According to this week's Harper's Weekly Review (link at right), "a flaming rabbit burned down a British cricket club". This may not be quite as bizarre a story as it first seems. There may in fact be some cross-cultural terminology confusion going on. Consider: in Australia, "flamin'" is a pretty harmless form of cuss word, as in "that flamin' sheila". And in cricket terminology a lower-order batsman (aka a "tail-ender") with a correspondingly low degree of batting ability is known as a "bunny". Imagine if a tail-ender had become so frustrated with his inability to make any runs that he set fire to the clubhouse. The source of the story could have been an Australian cricketer saying something like "Some flamin' bunny burned down the cricket club". There are a lot of Aussies playing cricket in England at this time of year.
By such simple mistakes are world wars commenced.
On the other hand, maybe a flaming rabbit did burn down a British cricket club.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Well done, that boy
Having very much admired the work of Canadian cartoonist and illustrator Seth for many years (well, since the third issue of Palookaville), I was very excited, and pleased for him, to see that he finally cracked the cover of the New Yorker this week. The impression one gets from Seth's work is that he very much sees the world through the eyes of the New Yorker of the 1950s (nothing wrong with that whatsoever), and in the case of his story "It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken" he even puts the central character on the trail of an obscure (and, as it would appear, entirely made up) NYer cartoonist from that era, so one may even go so far as to suggest this might be something of a dream come true for him. And so we say, "well done, that boy". It's just a shame this uplifting story will be kept from the wider public because of saturation Olympics coverage. Oh well.
Construction Site: Stand
As of tonight you could, if you wanted to, although it would serve no practical purpose to do so, stand on what is going to be the floor of the new family room. You would be cold. And the neighbours would be watching you. And you would be looking pretty silly. But none of that stopped us.
Monday, August 16, 2004
Construction Site: Demolition Man
On Friday a man who looked to have recently been rescued from a desert island turned up with a big hammer and commenced to knock the heck out of the brick cladding on those external walls which will eventually disappear. He became a little too enthusiastic at times, with the result that we can now see daylight from a few places. We can also see daylight through one power point, which I am not too sure about. His over-enthusiasm also led to him having to give up before he could attack the other end of the house, on account of a sore back.
Today a different man with a different hammer appeared and finished the job. Also the "chippies" appeared, to make a start on the framing. This was a great disappointment to the kids, who were expecting the kind of "chippies" you can get from McDonalds.
Leaving aside the laughter of children, is there any better sound than that of a circular saw going through a plank of wood?
Today a different man with a different hammer appeared and finished the job. Also the "chippies" appeared, to make a start on the framing. This was a great disappointment to the kids, who were expecting the kind of "chippies" you can get from McDonalds.
Leaving aside the laughter of children, is there any better sound than that of a circular saw going through a plank of wood?
I'd rather be watching ...
... "The Mighty Boosh".
But for the next fortnight it's wall to wall Olympics.
But for the next fortnight it's wall to wall Olympics.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Negativland
I found a copy of Elvis Costello's Deutsche Grammophon song-cycle album, "North", at the local library. I borrowed it, fully expecting to put it back on the pile after listening to the first five minutes. But you can knock me down with a feather: against all odds (and possibly against my better judgment) my inbuilt love-hate elviscostellometer is reading "love" again.
This just confirms that my philosophy of life is sound: if you set your expectations low enough, you are bound to have a large number of pleasant surprises. I first took this approach with my choice of football team: Melbourne last won a premiership when I was four months old. Since then they have played in two grand finals, both of which resulted in humiliating defeats.
But back to Elvis: why does this album work, when the collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach didn't? I'm not at all sure; maybe in some way they were test runs for this record. Maybe he is just not a good collaborator (although I thought the recording he did with Bill Frisell worked quite well). The biggest complaint that I would aim at recent Costello is that he is all over his own records, to their detriment (which leaves someone in his position in a bit of a spot, when you think about it). This time, there is room to breathe. The arrangements are quite spare. They wander into the "classical" sphere, sure, but they nevertheless don't sound either forced or inordinately "tasteful". Costello doesn't try too hard. Steve Nieve, even since the early days, has been a good influence on Costello, and it is possible that his appearance here is what tilts the record to the good. It's a record for late at night, sure, and therefore not compatible with having young children about the house, and I may look back at this in a couple of months time in horror, but for now I'm giving it a tick.
