I can't believe it's not ...

the December 2006 hypothetical mixtape, in April 2007.

The Go-Betweens, “Crystal Shacks”: a charming, laid-back mostly instrumental hidden on the “Worlds Apart” ep; whilst I may not be totally convinced that their best work was still ahead of them, yet I still cannot quite come to terms with the idea that they are at an end.

The Shakers, “Who Will Buy These Wonderful Evils?”: from the title on, this is as fine a piece of sixties garage psych as you are ever likely to uncover. It gets quiet, then it gets loud, then the Formula One cars go by, almost but not quite spinning off the track.

Kaleidoscope, “Faintly Blowing”: if you had told me this was a lost early Pink Floyd track, I might have been fooled. I am so in love with this song.

Calico Wall, “I’m A Living Sickness”: in the same, uh, vein. This one starts off like imitation Ennio Morricone, but soon dispels that idea. Sometimes it seems like there’s massive untapped wells of these sixties “nuggets” just waiting for excavation, and that we will never have heard the last of them. Which is just fine by me.

Tunng, “No Man Can Find The War”: one of my favourite folktronica exponents turn their hand to Tim Buckley’s Vietnam “protest” song and make it their own. I confess to being too close to the original to really be able to say how well this stands up under its own steam, but I venture to suggest Buckley neophytes would enjoy it as much as I do. I like the way they don’t try to out-vocal-range Tim Buckley - nobody could - rather, they play it dead straight all the way. Beautiful.

Shirley Collins and Davy Graham, “Reynardine”: which leads us, somehow, to Shirley Collins’s own ethereal voice, about which I know all too little.

Seekers Who Are Lovers, “It’s A Hard Life”: it starts off with a looped organ and serious vinyl hiss, which sits beneath somebody whose voice reminds me of somebody else (perhaps the singer from Rocketship, or perhaps, no, it’s coming to me, the guy from 14 Iced Bears - I think), singing about some of those universal truths young rock musicians like, or have, to sing about. (Even when that “young rock musician”, I later discover, is in this case Will Oldham.) For the first couple of minutes you are very conscious, not in a good way, of the 6.50 running time, but soon enough you are dragged under and time disappears. I find the 2006 copyright date both unlikely and extremely heartening.

Jean Paul Sartre Experience, “Own Two Feet”: a long-lost piece of minor-key gorgeousness from New Zealand circa the mid-1980s.

The Monochrome Set, “He’s Frank”: one of the things I have discovered in this era of MP3 theft is how great the Monochrome Set were. The guitar in this song just kills.

Depeche Mode vs Nirvana, “About A Girl In My Dreams”: Nirvana, unplugged, unexpectedly justifying their existence by providing the backing for Depeche Mode’s typically angst-ridden vocalisations and electronic squelches and squiggles. A rare example of two diametrically opposed sensibilities fitting together perfectly in the laboratory. Under controlled conditions.

Rosario Blefari, “Partir y Renunciar”: a pleasing blend of electronic noises and gentle Brazilian rhythms and vocals. If you said “Juana Molina” you wouldn’t be far wrong. From a CD called “4 Women No Cry” of which I like what I’ve heard.

Cal Tjader, “Gimme Shelter”: tacky but somehow perfect.

Blue Oyster Cult, “(Don’t Fear The) Reaper”: umlauts over the “O”, if you please. Man, this is is a blast from go to woah. For a “sell-out” record it so does not sell out. I assume that I am not the only person who hears quite a lot of later-period Husker Du (two more umlauts please) in this.

The Veronicas, “4Ever”: you got a problem with that? Sometimes all I really wanna do is jump up and down and spin my arms in giant circles.

Belle Epoque, “Miss Broadway”: if Suzi Quatro had donned sequins and white flairs rather than black leather, this could have been the result. (But then I wouldn't have been buying Suzi Quatro records in 1974.)

Ellen Allien and Apparat, “Turbo Dreams (Pier Bucci Mix)”: a messed-about-with version of one of the best songs from one of the best albums of the last little while.

Space, “On The Air”: a year or so ago I discovered that there has been, in a parallel universe to my own, a type of music entitled “space disco”. It has lately been reprised by such players as Lindstrom and Prins Thomas, and the Quiet Village Project, amongst others. This would seem to be a classic example of the genre. It is thematically similar to some of the big instrumentals from Yellow Magic Orchestra, let’s say “Rydeen”. (Can you use the word “thematically” in the context of an instrumental?) As the name suggests, this would have been a bitchin’ theme tune to a 1970s current affairs show on the ABC.

