventually, my original stockpile of coloured undies went to that big top drawer in the sky, to be replaced by others covered in road signs or farm animals (although I was destined never to own a pair like the much-coveted ones worn by Mark “Chook” McLeod, South Gippsland’s number one Ted Nugent fan, and about whom much more can be written, which featured prominently on the front a picture of a rooster and the words “Cock of the Walk”) and on to more subdued, single-colour models.

And now, thanks to the good works of Calvin Klein and the supreme power of advertising, it is, once again, safe to wear large white underpants. I guess this means that the schoolyard pecking order will have moved on to other things – mobile phones, perhaps, or hoodies. Or, this being the Information Age, the ultimate taunt: “My hard drive is bigger than yours.”

Spam of the Week

I quite like the morning ritual of deleting dozens of unsolicited emails. For one thing, the names the spammers come up with can be a work of art in itself. For another, I still entertain the vain and ridiculous hope that one day someone will offer to pay me to give up my day job and concentrate on writing.

Yesterday one in particular caught my eye. The content related to erectile disfunction, which is something no 42-year-old man wants to dwell on for any length of time. But the subject line made me think for a moment that I was getting a personal message from Mark E Smith: "Your future, pastry bag". Keep 'em coming.

There She Goes, My Beautiful World

Are these the end times?

We've got middle east jitters; oil jitters; north korea jitters; price-of-bananas jitters; global warming jitters.

Seems like as good a time as any to be listening to Nick Cave preachin' the blues on "Hiding All Away": "There is a war coming ... There is a war coming ..."

One Two Three Four Five Six

No sooner is February out of the way than April comes along, at least in the land of the hypothetical mixtape. A few girls on the vox, a bit of the old post-punk skrunk, some new sounds, all tossed together with no time spent on the running order, and even less on research. Which is a shame, because only six of these artists have any history with me (answers on the back of a postcard, please), and my ignorance is bound to show through to those “in the know”.

Archie Bell and the Drells, “Tighten Up”: tighten up.

La Dusseldorf, “Time”: in which we get to hear the origins not only of a certain type of Stereolab song, from the era of “Lo Boob Oscillator”, but also, less expectedly, of Ed Kuepper’s majestic (oops, almost typed “jamestic”, which when you think about it equally applies; how about that?) “Honey Steel’s Gold”.

Andreas Dorau, “Strasse der Traeume (Dorau Rossknecht Remix)”: where have I heard this before? It must be the theme music for something, it sounds so familiar. It also sounds rather old. What gives? Perhaps it is mislabelled. Perhaps I am just ignorant and/or confusing it with something else.

Alpaca Brothers, “The Lie”: the EP whence this track comes was the second New Zealand record I ever bought. (The first was the Chills’ seven-inch “I Love My Leather Jacket” / “Great Escape”.) I can’t remember, now, what became of the Alpacas. Another short-lived Dunedin band whose members, no doubt, have turned up repeatedly playing with other combinations of members of that small but fecund scene. But if this was the only song they had ever done, it would have been worth it.

CanseiDeSerSexy, “Acho Um Pouco Bom”: there are some great post-punk-style guitars snaking away beneath this piece of essentially pop confection.

Snakefinger, “The Model”: my favourite Kraftwerk cover, from a genre which might well be called swamptronica, and half of one of my most-loved seven-inch singles, the other side being the timeless “I’m The Man In The Dark Sedan”, but the entire package wouldn’t be whaat it is without Mark Beyer’s cover art.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids, “Blank Generation”: and, from a similar time and place, the punk rock anthem that even your granny knows and loves.

Fantastic Plastic Machine, “You Must Learn All Night Long”: a big slice of danceable, infectious nonsense that would have your aforementioned granny tossing away the Zimmer frame for six minutes of frenetic boogaloo. Or hucklebuck.

The Pretty Things, “Defecting Grey”: here is a song I feel like I know backwards, but I swear that, on paper, I have never heard it in my life before. It’s a perfect selection for the “Million Dollar Riff” segment on “Rockwiz”.

The Wonder Band, “Whole Lotta Love”: a nice subversion of the dominant paradigm here, as the girls take hold of the Led Zeppelin (pilfered from the bluesmen but we all know that story) chestnut and send it out to the dancefloor. It must be a sign of the times when it’s the girl who sings “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love”. Take that, Jimmy Page.