This just confirms that my philosophy of life is sound: if you set your expectations low enough, you are bound to have a large number of pleasant surprises. I first took this approach with my choice of football team: Melbourne last won a premiership when I was four months old. Since then they have played in two grand finals, both of which resulted in humiliating defeats.
But back to Elvis: why does this album work, when the collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach didn't? I'm not at all sure; maybe in some way they were test runs for this record. Maybe he is just not a good collaborator (although I thought the recording he did with Bill Frisell worked quite well). The biggest complaint that I would aim at recent Costello is that he is all over his own records, to their detriment (which leaves someone in his position in a bit of a spot, when you think about it). This time, there is room to breathe. The arrangements are quite spare. They wander into the "classical" sphere, sure, but they nevertheless don't sound either forced or inordinately "tasteful". Costello doesn't try too hard. Steve Nieve, even since the early days, has been a good influence on Costello, and it is possible that his appearance here is what tilts the record to the good. It's a record for late at night, sure, and therefore not compatible with having young children about the house, and I may look back at this in a couple of months time in horror, but for now I'm giving it a tick.
Construction Site: Another Brick in the Wall Part 1
Joe the bricklayer is here this week, putting up the footings. We can now stand in what will be the new family room and master bedroom, and imagine the walls going up around us. I feel a bit like a goldfish in a bowl. We arise somewhere between 6.45 and 7am, open the curtains, and there are the builders, already hard at work and (we imagine) looking in at us. I'm sure they do this all the time, and don't even notice the humans dwelling inside the houses they are working on. But I still feel as if they are looking at me. Did I already mention that builders make me very uncomfortable? I should probably get help.
Under Heavy Manners
Maybe I have been looking in all the wrong places, but did anybody even know that Fripp and Eno had been working together again? And then there's an album review on Pitchfork. After checking that it wasn't April 1, I sat back and asked myself how I felt about this unexpected development. After all, both of their careers have been patchy at best for the past 20 years. Eno's only two really indispensable albums since "Apollo" have been "Thursday Afternoon" (the reason I bought a CD player in the first place: Brian Eno as progenitor of the Killer App) and the collaboration with Jah Wobble, "Spinner". Fripp, meanwhile, was involved in the only David Sylvian record that is anything less than indispensable. And the unreleased tracks on "The Essential [sic - where was "An Index of Metals"?] Fripp and Eno", entitled "Healthy Colours I-IV", seem to be little more than off-cuts or prototypes of Talking Heads' "Electricity". So I don't think I will by tying myself up in agonising knots of indecision the way I did with Kraftwerk's "Tour de France Soundtracks" (what a fool I was). But I am at least intrigued to hear what direction the two boffins might have pushed themselves in this time around.
Sunday, August 08, 2004
All that scratchin' is making me itch
Whoever it was out there in the wide world of MP3blogs who made available (from the original vinyl, no less) "Trees and Flowers" by Strawberry Switchblade, I am not worthy to lick your Dr Marten's boots. Here is a song I haven't heard even once since the days when it was on reasonably high rotation on Melbourne's 3RRR, circa 1982, and have been desperate to hear again ever since. Thank you thank you thank you. Remarkably, it is just how I remember it, and also just as special as I remember it being. (Yes, tears of nostalgia have been duly shed, for those thrilling days when all of our gang were living in those tiny "dog boxes" they give to the first-year students at Trinity.) Have I already said thank you? Whoever you are?
Steamin'
So, last week the High Court upheld the Australian government’s right to hold people in immigration detention indefinitely. There are two remarkable things revealed by this litigation: first, that on the Australian statute books is a piece of legislation that allows a person to be kept behind bars for the term of his or her natural life, not because of their having been convicted of some terrible crime, or for any other reason justifying their segregation from the community on grounds of their own, or others’, safety, but simply because they tried and failed to obtain permission to reside here, as a refugee or otherwise, and the Australian government has had no success at sending them somewhere else. (The Court’s decision appears to say that as long as the government still maintains a present intention that the person be deported, the person can be detained, notwithstanding that no deportation is imminent, or even likely, and not just in the short term or indeed for any reasonable length of time.)