Einzelganger, “Untergang (Ruin)”: Giorgio Moroder. 1975. From the same album as “Warum”. What more do you want?

Komeit, “Summer’s Gone”: in this hemisphere, at this time of year, this song evokes a perfect mood. Melancholy, wistful, drifting in a still autumn early afternoon, sitting on the back deck, before the damn mosquitos start to zero in on me as the sun swings around to the west. (Postscript: I can't google this up to save myself. The name of the song is quite possibly wrong. The photo on Komeit's web site kind of fits the music.)

Democracy At Work

Dear Friends,

I have just read and signed the online petition:

"Age of Mythology: The Titans exspansion pack for mac computers"

hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition
service, at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/titans12/

I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might
agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider
signing yourself.

Best wishes,

Carl

Highway Child

While you’re here, head on over to No Commercial Potential, a fine weblog which may even belong to a fellow Australian (g'day there), scroll down a bit, and download the Oxford Union Speech delivered by Gerald, er, Gerard, Hoffnung, an extraordinary piece of oration, timeless in both content and delivery, which I was only once previously exposed to, some twenty or so years ago.

There I was, back at the farm, where I had spent the weekend in order to get away from college food for a couple of days, killing time on Sunday afternoon before catching the bus back to Melbourne, when there came a knock at the front door. At Fish Creek, nobody ever knocked on the front door. There on the doorstep stood Doctor Jim, whom we have previously mentioned in these pages, and the now missing-presumed-reclusive Michael Clark. They had spent the weekend at or in the vicinity of Wilson’s Promontory, and had kindly detoured on their way home to see if they could give me a lift back to the city.

Of course they could! The bus trip from Leongatha to Melbourne was always a dispiriting affair. If you weren’t covered in cigarette smoke (not all nostalgia, you see, is rose-coloured), you found yourself sitting next to somebody who knew somebody who knew you, and who wanted to talk about their personal problems for two hours when all you wanted to do was absorb yourself in “Midnight’s Children”, or “The Name of the Rose”, or “The Dispossessed”. Then, when the bus pulled into Spencer Street Station, after dark on a Sunday evening, the city was a desolate wasteland. This may seem hard for today’s young city-apartment dwellers to understand, but as recently as the mid-1980s Melbourne’s central city was almost entirely devoid of people from 1pm Saturday, when the shops shut, until Monday morning. The only signs of humanity on a Sunday night were fellow travellers returning to Melbourne after a weekend with the folks in the country; the permanently drunk; the presumably up-to-no-good; the mentally infirm and/or homeless. This made waiting for one of the infrequent connecting trams all the more depressing, and often caused one to choose to walk the lonely mile to one’s University digs.

So, this once, I was spared from that ordeal. Instead, an entertaining drive back to Melbourne ensued, featuring Hoffnung’s very silly “lecture”. I don’t know how many times we listened to it in that 90-minute journey, but it was certainly enough that, on my reacquaintance with it however many years later, it feels like being reunited with a long-lost, and much missed, friend.

Errant apostrophe of the week

Or month. Or century.

There it sits, prominently, at the foot of page two of this week's Sydney Morning Herald TV Guide, waiting to be seen by many, in striking, large, white-on-black letters, using a very attractive sans serif font. In an ad for some kind of navigation system. It says

Overtake the Jones'

Just like that. It has taken me a few days to determine whether, in my state of flabbergastedness, I was overlooking some kind of elaborate joke or pun. But no. It is, I am sure, wrong in every possible way.

Whichever advertising agency was involved (it looks too professional to be in-house) obviously wasn't able to use the navigation system concerned to find their way through the wild and tangled woods of the common apostrophe.

Pour Down Like Silver

Current listening

All eight discs of the complete Miles Davis live at the Plugged Nickel, 1965. They make it seem all so easy, you can be fooled into thinking that you could do it.

Various live recordings of Richard Thompson, legitimate and otherwise.

Second albums: “Portishead” by Portishead (about which, if work ever gives me a chance to do some writing of my own, more soon); “Secondhand Daylight” by Magazine (I was such a big big fan of that band; missed them by a year when they toured Australia, but then “Play” was released, easing the pain a little; could never understand the Roxy Music comparisons that seemed to permeate the English weeklies - I necessarily came late to Roxy (first album came out when I was eight years old - although my crazy Melbourne cousins had copies of “Siren” and “Country Life”, the covers of which were of some interest), and couldn’t be at all objective re Magazine, but could they not see beyond the fact that both bands had someone who could play the sax?); “Heaven Up Here” by Echo & the Bunnymen.