Laibach, “Across The Universe”: sometimes, listening to a song for the first time can be a challenge. This is a perfect example. It is one of my least favourite Beatles songs (although not as bad as “Good Day Sunshine”, which was forever ruined for me by a tragic performance from Marcia Hines on her short-lived ABC television “variety”program, wherein she also took a bluntened butcher’s knife to the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”). Laibach reimagine it as performed by a heavenly choir of angels balanced on a shimmering, unbelievably thin tightrope. At any minute, you are thinking, the entire edifice is going to collapse in upon itself, and we are going to be abruptly returned to mundane reality. It is just too beautiful to be true, you think. They cannot possibly get away with it. But they do; and then, when it is over, you can take a deep breath, relax, go back to the start of the song, and enjoy it all over again.

Berntholer, “My Suitor”: it would appear that this is from Belgium from some time in the early 1980s. It figures, then, that it is, as of this moment, one of the best songs I never knew existed. Put it in a box with the Passions’ “I’m In Love with a German Film Star” and hope they start breeding like bunny rabbits.

Princess One Point Five, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix I’ll Be ...”: no, not that one. A lonely, vulnerable female voice sings about personal things, surrounded only by some rudimentary and primitive electronics. My mother once told me not to listen to songs sung by women because women couldn’t sing. This struck me as odd, given that one of the most-played records at our house was by the Seekers. (Then again, perhaps she had cottoned on to the essential truth: that nobody will ever equal Judith Durham.) I suspect now, on thinking about this after the passage of quite a lot of years, that she was probably subtly trying to steer me away from my obsession with Suzi Quatro. (She must have been beside herself when Blondie came along and the posters on my wall were updated.) Anyway, she was wrong.

Young Marble Giants, “Final Day”: now where did this come from? It’s not on the album; it’s not on the “Testcard” ep. I simultaneously love it and hate it when this happens: it’s a pinch-me moment to discover a “new” song by a much-loved but short-lived band. But on the other hand it’s very frustrating to know that you have lost 25 years of potential listening time. And the clock, it is ticking all the time.

Nathan Fake, “Grandfathered”: remember those slightly unsettling but also emotionally uplifting instrumental passages that OMD could seemingly toss out at will? This is a not half bad update that, if you like that sort of thing, you might seek out. Hi, Bart.

Ray Bryant, “Up Above The Rock”: no synths here. Just some way funky drumming, a nice vamping piano, and - “hey!” - handclaps. If this was the opening scene to a movie (and maybe it is), we would be driving in a red convertible along some European back-road in early spring, with Tuesday Weld in the passenger seat (we couldn’t afford Audrey Hepburn).

Sparrow, “The Early Years”: Franz Ferdinand via sixties bubblegum pop? Now we are in the inevitable FF-backlash years, such a description might not be instantly attractive. It might also be totally off the mark. This also reminds me of the first dBs album, and more generally that it is always the right time for a power-pop revival.

Odetta, “I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain / Water Boy”: the single most jaw-dropping moment on the “No Direction Home” film, an artefact with no shortage of jaw-dropping moments (eg, who knew there was actual footage of the “Judas” incident?), is Odetta singing this deep dark monster of a song. My theory is that when Robert Johnson went to the crossroads it was Odetta, in the guise of a big black cat, who was there to meet him.

The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

And, of course, Marcello.

I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives

Obviously, and understandably, the Internet is awash with words about Syd Barrett and his legacy (which is, not exactly "questionable", that sends entirely the wrong signal, but, how to say this, he seems to be worshipped, and I suspect that's not too strong a word, much more for what he could have done than for what he did - his is a story of real sadness that has been somehow turned into a cult). Jody Rosen on Slate has some worthwhile things to say, and in the Guardian you can choose from Richard Williams, Nick Kent and Rick Moody. The BBC has extracted a few paragraphs from Joe Boyd. I'm sure there is much more that can, and will, be said. So it seems a bit pointless for me to add anything.

Except: I have long harboured an irrational, but genuine, hope that Barrett would one day, J D Salinger-like, emerge from his extended hibernation and present us with new songs that would thrill and beguile us. If Salinger dies, there will be no hope left.

Baker Street

Adrienne saw in yesterday’s Melbourne Age that one of the best (in fact it may have been the best) places for buying pies in Victoria is the Malmsbury bakery. This may not mean much to most people, other than somewhere to go for a Sunday drive. But when my father was very young, during the Depression, his father owned what was then the Malmsbury bakery. Malmsbury is a small town on the highway north-west of Melbourne, near the edge of the goldfields. It has a very nice park with a lake (where dad and Aunty Betty supposedly once found a matchbox-full of gold in some dumped quartz), a bluestone church, a mostly bluestone school, and an enormous railway viaduct that used to give me the creeps. In more recent years it has also been host to a correctional facility for naughty boys. For a few years the Emmerson family held its annual reunion at the Malmsbury hall.