The second, and even more remarkable, thing is that this government has been prepared to go to the highest court in the land in order to enforce such a law and have its validity upheld. In other words, it sees nothing wrong with pursuing as a legitimate policy the action of keeping a human being in incarceration (call it immigration detention if you will, but in my book a gaol is a gaol) until that human being dies. One could suggest that this is the sort of ruling behaviour against which Australians have on many occasions gone to war, including in the very recent past. One could also suggest that, surely, instances of people having no country which is prepared to accept them (or, in the case of one of the parties before the High Court, being in effect stateless, ie, having no “country of nationality”, in the words of the Refugees Convention) would be rare, or at least sufficiently rare that it would cause very little practical harm to quietly send them off into the community on some legitimate basis until such time as they could be sent away. We may be inundated by stateless Palestinians, I suppose, but somehow I doubt it. Australia is proceeding to send very negative messages to prospective refugee arrivals as it is; a small handful of legitimate exceptions, on humanitarian grounds, is hardly likely to cut across those messages.
It is all very sad, not to mention cruel, and, as Justice McHugh said in his judgments in each of the two cases, “tragic”, and, anyway, my mind keeps turning to the Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Vietnamese and all the other communities around the nation who have, over successive waves of immigration, helped to make this country stronger, more prosperous, more multicultural, more interesting, more culinarily (?) adventurous ...
Does it really make sense to turn a handful of desparate persons into “non-persons”, keeping them in custody at the public’s expense, when they could be living amongst us, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, as previous generations would have said, and becoming responsible members of this thing we are proud, most of the time, to call Australian society?
End of sermon.
The second, and even more remarkable, thing is that this government has been prepared to go to the highest court in the land in order to enforce such a law and have its validity upheld. In other words, it sees nothing wrong with pursuing as a legitimate policy the action of keeping a human being in incarceration (call it immigration detention if you will, but in my book a gaol is a gaol) until that human being dies. One could suggest that this is the sort of ruling behaviour against which Australians have on many occasions gone to war, including in the very recent past. One could also suggest that, surely, instances of people having no country which is prepared to accept them (or, in the case of one of the parties before the High Court, being in effect stateless, ie, having no “country of nationality”, in the words of the Refugees Convention) would be rare, or at least sufficiently rare that it would cause very little practical harm to quietly send them off into the community on some legitimate basis until such time as they could be sent away. We may be inundated by stateless Palestinians, I suppose, but somehow I doubt it. Australia is proceeding to send very negative messages to prospective refugee arrivals as it is; a small handful of legitimate exceptions, on humanitarian grounds, is hardly likely to cut across those messages.
It is all very sad, not to mention cruel, and, as Justice McHugh said in his judgments in each of the two cases, “tragic”, and, anyway, my mind keeps turning to the Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Vietnamese and all the other communities around the nation who have, over successive waves of immigration, helped to make this country stronger, more prosperous, more multicultural, more interesting, more culinarily (?) adventurous ...
Does it really make sense to turn a handful of desparate persons into “non-persons”, keeping them in custody at the public’s expense, when they could be living amongst us, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, as previous generations would have said, and becoming responsible members of this thing we are proud, most of the time, to call Australian society?
End of sermon.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Murphy's Law Is In Da House
It turned out to be true: Canberra's only broad-spectrum music store has sold out to the big boys. I went briefly to what was supposedly the last day of their closing down sale, but realised that I wouldn't have time to stand in line to pay for anything I found before I had to meet Adrienne. All queues for the checkouts were at least 20 people long. But all was not lost: they were still open the following weekend, all vinyl was still 50 percent off. So for not very much money I bought the following. All English (in the general sense). With roughly a 3-year gap between each. It's a kind of potted history. Potty, anyway.
Black Widow: Sacrifice. Allegedly from 1971, although this copy is an Italian repress from 1998 (180g vinyl!) and the only other copyright info says 1992. I'm still not convinced it isn't a hoax. Purchased because of "Come To The Sabbat", made available by Tom Ewing during the heady days of PopNose.