“The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall” by The Fall, which I had always relegated to the “second-rate Fall” category on account of its being swamped by the twin peaks of “This Nation’s Saving Grace” and “Bend-Sinister”. I now realise I made a big mistake, and have some catching up to do. There are passages that can only be describe as "beautiful". Who'da thunk it?

Anecdote

I spent today at work notwithstanding it was a public holiday in Canberra, so I took the boys in with me, one at a time, to provide some respite on the home front. Julius and I had a brief wander over to the National Gallery. He is fascinated by the Sidney Nolan series of “Ned Kelly” paintings upstairs. When we got back to my office he sat down and drew his own, very convincing, Ned Kelly picture using various shades of highlighter pen. He asked one of Justice Kirby’s associates to give it to the judge. Justice Kirby is known to the boys only as “Kirby”, as this is also the name of a Nintendo character. I wonder what kind of mental picture Jules has of the judge.

Wanted

If anybody has an MP3 or equivalent of “Coward of the County” as rended (sic) by Alvin and the Chipmunks, you will find our email address on the right-hand side of this page.

A few words (not mine) about "Sound of Silver" by LCD Soundsystem

What he said.

Ghost Who Walks Can Never Die

What drums say?

Hal Hartley lives; makes new film.

How To Do It

1. Do not tear this package.

2. Find the object. Break the small water-bag inside the package which will be full of air immediately. Drop the bag beside the object.

3. When the bag pop and air.

4. Eating prohibited.

The above being the instructions printed on the packaging of a mature and sophisticated "novelty" item, the Fart Bag ("BOOM"), which the boys brought home from a recent birthday party (thanks Lyn, thanks Rob).

Instruction 2 takes on added significance when the user realises that he has no idea what is the "object" referred to. I can read instruction 3 over and over with no diminution of pleasure. When the bag pop and air. That about says it all, really.

My Autumn's Done Come

You probably know the story of Lee Hazlewood. Lee isn't going to be with us for much longer. He has just released what is going to be his final album, "Cake or Death". It would be churlish to be critical of anybody in such circumstances, but in all honesty there is quite a bit of this record that, it seems to me, perhaps should not have seen the light of day.

However, by the time you get to the end of the last two songs on the disc, there will not be a dry eye in the house. Lee Hazlewood understands that music can do this. Misgivings about this record do not in any way undermine the legacy that he will leave to us. Thank you, cowboy.

Progress Report

So. I finished reading Ian McEwan’s “Amsterdam”. Can’t now understand how I could have taken so long to make a start with it. Aspiring novelists should both read and not read this book. Read it, because it is perhaps the closest thing to a “perfect” novel that I can think of: characterisation, plot, pacing, tension, place, time, anything else you care to mention. When the trademark McEwan shocks occur, you are not only there with the characters, you are inside their heads, feeling what they are feeling, which is something I last remember experiencing while reading “The Comfort of Strangers”, in 1986, lying on the lawn in Carlton Gardens, where the Melbourne Museum now sits, one afternoon, until it started to cool down and darken, whereupon I went back to the flat at 666 Lygon Street to finish it off. That is the only book I have ever read in one day.

Whereas aspiring novelists should, also, not read it, because it can only leave them with an overwhelming sense of “Man, why would I bother?”.

Meanwhile, readers of “serious” fiction who have been hearing about these things called “graphic novels”, but can’t quite get beyond the idea that they would never be seen dead reading comic books, might break the ice with “La Perdida” by Jessica Abel, a well-written, well-drawn story about a somewhat misguided and/or naive young woman who goes to Mexico to find her roots and instead gets into a bit of, er, trouble. Abel may not be in the same league, writing-wise, as McEwan, and she may also not be as great an artist as, say, Picasso, but the particular skill of being able to combine writing, and especially narrative, with a strong visual sense, is something rare, and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms. This book's relationship with superheroes does not exist. I read some of it on the bus, and some of it sitting in cafes, and the world didn’t end. Go on, be brave.

(I also, to keep things a bit lighter, romped through another hardcover work of graphic fiction, “Get A Life” by Dupuy-Berberian, an absolutely gorgeous collection of Monsieur Jean stories, translated from the French, and packaged to the exceptionally high standard we have come to expect from the good people at Drawn and Quarterly. For those of us whose next visit to Paris is some years away, it’s the next best thing to being there.)