One day dad showed me through the bakery, having imposed on its then owners. It was amazing to me to think that a family with 12 children could have lived and run a business in such a small space. Apart from the shop, there was one small bedroom, somewhere to cook, somewhere to wash, and precious little else. The oven was in a separate structure in the backyard. And yet this was how they lived. As it was told to me, government regulation in those dark days meant that providers of things like bread were obliged to sell on credit, even where there was no real likelihood that they would ever get paid. So things were tight. Workers on rail gangs would come through from time to time, get their bread on credit, and be gone in a day or two. Dad told stories of playing football with other kids, using an old sock, stuffed and sewn up, as the ball.

At some point he went to live with some of his older sisters in Richmond, where he went to school near the MCG and claimed to once have played a school vs school football match in which a young Lou Richards was playing for the other school. Later, dad's family left Malmsbury and somehow finished up at Meeniyan and thence to a farm at Berry’s Creek, from which I suppose dad and some of his brothers got the idea of being South Gippsland farmers.

The desperate circumstances of their youth no doubt lies behind the close-knit nature of dad’s generation. Dad and three of his brothers worked the one farming enterprise until dad’s untimely demise. If you put any two of that generation of Emmersons together, nobody would say very much. But if you added a third, it was impossible to shut them up, as the stories would tumble out. Always the same pool of stories was drawn upon, told in different combinations and in different ways. Always funny. The day my father fell into the milk separator. The day Uncle Jack had to write a letter for some poor farmer whose wife had left him and taken their prize cow. The day Uncle Jack, while on the bread run, found someone in their house trapped underneath a wardrobe that had fallen on top of them. The day Uncle Tip (real name Albert) took literally my grandfather’s exasperated exclamation “those kittens should be tied up”, with predictably grim consequences. The day Uncle Tip got the sack from his newspaper run, for some inadvertent indiscretion, and said “Well I won’t take the sack”, turning up for work again the next morning so that the newsagent felt compelled to take him back (and didn’t regret doing so). The day the bullock wagon ran out of control. The night the roof blew off the house (shades of Thurber in that one).

Well, now Uncle Mick (real name Walter) has gone, and there is only one of that generation left, Aunty Betty, the baby of the family and mother of my mad cousins from the city. It must be very strange for her to be alone, after having so many brothers and sisters for so long. And, perhaps predictably, the next generation has gradually gone its separate ways. I have a large number of cousins, but most I have neither seen nor heard from in the seven years since we moved to Canberra. News travels, of course, and I have some idea of what goes on, but many of them must now themselves be getting quite old. The stories of dad’s generation have now gone, there being no longer the possibility of a quorum. Murray, one of my cousins, has apparently written them all down, but I’m not sure what is happening with that. I suppose it would be nice to be able to pass some of them on to the boys, but it wouldn’t mean the same to them, given that they have no real knowledge of the people who were telling them.

Such is life, I suppose.

Next Time Round

Why I would be no good at reviewing records is, well, I don’t know how this works, but somehow I am able to miss the obvious on the first few listens to something, maybe there are too many factors at play, expectations, trying too hard, distractions; whatever. I put the record away for a while, having listened to it just enough times to have some small part of it, almost unknowingly, embedded somewhere in that corner of the deepest recesses of my brain where song fragments lie in wait for an opportunity to surface.

Then I go about my business.

Until, for some reason, I am reminded of this record I have had sitting in that pile over there, maybe for a few months, maybe a year, who knows, and I think, well, I don’t recall being all that excited by this at the time, but I should give it another go, because they have another record out, or someone blogged positive about it, or I have a nagging feeling that there is something there busting to be let out. I listen again. I think, I remember this. I think, hey, this is quite good. I think, you idiot, you’ve missed the point again.

It ... is ... happening ... again ...