Sparks: Propaganda. 1974. I'm not sure what to expect here. I only really remember the "hits" from around 1979, but I know they're still going and well regarded. I like the cover, too. And it's on Island, which really was the home of the hits in them days.
David Essex: Gold & Ivory. Because Marcello Carlin said so. 1977.
Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark: Architecture & Morality. Not as perfect as I remember it, but at least four songs that stand the test of time. 1981.
Simple Minds: New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84). From 1982. One of the records that I used to own that I have long regretted parting with (I abandoned it to its fate out of anger at how bad subsequent records were). This looks like an English pressing and there's nothing on the record to suggest it's not, but something makes me suspect otherwise. I used to be able to tell just by picking them up, you know.
Propaganda: "Present The Nine Lives Of Dr Mabuse" (12" single). Parts 3 and 4, to be precise. From 1984 (I could have sworn it was a couple of years later). This is an itch I have been needing to scratch since I last heard it, which I think I can date back to a weekend on the farm in 1989, not long before dad got sick and we had to say goodbye to all that. "Why does it hurt when my heart misses a beat."
Enter Murphy's Law: before I could get through any more than the Propaganda and OMD records, the knob fell off my amplifier, in such a way that I can now listen only to CDs. It could have been worse, I suppose; we could have been limited to the cassette deck. And in a month or two all records and tapes, and probably most of my CDs, will be farmed out to willing borrowers while we lose most of our internal living space to these accursed renovations. But for now it is very, very frustrating to have bought records for the first time in some years, only to have them rendered unplayable on account of my lack of (a) one Allen key and (b) any practical and/or handyman skills whatsoever.
Black Widow: Sacrifice. Allegedly from 1971, although this copy is an Italian repress from 1998 (180g vinyl!) and the only other copyright info says 1992. I'm still not convinced it isn't a hoax. Purchased because of "Come To The Sabbat", made available by Tom Ewing during the heady days of PopNose.
Sparks: Propaganda. 1974. I'm not sure what to expect here. I only really remember the "hits" from around 1979, but I know they're still going and well regarded. I like the cover, too. And it's on Island, which really was the home of the hits in them days.
David Essex: Gold & Ivory. Because Marcello Carlin said so. 1977.
Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark: Architecture & Morality. Not as perfect as I remember it, but at least four songs that stand the test of time. 1981.
Simple Minds: New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84). From 1982. One of the records that I used to own that I have long regretted parting with (I abandoned it to its fate out of anger at how bad subsequent records were). This looks like an English pressing and there's nothing on the record to suggest it's not, but something makes me suspect otherwise. I used to be able to tell just by picking them up, you know.
Propaganda: "Present The Nine Lives Of Dr Mabuse" (12" single). Parts 3 and 4, to be precise. From 1984 (I could have sworn it was a couple of years later). This is an itch I have been needing to scratch since I last heard it, which I think I can date back to a weekend on the farm in 1989, not long before dad got sick and we had to say goodbye to all that. "Why does it hurt when my heart misses a beat."
Enter Murphy's Law: before I could get through any more than the Propaganda and OMD records, the knob fell off my amplifier, in such a way that I can now listen only to CDs. It could have been worse, I suppose; we could have been limited to the cassette deck. And in a month or two all records and tapes, and probably most of my CDs, will be farmed out to willing borrowers while we lose most of our internal living space to these accursed renovations. But for now it is very, very frustrating to have bought records for the first time in some years, only to have them rendered unplayable on account of my lack of (a) one Allen key and (b) any practical and/or handyman skills whatsoever.
And the big men fly
I found myself watching a bit of footy on TV on Sunday afternoon: St Kilda v Geelong. Discussing with the kids who to barrack for. Carl spent the first year and a bit of his life as a resident of St Kilda. The grandparents live in Geelong. It was a tough call. Julius chimed in: "Is granddad playing?" Given that granddad is Scottish, 75 years old, of not inconsiderable girth, and has demonstrated in the time I have known him zero interest in any kind of ball sports, I had to say that I thought it was unlikely but that we should keep looking out for him just in case. Which gave me an excuse to keep watching the game, when Jules would have been much happier to turn over to Speed Week on SBS.