“Stranger Than Fiction” is a better movie than you might think. I had never seen a Will Ferrell “vehicle”. The closest I have ever come is watching him interviewed by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show Global Edition” some months ago. I took him to be a glorified ham actor, but there is nothing hammy on show here; it is all very quiet and understated, perhaps bearing comparison with Adam Sandler’s surprise turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s last film. The story itself, meanwhile, is the kind of mess-with-your-head concoction that has appeared in recent years in films like “I [heart] Huckabees”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, and especially “Adaptation”. What the creators have done here, however, is to transpose these seemingly post-modern avant garde ideas into the mainstream, and they have done so in such a way that you don’t notice the joins. It won’t win any awards (although Dustin Hoffman should be noticed for his beautiful performance as a literature professor/sleuth, not a million miles away from the character he played in “Huckabees”) but there are plenty worse films out there at the moment.

Over in the world of the blogs, Woebot has, as you might expect, be the first of the old guard to embrace video streaming, if that’s what you call it, with Woebot TV, while over at his usual home he has posted a scantastic tale of his grandparents’ record collection, which would appear to bear a striking resemblance to that of my own parents. (No Winifred Atwell, though?)

Elsewhere, Mark K-Punk has finally put up the second and third parts of his too-difficult-by-half-but-that’s-how-we-like-it discourse on The Fall’s “pulp modernism”, while our man Tom Ewing has brought some much needed freshness to the frequently uninspiring pages of Pitchfork with a nicely meandering essay on the Beatles and the music-hall tradition. Marcello Carlin, meanwhile, has produced four consecutive pieces of writing that are up there with his best (which, of course, is way out of reach of us mere mortals), dealing, in turn, with the new Stooges album (and in the process totally nailing the fan’s urge to welcome any new, and especially any new and unexpected, material from a long-dormant favourite as a “stunning return to form” - yes, we all do it; I even had kind words to say once upon a time for the Howard DeVoto/Pete Shelley sub-Buzzcocks reunion album, the name of which I can no longer even recall, and the desire to hear which is zip), “Treasure” by the Cocteau Twins, an album which means more to me than almost any other album by any artist anywhere ever (i.e. it’s quite good), and, by way of two posts, Judee Sill, whose “The Kiss” destroys me every time I hear it. Good work, fella.

And a final mention to new blogger on the block, Sammy Harkham, comic-book creator and editor of the cutting-edge graphic anthology “Kramer’s Ergot”. Sammy is doing a fairly regular blog which is tied in with a Los Angeles store called “Family”, which I can’t help thinking I would spend way too much money in if I lived anywhere near it. Sammy’s blog is to some extent “advertising”, but it is sufficiently stand-alone, and he is such a natural at this blogging caper, that it merits a regular visit.

Oh, and I have also bought the Tom Waits triple-disc set “Orphans”, which will take a while to digest, and I would like to have bought the new David Kilgour except the guy behind the counter at Canberra’s “hippest” record shop had no clue who or what I was talking about. Sheesh. Dude is only a living legend ...

So, what have you been up to?

Where It's At

A friend writes to advise that she is about to undergo a kind of voluntary sonic colonic (solonic?) irrigation, flushing out all of the old music in her head to make way for new sounds. Or unheard or forgotten old sounds. What, she asks, should she be looking out for in 2007?

Well, I have given this some thought, and here is what I would be cramming my head with, if it were me.

First off, I find that a lot of what I am listening to at present is being made either by waif-like females (at least, they sound as if they should be waifs; some I cannot vouch for the way they look, as they remain little more than spectral digital presences): “Ys”, obviously, but she already knows about that; but also Marissa Nadler; Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton’s “Knives Don’t Have Your Back” and Neko Case’s “Fox Confessor Brings The Flood” (both being members of Broken Social Scene, perhaps suggesting that half the Canadian youth population are Scenesters, which may in fact be true) and, not so much waif as tough, Joan As Policewoman’s self-titled album; and, from an older school, records by Karen Dalton and Vashti Bunyan; or by what Mojo magazine, the home of dad rock, would be calling beardo folk, or New Weird America, or folktronica, or back to the Appalachians: by which I mean, I just can’t get enough of “Espers II”, “Brightblack Morning Light”, Six Organs of Admittance’s “The Sun Awakens”, Tunng’s “Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs”, and “To Find Me Gone” by Vetiver. To enter these records is to enter a world where time has stood more or less still, where new sounds are being made in the old ways, and old sounds are being made in the new ways.