A few days back, Pitchfork mentioned that M Ward has a new album in the works, wherein he is backed by a “full band” (full of what? being the real question). I bought “Transistor Radio” some time back, played it a few times, pigeonholed it under “quite good but not “Transfiguration of Vincent””, and promptly went on to the next thing. I can’t believe that I had entirely forgotten about it. But I had. So I listened again last night. And again today. And do you know what? I can now say it is one of the best records I have listened to this year. Mr Ward is somehow able to occupy a place slightly outside of time without sounding in any way contrived or forced. I suppose you could say something similar about Gillian Welch. But in the case of M Ward he is somewhere between the Pacific Northwest, John Fahey and Bob Dylan. In fact, the opening piece funnels the Beach Boys through the mind of John Fahey. And succeeds. From there it’s a trip through a world of song fragments, some developed, some less so, and always (as was the case with “Vincent”) a stone classic is never far away. What I really like about M Ward is the way he chooses not to sing his heart out, but always keeps a little something permanently in reserve. It keeps you wanting more but also glad he doesn’t give it to you.

Then there is the mysterious case of “The Life Pursuit” by Belle and Sebastian, a group that should have worn out its welcome some time ago but somehow keeps finding a new chain to pull. I think I dealt with my early impressions on these pages a while ago. Those turned out to be my only impressions, until a copy turned up in The Shop Formerly Known As Revolution on the weekend, which I duly bought. (Who can resist a photo suite of gorgeous young lassies dressed in tartan?) There may still be some patches of this record that I can’t quite warm to, but it is relatively early days, really, and I feel confident in saying that, whoever you are, you will like this record. Adrienne says they must have been listening to The Kinks. It could be true (although I put the overall feel of this record a few years later than “... Are the Village Green Preservation Society”, which is our own benchmark Kinks long player). It certainly sounds very clean. Stevie Jackson’s guitar playing keeps getting stronger and stronger. Belle and Sebastian may yet outlive the cardigans and old Penguin paperbacks jibes. They may make more great records. This may turn out to be one of them.

Roll Call

There are many institutions which, having at one time or another been a large part of life, are no longer there; or have moved; or have irrevocably changed. Here are a few:

Cafe Paradiso
The Carlton Moviehouse
The Valhalla
Genevieve
The Black Cat Cafe
Dizzy Spinners
The Carlton Noodle House (or maybe it’s still there?)
Alice’s Bookshop (in its first, Trefor John incarnation)
The steps of Missing Link Records (in its original location)
Gaumont Book Co
Exposure Records
The Metropole
The Club
The Old Greek Theatre
The Venue
The Seaview Ballroom
Harley Court Cafe
The Galleon
The Longford
The Lumiere
The corner bar at The George, when it first opened under Donlevy Fitzpatrick’s stewardship, and the bakery a couple of doors up, on Grey Street
Upstairs at the Continental

And do I hear that the Astor is closing and/or has closed?

Endorsement

Throw yourselves behind this humanitarian campaign.

Give generously.

You know it makes sense.

Hello!

We should like to take this opportunity to welcome the most recent additions to the circle, namely:

Niall Atticus Florien O'Shannassy, born 13 June 2006

Nicholas Hugh Breward, born 15 June 2006

Thanks to the wonders of email and digital photography, distance is no barrier to an early viewing, and we are fortunate to be able to say that both are as gorgeous as is it possible for small humans to be.

Dylanologists rejoice!

Yes, the fabled Bob Dylan radio shows have appeared on Ye Olde Gas-Light Internet, courtesy of the good folks at mp3@3pm (scroll down a bit; they're spread over a couple of posts).

From what I've heard so far, I observe:

1. Dylan would have made a very good late-night radio host, with his gruff voice and smooth delivery, kind of (if I remember rightly) like the radio voice on Jim Jarmusch's "Night On Earth" - was that Tom Waits? Maybe I have that totally wrong.

2. This seemingly strange career shift may turn out to be, in typically oblique fashion, a kind of audio "Chronicles, Volume Two", with Dylan seeking to put his own spin on his own mythology, sorry, autobiography. I mean that in a nice way. He is a fascinating man.

Sadly, though, the Macintosh doesn't seem to be able to download episodes one and seven, so I herewith provide, for my own benefit, direct links to those episodes on the off chance I can get them that way. I know dirrect links are a transgression of the unwritten law, so if I offend anyone by doing so, they only have to ask (nicely).

Episode One

Episode Seven

Addendum

By way of value-adding the previous entry, we provide the following links:

1. Go here and scroll down to find and excellent description of the works of Kevin Huizenga, and incidentally rare evidence that I am not his only fan in the world;

2. Go here for an entirely wrongheaded and misguided review of "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", which raises a number of discussion points, none of which will be elaborated upon here. Including: should people be allowed to review records that were released before they were born; is "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" post-punk's answer to "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", i.e. revolutionary in its day, changing the face of music to such an extent that its very existence creates a kind of built-in redundancy (how can you sound fresh when pretty soon everything sounds like you); and, am I, despite fighting against it, becoming a crusty old curmudgeon of the Ian MacDonald, it-was-all-better-in-my-day type?