Snow Crash
We took the guys to see some snow on Saturday morning. I had been making a nuisance of myself around the house and driving Adrienne crazy with my continual harping on to her about finding out whether we would need chains or if there were other hazards relating to driving of which we should know before heading off. I kept regaling her with stories of how we would be trapped for days after our car slid off the deserted backroads, having to eat our own legs before help was at hand. It turns out that the reason it was so hard for me to get an answer was that the question, I know now, was itself completely ridiculous.
Where we were going was no more than 15 minutes from the outskirts of Canberra. The entire countryside was as dry and arid as if it were the middle of summer. The landscape was barren; devoid of any moisture whatsoever; and any vegetation had been corpsed in the bushfires of January 2003. We found the snowfield without any trouble: a rectangular, sloping patch of ground covered by some kind of artificially made "snow", guarded by a man charging $8 per person to enter, and $6 to hire a little orange plastic "toboggan". Not exactly Aspen. Not exactly the Winter Olympics. But a whole lot of fun for 4, 6 and 40-year-olds regardless. It was a beautifully sunny morning, so nobody cared about sopping wet trousers. Well, Carl did, but once we explained to him that he would stay warmer if he ran around, he was fine. Winter in Canberra.
Where we were going was no more than 15 minutes from the outskirts of Canberra. The entire countryside was as dry and arid as if it were the middle of summer. The landscape was barren; devoid of any moisture whatsoever; and any vegetation had been corpsed in the bushfires of January 2003. We found the snowfield without any trouble: a rectangular, sloping patch of ground covered by some kind of artificially made "snow", guarded by a man charging $8 per person to enter, and $6 to hire a little orange plastic "toboggan". Not exactly Aspen. Not exactly the Winter Olympics. But a whole lot of fun for 4, 6 and 40-year-olds regardless. It was a beautifully sunny morning, so nobody cared about sopping wet trousers. Well, Carl did, but once we explained to him that he would stay warmer if he ran around, he was fine. Winter in Canberra.
Saturday, July 31, 2004
Used Songs
More disc slippage from the local library.
Bjork “Post”: I like the idea of listening to Bjork more than I like actually listening to Bjork. In this, she is like Laurie Anderson. I can take both of them in small doses but find that it soon becomes hard work. (Which is not to deny that “O Superman” is a cornerstone of the repertoire.)
Various Artists “The Best Ever Disco Album”: it can’t be the best one ever, because “I Feel Love” fades out around the four minute mark, just as it really starts to head off into the stratosphere, and “We Are Family” seems to have acquired a suspiciously 1980s-sounding introductory section which I don’t recall being there the last time I heard it. But as someone else’s guess at what I would consider “best ever” it’s actually quite close.
Various Artists: “The Love Handle Lounge”: hands up who remembers the Loungecore craze, those heady days when we all took off for the nearest second hand record stores and op shops to buy any Martin Denny records we could find before Bruce Milne got his grubby hands on them and put them up on the wall at Au Go Go for $60 a piece. But even if it only served to rescue Esquivel! from obscurity it was a force for good. This tawdry compilation, however, is really scraping the shavings off the floor. The name “Rod McKeun” appears all too frequently on this CD, inauspiciously appearing as "producer" as well as writing or co-writing about half of the songs. My personal favourite of the cocktail-set CDs was, and still is, “Shaken, Not Stirred”, which as well as being consistently good has the Rykodisc seal of quality.
Ry Cooder & V M Bhatt “A Meeting By The River”: it’s easy to dismiss Cooder as a kind of self-promoting, thinking man’s Eric Clapton, or a white-shoed Bill Laswell, or something. And he is probably not averse to wearing his hair in a ponytail. But I try to remember that he is also responsible for the “Paris, Texas” soundtrack (which his own playing here sometimes echoes), and for producing one of the great modern recordings, Jon Hassell’s “Fascinoma” (which appeared on the same label as this). “A Meeting By The River” is a very listenable set of four longish instrumentals. File under “World Music”, sure, but don’t let that get in the way of your enjoyment of it. After all, it’s just a label.