Otherwise, I find myself at the moment skittering between shortlived “phases”. First there was my Led Zeppelin phase, inspired by watching Disc 1 of the “Led Zeppelin” DVD on a big TV on New Year’s Eve. This needs to be watched, not just for the music, but also for their youthful good looks, immaculate dress sense and superior hair care. Next, and still happening, is my Crosby Stills and Nash phase, brought on by accidentally hearing a couple of songs of theirs, “Dark Star” and “Wooden Ships”, on the download. Interestingly (to me), both of these were pockets of music I have looked down upon since I turned 15 and discovered 2JJ and New Musical Express. Which is perhaps my bad, although I wonder where I would be now if I had continued down the path that had me listening almost exclusively to Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Status Quo, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and so on. It probably wouldn’t be pretty.

In fact, I am feeling another phase coming along, and appropriately enough it is a Steve Reich phase (many of his earlier pieces had the word “Phase” in the title). Steve Reich would be very suitable for listening to if you were, say, working on a D Phil thesis and needed at once to concentrate and to have some music in your life. If you ask me, I would say start with “Music for 18 Musicians” (any version; I like the Nonesuch one from a couple of years back, but then that’s the one I have) and “Tehillim” and, maybe, the Deutsche Gramophon two-CD set that has “Drumming” as its centrepiece. The Necks can serve a similar purpose, buy you already know them.

I also think it is always a good time to revisit Tim Buckley. Right now, I would say that the time is right to dig back into “Dream Letter”, a double live CD (I have it on vinyl only, which leaves out a couple of songs from the concert) which I would like to think is still available, although now that you mention it I haven’t seen it around for a while.

Which is probably enough for now. Except to say that on a personal level, I am looking forward to new albums by Air, Au Revoire Simone, LCD Soundsystem, The Bird and The Bee, and Electrelane. But especially the new David Kilgour. It is always a good year when you have a new David Kilgour.

Make Love Not War

Introducing the Explosively Formed Penetrator.

Hmmmm.

(Don't) Rain (on my) Parade

I had the job of explaining to Julius (now aged seven) that Australia had lost the rain-damaged second one-day cricket final against England, and hence the series. As someone whose cricketing consciousness has developed at a time when, the 2005 Ashes debacle aside, Australia has been on top of the world, he was understandably disappointed and, in the tradition of Australian values and the notion of the "fair go", tried to find someone to blame. (He eventually settled on "the god of weather".)

Mr Duckworth and Mr Lewis (or is it Mr Duckworth-Lewis?) have devised a system which, though it seems able to deal with every possible eventuality, is inexplicable to seven-year-olds, and hence breaks one of my own ground rules: if you can't explain/justify something to your own children, then you probably shouldn't be doing it. (Okay, nobody mention d*wnl**ding music from the Int*rn*t.)

He insisted that the result was Not Fair, and I must admit I found it difficult to wholeheartedly disabuse him of that notion. (Although I did point out that finding themselves at 4/40 was not the fault of anyone but Australia's upper order.) It does seem, on the face of it, a bit skew-whiff [now there's a word you don't see enough of] when, after one rain interruption, the number of overs to be bowled is reduced by eight and the victory target is reduced by a mere 13 runs.

Nevertheless, as an aspiring young cricketer, the experience will do Jules some good. Hopefully it will also help the Australians, as they ramp up their preparations for the World Cup, the (as I pointed out to him) only one-day series that really means anything at all.

The final word is Jules's: "But we still have the Ashes, don't we?"

And here is the news

Let me reproduce for you, without permission but I'm sure they won't mind, the last paragraph of the editorial (they call it a "comment" for historical reasons) in this week's New Yorker (cover by David Heatley, by the way, well done that boy), written by Elizabeth Kolbert, whose work on climate change over the last two years has sent me into alternating waves of proselytising and abject despondency:

"Carbon dioxide is a by-product of just about every aspect of contemporary life—from driving and flying to farming and manufacturing and watching videos on YouTube. To reduce emissions by sixty per cent—or eighty per cent, as Senator Boxer advocates, or by two-thirds, as the McCain-Lieberman-Obama bill calls for—will thus require significant, and doubtless also disruptive, changes at every level of society. This may not seem an attractive prospect, but, as the latest I.P.C.C. report makes clear, change is not something that anyone at this point has a choice about. All that is at issue—and it is critically at issue—is how disastrous the change will be. Already enough CO2 has been pumped into the air to alter life on earth for thousands of years to come. To continue on our current path because the alternative seems like too much effort is not just shortsighted. It’s suicidal."