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

I have a couple of longer pieces, or at least a bit more thought-out than usual, that I want to write but I can't seem to get it together at the moment. I blame the onset of winter in these parts. (Others might blame Google Earth. I found the farm I grew up on!)

I have another one of my personal-reminiscence-type pieces ready to go, and another playlist (already?), both of which will get posted very shortly. But for now just let me say this:

1. During the week there were many tears in our house, on account of one of the two guinea pigs we have been minding for friends for almost three years now, name of Cuddles, passed away quietly in his sleep. The owners of Cuddles, and his good friend Pepper, are due back in a matter of weeks and it is a shame, having come so far, that we are unable to deliver up two healthy guinea pigs. Jules, aged six, appeared to have some trouble understanding his own emotions and, consequently, they manifested themselves as anger (the following morning he had sorted himself out and began asking questions like, "Are you sure he was really dead?"). Carl, aged eight, was the more distraught of the two, but still managed to find the silver lining: "I really miss Cuddles, even though I couldn't tell which one was which; at least now I will know which one is Pepper."

2. I might have mentioned that I received a large shipment of comic books from my Canadian pusher-man recently. A large proportion of them consisted of work by Kevin Huizenga. The more I read of this fellow, whose name I wouldn't have even recognised a year or two ago, the more impressed I am. He is a very gifted and surprisingly wide-ranging storyteller, a fine observer of human behaviour, and he draws like a treat, too. Don't you just hate people like that?

3. Also buried withing the aforesaid comics shipment: the final issue of Charles Burns's "Black Hole". Upon finishing, at long last, this beautifully drawn but frequently distressing saga of 1970s teen angst and plague, one's first response is, perhaps, envy addressed towards all the people who are able, now, to buy it off the shelf as a single publication and read it through from start to finish in one go. What they won't ever have, though, is the experience of living with the accumulated sense of anticipation every time another issue loomed. An ongoing, self-contained story, stretched out over, what, is-it-really-ten years? That's something I don't think we have seen the likes of since the days of the serialised novel a la Charles Dickens, and even they were churned out well inside a decade. It seems kind of strange not to have to wait for the next issue any more. And, even if the story might perhaps turn out to be just a bit less than meets the eye, that's really neither here nor there, given how well it all holds together, how gorgeous it is, and how amazingly consistent the drawing, writing, and tone have been over all of those ten years and twelve issues. How did he do it?

4. I have resisted most fancy-pants CD reissues of "classic" albums with their barrel-scraping extra tracks and typo-infested liner notes (exceptions: Television's "Marquee Moon" and "World of Echo" by Arthur Russell). But the floodgates may have opened with my recent purchase of not one but two of the Greatest Records Of All Time ("groats" for short), remastered and expanded, and gorgeously packaged. I am speaking, obviously, of "Remain In Light" by Talking Heads and "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" by David Byrne and Brian Eno. These two records were staging-posts in my life. I would never need to listen to either of them ever again, on account of their being so much a part of me, but it is a pleasure to hear them as I have never heard them before: no pops, no clicks, nothing muffled, just pure joyful sound. It's a shame that "Qu'ran" couldn't be given a run, but understandable too, given the times in which we live, and anyway I can always crank up the turntable whenever I want to listen to it.

5. A big Internet hello to the human being behind Voltage Controlled Technicolor, who has gone to the trouble to offer us mere mortals an astounding collection of complete albums, most of which none of us will ever have even heard of, for download. There is very little here that you can imagine would be troubling the copyright police, on account of obscurity and presumed out-of-printness, which is a very welcome change from the seemingly endless parade of "mp3 blogs" that offer the latest "hip" "indie" records for complete download, a dubious enterprise at best, but even worse when (a) they boast about how many copies of things they have put up have been downloaded and/or (b) they have the temerity to request that users click on a banner ad on the site, which I can only assume results in some small amount of revenue to the person behind the site. This is like saying, "It's fine to deprive the musicians of what little they would have made if you had bought the record, but, hey, I'm giving it to you for free, so pay me instead." I don't think it's meant to work that way.

6. I'm going to shut up now. It's late.