Roxy Music “Avalon”: (sigh).
New Order “Get Ready”: this was never going to change anybody’s life. But gee, wasn’t it good to have them back.
The Chemical Brothers “Surrender”: yeah, okay, but I really think the moment has passed. Nevertheless no record featuring Hope Sandoval can be dismissed out of hand.
Various Artists “The Ice Storm” (soundtrack): how could such a wonderful film have such a patchy soundtrack? Everything from some long early-70s numbers by the likes of Zappa, Free and Traffic to Antonio Carlos Jobim, “Montego Bay”, “Too Late To Turn Back Now” and some Bowie song that I can’t place but that I assume must be fairly recent because it was co-written by Reeves Gabrels. I’d see the film again before I gave this a second listen.
Bjork “Post”: I like the idea of listening to Bjork more than I like actually listening to Bjork. In this, she is like Laurie Anderson. I can take both of them in small doses but find that it soon becomes hard work. (Which is not to deny that “O Superman” is a cornerstone of the repertoire.)
Various Artists “The Best Ever Disco Album”: it can’t be the best one ever, because “I Feel Love” fades out around the four minute mark, just as it really starts to head off into the stratosphere, and “We Are Family” seems to have acquired a suspiciously 1980s-sounding introductory section which I don’t recall being there the last time I heard it. But as someone else’s guess at what I would consider “best ever” it’s actually quite close.
Various Artists: “The Love Handle Lounge”: hands up who remembers the Loungecore craze, those heady days when we all took off for the nearest second hand record stores and op shops to buy any Martin Denny records we could find before Bruce Milne got his grubby hands on them and put them up on the wall at Au Go Go for $60 a piece. But even if it only served to rescue Esquivel! from obscurity it was a force for good. This tawdry compilation, however, is really scraping the shavings off the floor. The name “Rod McKeun” appears all too frequently on this CD, inauspiciously appearing as "producer" as well as writing or co-writing about half of the songs. My personal favourite of the cocktail-set CDs was, and still is, “Shaken, Not Stirred”, which as well as being consistently good has the Rykodisc seal of quality.
Ry Cooder & V M Bhatt “A Meeting By The River”: it’s easy to dismiss Cooder as a kind of self-promoting, thinking man’s Eric Clapton, or a white-shoed Bill Laswell, or something. And he is probably not averse to wearing his hair in a ponytail. But I try to remember that he is also responsible for the “Paris, Texas” soundtrack (which his own playing here sometimes echoes), and for producing one of the great modern recordings, Jon Hassell’s “Fascinoma” (which appeared on the same label as this). “A Meeting By The River” is a very listenable set of four longish instrumentals. File under “World Music”, sure, but don’t let that get in the way of your enjoyment of it. After all, it’s just a label.
Roxy Music “Avalon”: (sigh).
New Order “Get Ready”: this was never going to change anybody’s life. But gee, wasn’t it good to have them back.
The Chemical Brothers “Surrender”: yeah, okay, but I really think the moment has passed. Nevertheless no record featuring Hope Sandoval can be dismissed out of hand.
Various Artists “The Ice Storm” (soundtrack): how could such a wonderful film have such a patchy soundtrack? Everything from some long early-70s numbers by the likes of Zappa, Free and Traffic to Antonio Carlos Jobim, “Montego Bay”, “Too Late To Turn Back Now” and some Bowie song that I can’t place but that I assume must be fairly recent because it was co-written by Reeves Gabrels. I’d see the film again before I gave this a second listen.