Whitney Bailliett R.I.P.

We are obliged to mark the passing of Whitney Bailliett, erstwhile New Yorker jazz critic, who, like the best of that magazine's critics (here we are thinking of, say, Lewis Mumford and Pauline Kael; there are others), called it as he saw it, and saw it very well. We weren't around in the late fifties, when Bailliett first appeared at the magazine, but we are willing to wager that not every writer for a major newspaper or magazine was as prepared to be thrilled and amazed by the new sounds of jazz as it evolved into, and beyond, bebop in what must have seemed to have been the blink of an eye. Even now, almost fifty years later, you go back and read one of his columns and feel compelled to rush out and listen to whatever it is he was writing about that week. And you just know that, if he liked it, it will still sound good.

Who Killed The Polar Bear?

We did!

Who killed the Great Barrier Reef?

We did!



Next!

David versus Goliath

Over the weekend I found myself reading, with rising anger, Joe Lelyveld's piece in the New York Review of Books about the mess in which America finds itself with its misguided (to put it kindly) policy of locking up foreigners, sorry "furrners", indefinitely, offshore, and without charge, in pursuit of the so-called War on Terror. Lelyveld, who as I understood it was supposed to have moved from the New York Times to the New Yorker, but who appeared once in the latter only to have vanished, Joseph Mitchell-style, ever since, puts in clear and rational terms the combination of barbarity, inhumanity and inextricability that can only lead to ever-larger chickens coming home to roost at some point in the future.

But for the Australian reader, concerned about the terrible plight of David Hicks and his total abandonment by his own government, this passage, written for purposes other than to highlight Hicks's predicament, does just that:

"In all, more than 250 Guantánamo prisoners have been repatriated. In some cases their release appears to have had more to do with diplomatic pressure applied by allied countries in which they had legal residence than with the facts of their particular cases."

Hello? Didn't we blindly march backwards into Iraq, side by side with America, without even waiting to be asked? Haven't we remained there, through thick and thin, as practically all other members of the "coalition" have seen Iraq revealed as America's own folly, and gone home? That doesn't seem to give us as much clout as I would have thought it would, particularly given the "special relationship". Or maybe nobody in Canberra has thought to test it out?

No, he only smells that way

I put on disc 1 of Tom Waits's "Orphans". After a few minutes, Jules says: Dad, who is this man singing?

I say: This is Tom Waits.

Jules says: Is he dead?

[I resist the urge to explain that, actually, Tom Waits sounded old when he was young, but that now, through some miraculous process of ageing backwards, he sounds like a young experimental noisemaker ready to take on the world on his own terms and tear it apart limb from limb. An almost-seven-year-old wouldn't understand.]

Astounding headline of the week

From The Age (and from memory):

"Hicks's mental state not an issue: Downer"

So, after letting the guy rot in Guantanamo Bay for five years you can confidently say, from your Canberra air-conditioned bunker, that David Hicks is as happy as Larry.

Since when is Australia's foreign minister a psychiatrist? How many sessions on the couch (or, more likely, the waterboard) did they have together?

Even assuming that "due process" would apply to any trial, which is now demonstrated not to be the case, wouldn't his mental state be a, if not the, crucial issue?

And I thought the government might just have been trying to come to terms with its appalling handling of this appalling matter. Not so: still the dissembling continues.

Against the grain

And speaking of the New York Review of Books, given the critical hammering that has by and large been meted out to Thomas Pynchon's "Against The Day", it was surprising, and also refreshing, to see it described by Luc Sante in such a way as to make it sound like something you would not so much want, as have, to read. (Sante tends to know of what he speaks; and his book "Low Life" is perenially near to top of my "books I really must read" list.)

(And while we are all about books, what is it with Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times? Three times, now, she has been guilty in recent months of describing something as reading like a parody of a book by the author she is reviewing: first the new Richard Ford novel, then "Against The Day", and now, in a review of the new Martin Amis, she has felt compelled to use the same description in relation to his previous novel, "Yellow Dog" (which I actually enjoyed, precisely because it read like a Martin Amis novel). Isn't such an observation (as well as being a cheap shot) as much a vindication of a writer's distinctive style as it is a criticism, if not more so? Isn't she really saying, "I don't like this book because I liked other books like this written by this person?" I mean, what if the new Thomas Pynchon read like a novel by, oh I don't know, Ben Elton? Would that make it alright? Just asking.)