Pictures On My Wall
Find myself involved in friends’ domestic shenanigans. Feeling a bit shaken, I retreat to the Gallery during lunch in an attempt to calm the savage beast. The international galleries have never been as well hung as they are now. Pretty much everything you want to see is there. “Blue Poles”, of course, lifts the spirits no matter how many hundreds of times you have stood in front of it. The David Smith sculpture is there, Brancusi’s birds, Rothko, a bit of Agnes Martin. Not sure about having Leger’s sublime acrobats facing Anselm Keifer, but what can you do? I am not yet convinced by the recently acquired Kitaj biblical allegory painting, but I’m working on it. On the other hand, I would happily take home Leon Kossoff’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, painted from almost the exact spot at which we stood on the Hawksmoor pilgrimage leg of our visit to London in 1996. I still get the shivers thinking about it.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Two turntables and a microphone
The only other thing I will ever want to say about Rachel Stevens' "Some Girls" is that it reminds me of the time our brave and true friend Darren, back in the days when all of the gang did shows on the South Gippsland community FM radio station, brought into the studio a record of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop "doing" the Doctor Who theme music, put it on one turntable, put Gary Glitter's "Rock And Roll Part 1" on the other turntable, got them both spinning, and proceeded to spend the next couple of minutes of airtime cross-fading from one to the other. This was around the time of "Doctor In The Tardis" or whatever it was called, and Darren was no doubt driven by the "anyone can do that" spirit of punk. That he couldn't quite get the two songs in sync only added to the charm.
Construction Site: All quiet on the northern front
Not much sign of activity at the moment; concrete for footings has been poured, has got quite wet, is drying out. We await bricklayers: one week or two. Meanwhile we do the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand shuffle over such intrinsically exciting things as single v double glazing. The joys. The backyard, a barren landscape leavened by piles of old fencing and such, looks not unlike the World Trade Center circa September 12, 2001. Adrienne calls us the Little House On The Prairie, which sums it up nicely. There is very little grassy space for the poor suffering guinea pigs.
The Dustbin of History
Editor's Note: the previous post was, it would be obvious to anyone who read it, hacked out at speed and not reconsidered in any way, contrary to the usual practice around here: I had had a long day at work, it was getting late, the kids were sick, etc. I have therefore spent a restless night worrying about how bad it actually was. I have now gone back to it, fixed up the most obvious mistakes and misguided statements, and re-posted it. I hope nobody minds. It won't happen again.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Footloose and Fancy Free
No, I don't want to be Marcello Carlin. But I do take a lot of notice of what he says, and have a sense of expectation whenever has has a new post on his weblog (link at right) similar to that I used to get around 1981 whenever an NME turned up in the old cream can that served as a letter box back on the farm. And yes, if he told me to put my head in a fire I probably would. (Mostly who I want to be is Harold Ross, founder of the New Yorker and its editor until his death in 1951.) Nevertheless, I do have some minor concerns about some aspects of his finely wrought piece on NYLPM about the state of pop in 2004. As to the specifics of his argument, well, nobody has been further out of the loop, popwise, than I have since the onset of children and our move to Canberra five years ago. Nevertheless, his main thesis, that the pop charts a year or two after a watershed year are a barren wasteland, brought about by the inevitable record company-induced law of diminishing returns, i.e., what was a good idea two years ago when first revealed soon becomes a pale shadow of itself, is worthy of further study. Certainly, everything that was bad about 1984 can be traced very closely back to everything that was glorious about 1982. But is this scenario confined to the rarefied atmosphere of the pop charts? In other words, what about non-"pop" watersheds? I remain convinced, for example, that the years 1977-1982 were a time of ever-increasing quality in modern (c.f. "pop"?) music; each step forward was followed not by two steps back but two more steps forward. If you assume that (from memory) 1978 was the year that punk vaulted through the earth's crust and into the charts, why then was 1980 (and 1981, and 1982) an even better year?
I suspect that what I am doing is confusing movements with phenomena. The answer might be that punk (and, more crucially, what came after) was itself drawing on earlier musics (garage, mods, rockers, dub) and gave rise to healthy cross-pollination in the form of a "scene" (albeit highly fragmented), whereas the kind of music he (and I put my hand up here, he's not the only one) looks back to from 1982 with such fondness really appeared from out of nowhere (as much of the best, and most lasting, music does) and, having exploded in the sky, had nowhere to go to but nowhere. Or, as Carlin says, to Howard Jones (much the same thing really).