(Of course, if Michiko Kakutani were reviewing the previous paragraph she would point to its excessive, and confusing, use of parentheses and say that it read like a parody of one of my paragraphs.)

Monopoly money

Strange coincidences abound. Yesterday I decided to plunge headlong into Mark Danner's long but essential article from the New York Review of Books in which he looks through the rear-view mirror to establish exactly how the United States could have convinced itself to invade Iraq, given how obvious the resulting diabolical mess now seems. Therein I found this sentence:

"If attaining true political authority depends on securing a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans would never achieve it in Iraq."

Securing a monopoly on legitimate violence. At first glance it seems to be describing the establishment of a police state, but it is in fact setting out a precondition for individual liberty, as long as it's the good guys who hold the monopoly (although words like "legitimate" can readily slide through one's fingers).

Anyway. There I was this afternoon, making good headway with Ian McEwan's "Saturday", when, on page 88, I read this:

"Holding the unruly, the thugs, in check is the famous 'common power' to keep all men in awe - a governing body, an arm of the state, freely granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence."

Okay, the phrase might well, for all I know, be covered in Lesson One of Political Science 101, but to stumble across it twice in 24 hours, well, you have to admit that's a tiny bit creepy.

(Yes, I have finally started "Saturday", after having suffered from reader's block for the best part of 12 months. I don't know what was stopping me from picking it up, but it has sat beside the bed, and sat, and sat, and in the meantime I haven't read any other novels because I wanted to read "Saturday" and didn't want anything else to get in the way. Oh, I torture myself sometimes. Well, after a gorgeously languid, yet meticulous, start, it suddenly opens out, around page 87, into a typically brilliant, stomach-tightening Ian McEwan set-up.)

Uncle Ray

Yesterday, one day after what would have been my mother’s 82nd birthday, her brother, Ray, my last surviving uncle, died. This news has, as usual, sent me into something of a tailspin of reflection and introspection.

He was 86. He and his wife, Margaret, were a pretty good team, and seem to have been able to keep each other going to what is a very good age. Although I haven’t seen them for a number of years on account of physical distance, we have kept in touch, and they seem to have been in quite good health (although, curiously, they both became diabetic late in life) and in full control of their faculties, although uncle Ray, I am told, had withdrawn into himself in the last little while.

Which might have been difficult for an outsider to notice. Ray was a quiet one at the best of times, a Hewson trait of which I am an inheritor (as was my own mother).

Ray was the survivor of the four Hewson children. For whatever reason, genetics, circumstances, or mere coincidence, none of his three sisters fared entirely well. Mavis, whom my mother spent some years looking after, contracted juvenile diabetes, went blind, and died young. Muriel, mother of the three Coulter boys, also died much too young (when Geoff, the youngest, was only a teenager; he spent some time living at our house, which I was too young to really remember); and mum died at 68, not that young, I suppose, but also not that old, and she had been in varying degrees of poor health for a number of years. Ray, however, was made of stronger stuff.

(As for myself, I don’t think I am a particularly well-made human being. I have had poor eyesight since at least the age of five; my spine is twisted at various angles; I have strange neurological symptoms consistent with, but not, apparently, amounting to, MS; and yesterday I scored 35 in a test in which anything over 28 is indicative of Asperger’s syndrome.)

Perhaps because of my status as an only child, I have never really understood families. I seem to have voluntarily estranged myself from most of my cousins on my father’s side, on account of bad things that happened after he died; and the Hewson side is prone to long silences and infrequent contact. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding that we have never really spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, I feel a strong sense of connection with my cousin Gay, Ray and Margaret’s daughter. Whether this is because we are both only children I couldn’t say, but it probably does have something to do with it.

Gay is a few years older than me, but not many, and we both were born to relatively old parents (for those times). She grew up in Dandenong, which was the closest part of Melbourne to our farm, so we did see them for a few hours at a time, from time to time, and stayed with them occasionally - enough for me to carry a number of lasting, but general and perhaps distorted by time, impressions. They had a caravan, a budgie called Marmaduke and a cat whose name now escapes me. Later, they built on an extra room, which came to be dominated by a billiard table which I was quick to gravitate towards whenever we paid them a visit. (Ray worked for a company called Southern Billiards, if I remember rightly, making billiard tables for a living; he was also a keen gardener and, after his retirement, a fine lawn bowler.) Gay had Stephen King novels in her room, and listened to David Bowie (whose surname Margaret insisted on pronouncing so that the “Bow” sounded like “bow wow”, much to Gay’s disgust - I suspect this was Margaret’s way of expressing her disapproval of this man who wore copious amounts of make-up, had coloured hair, and even wore dresses). They came to our house most years on Christmas day, along with the Coulter cousins. For a long time my prize possession was a postcard from Gay which was sent from Fiji, featuring a policeman wearing a white uniform, directing traffic. I have no idea what impression, if any, Gay formed about me: probably just that I seemed like a strange sort of kid from the country: which, I suppose, I was.

Specific memories? Only two, and one of those not so much a memory as a story.

When I was very young, maybe around five, Ray and Margaret took me out for the day, to what I now believe to have been Venus Bay (where Adrienne and I, much later, went for a long walk on that fateful weekend in 1989 when she first visited me in Leongatha). I was wearing a new pair of black shoes (new shoes, new anything, was something pretty special in my family). I was under strict instructions from Margaret not to get them wet. I was busy for some time playing at the water’s edge, lost in my thoughts and oblivious to anything else that may have been happening around me (such as the tide coming in). There was a shout and a severe reprimand from Margaret when it became obvious that my new shoes had indeed been immersed in the salt water, and who knows for how long? (But why was I not in bare feet like normal kids would have been?) I felt terrible, having failed to follow instructions and, I was led to believe, destroyed my new shoes into the bargain. No doubt I got into more trouble when I got home, but that I don’t remember at all, only my betrayal of my aunt and uncle, who had been good enough to take me to the beach in the first place, a treat which, in my own mind, I clearly didn’t deserve and which would never happen again.

Second, there is a story recounted by my mother of my cousin Max, one of the Coulter boys, at a young age, sitting on the floor at Ray’s feet, while Ray was, characteristically, sitting in an armchair, reading. They stayed there in complete silence for some time, until somebody, perhaps my mother, perhaps Muriel, Max’s mother, said to Max, “What are you doing, Max?”, to which Max replied, “Talking to uncle Ray.”

That story, while it may or may not be entirely true, certainly rings true. Ray is best remembered as a quiet figure sitting in an armchair, reading a magazine, a book or a newspaper, or doing a crossword, seemingly oblivious to events around him but in fact entirely attentive, making the occasional comment, always worth waiting for, and then going back to what he was doing. In some people this may have been considered rude, or arrogant, but Ray conveyed so much generosity of spirit, kindness and goodwill that he could get away with it. In fact, not just “get away with it”: it was who he was.

Spam Header of the Week

"Cow strife".

Specifically and individually targeted, no doubt, to the "farmer in the city".

Snake oil

Yesterday I picked up, second-hand, a copy of "Big Iron World", a rollicking 2006 record by Old Crow Medicine Show. It contains some fine pickin', fiddlin' and blowin', and is augmented by appearances by David Rawlings (who produced) on guitar, and Gillian Welch on drums(!). As Gillian fixes go, it's not much, but it was all we had (leaving aside the Robyn Hitchcock disc, which wasn't really in the ballpark). Which leads us to our hopes for 2007:

1. A new Gillian Welch album. Please please please. It's well past being about time.

2. The repatriation to Australia of David Hicks, freed from governmental interference and armed with a seven-figure book deal, which for once I wouldn't be in opposition to. Think about all you have done in the last five years. Whatever it is, even if nothing more than sitting in a chair and looking out the window, is more than Hicks has been allowed to do, in whatever appalling conditions he has been kept (and you would have to think that if the conditions were in fact better than we have been led to believe, someone in authority would have made that clear; that they haven't speaks volumes). So perhaps he was hell-bent on killing Americans; more likely he was a misguided young man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For which he has paid with a large chunk of his life and his mental health.

3. World peace and happiness. Obviously.

Happy New Year To You

Each year at Moistworks, Alex does a new-year mix. It is always a treat, and this year's is no exception.

Off you go, then.

Ho Ho Ho

Santa gave me a Batman Lego kit which includes a Lego Catwoman, looking stunningly curvaceous - well, in a blocky Lego kind of way - in skin-tight black leather (or maybe it's PVC) and carrying a whip.

I like Santa.

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.