None of which was what I really wanted to say. All I intended to do was add a couple of slight caveats, one general, one particular. General first: the danger in taking up a rigid, immutable stance against a particular aspect or trend in popular music is that, for most of us in this corner, music is about emotional responses, and, as any fule no, it is unwise to second-guess the ways of the heart. He who rails against Rachel Stevens's "Some Girls" today for the way it cynically picks up on the current vogue for all things no wave and post-punk and moulds them into stick-in-the-head chartbuster may well find himself helpless in the face of a song he might hear tomorrow that crawls out of the same swamp and pushes the same buttons, but in a way that produces in him, for reasons he cannot explain, paroxysms of pleasure instead of anger. One thing that I have found about turning 40 is that it lets you open up and allow onto the radar music that was previously Now Allowed for reasons of "style", "attitude" or (usually) "disco sucks". One thing, for example, that I can now do that I couldn't do a few years ago is absorb large quantities of disco music and begin the process of sorting out the good from the unecxeptional (and just how good IS Silver Convention's "Fly Robin Fly"?).
As to the particular, I found a copy of "Some Girls" floating in the digital ether, and I must say that on a few listens it seems a pleasant enough kind of pop song. I actually like the way it borrows liberally from Gary Glitter and from the class of 1982, but beyond that, well, I just like it, and who can really say why? (Maybe if one was in London and hearing it 15 times a day, one's attitude might be different. I gave it three spins in a row while typing this, and that was quite enough.)
Oh, and by the way, thanks also to Tom Ewing, also on NYLPM (link at right), for finding and reproducing Paul Morley's piece from 1982 on the state of the pop charts then. I was at that time coming to the end of three years of reading every word of every issue of the NME, so I must have read it at the time, but I don't think I really appreciated at the time what he was saying (did anyone??), so it is nice to read it again now, with the benefit of a further 22 years of real life behind me. How did Morley, Penman etc get to be so wise so young?
I suspect that what I am doing is confusing movements with phenomena. The answer might be that punk (and, more crucially, what came after) was itself drawing on earlier musics (garage, mods, rockers, dub) and gave rise to healthy cross-pollination in the form of a "scene" (albeit highly fragmented), whereas the kind of music he (and I put my hand up here, he's not the only one) looks back to from 1982 with such fondness really appeared from out of nowhere (as much of the best, and most lasting, music does) and, having exploded in the sky, had nowhere to go to but nowhere. Or, as Carlin says, to Howard Jones (much the same thing really).
None of which was what I really wanted to say. All I intended to do was add a couple of slight caveats, one general, one particular. General first: the danger in taking up a rigid, immutable stance against a particular aspect or trend in popular music is that, for most of us in this corner, music is about emotional responses, and, as any fule no, it is unwise to second-guess the ways of the heart. He who rails against Rachel Stevens's "Some Girls" today for the way it cynically picks up on the current vogue for all things no wave and post-punk and moulds them into stick-in-the-head chartbuster may well find himself helpless in the face of a song he might hear tomorrow that crawls out of the same swamp and pushes the same buttons, but in a way that produces in him, for reasons he cannot explain, paroxysms of pleasure instead of anger. One thing that I have found about turning 40 is that it lets you open up and allow onto the radar music that was previously Now Allowed for reasons of "style", "attitude" or (usually) "disco sucks". One thing, for example, that I can now do that I couldn't do a few years ago is absorb large quantities of disco music and begin the process of sorting out the good from the unecxeptional (and just how good IS Silver Convention's "Fly Robin Fly"?).
As to the particular, I found a copy of "Some Girls" floating in the digital ether, and I must say that on a few listens it seems a pleasant enough kind of pop song. I actually like the way it borrows liberally from Gary Glitter and from the class of 1982, but beyond that, well, I just like it, and who can really say why? (Maybe if one was in London and hearing it 15 times a day, one's attitude might be different. I gave it three spins in a row while typing this, and that was quite enough.)
Oh, and by the way, thanks also to Tom Ewing, also on NYLPM (link at right), for finding and reproducing Paul Morley's piece from 1982 on the state of the pop charts then. I was at that time coming to the end of three years of reading every word of every issue of the NME, so I must have read it at the time, but I don't think I really appreciated at the time what he was saying (did anyone??), so it is nice to read it again now, with the benefit of a further 22 years of real life behind me. How did Morley, Penman etc get to be so wise so young?
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