Relieved, frankly, not to have been given a mauling on K-Punk’s site over the “Wyatting” thing (do I spy an Albatross winging its way toward me?), a post I read through my fingers while hiding behind the setee, much as I used to when the Sontarans came on the telly.

Why do I care so much? Well, let’s be frank, it’s probably due to the schoolboy-ish intellectual crush I have on the man and his works. I was trying to think of why I found the Blog so utterly compelling and the only word I could come up with was: “troubling”.

Yep. I love that Blog because it’s “troubling”, which seems counter-intuitive as our natural inclinations are apparently to avoid pain and seek pleasure (cue much debate as to exactly what those terms imply). So, maybe it’s only me, but somehow certain kinds of trouble (rent arrears, spousal infidelity, shadow on the lungs: NO. assumptions undermined, practices questioned, orientation recalibrated, universe enlarged: YES) are exactly what I’m looking for, indeed I would go even further, are what I feel it is in fact my DUTY to actively seek out. The fact is that my desire to be challenged is only growing as I get older and one of the wonderful things about the Blogosphere for me is the amount of unbelievably enriching, exciting thought that’s swimming around out there (the Pinocchio Theory, Different Maps, Subject Barred, the Measures Taken, infinite thought etc). It’s been and continues to be amazingly educational , troubling, in effect, in the most vital, most rewarding of ways.



I guess this means that, for me at least, the traditional wisdom that the natural movement of the soul is from youthful idealism to disillusioned middle aged (“ if you’re not a socialist at twenty there’s something wrong with your heart, if you’re still a socialist at thirty there’s something wrong with your head”, as my dad, a disillusioned ex shop-steward has been telling me twice a week for the past thirty six-years) and then on to a kind of Zen-like acceptance, in your twilight years, of man and his foibles, (“what fools these mortals be!”) is, in the current situation, actually reversed. I feel myself moving ever closer to the kind of idealism and engagement that evaded me in my youth, in fact that “maturity” is represented not by increasing “acceptance” but by the process of rejection, that the movement toward “disillusion” in the context of liberal tolerance is a return to “belief” and I think that all my longer fiction (at least the last two and the current, still unfinished, one) have been precisely about this, the disillusion/dissolution of disillusion itself. I don’t mean some kind of clapped-out PO-MO “re-enchantment” with the world or “ Spirituality” as a sop for the ugly brutalities of early twenty- first century life (see World’s Most Aggravating Film,“ What the !$%* do we know?” (Even that title, suggesting the propriety of awestruck quietism in the face of the imponderable Universe. GAHHH! “But why do I have to work two jobs on minimum- wage with no employment rights and…” “ SHUSH child, unfold your antennae and attune yourself to Music of the Cosmos! Is it not rapturous?”)) but rather that the struggle toward belief is not for the relief it offers as a closure to the agonies of thought but is an attempt to find a solid grounding for action, political action, ethical action. I tend to try and figure things out through fiction, and the tensions, knots and impasses that I encounter in arguing with myself through the intermediary of invented others is the way that I’m moving closer to a “ position” on things. This sounds hopelessly weak, (what do you stand for, man!) and in fact it is, which is again why I think in the last two longer pieces I wrote, both of the central characters are men trying to give up “writing” (writing is a kind of symptom of a deeper sickness, I’m sure there’s been a lot of interesting stuff written on this and I’d be really grateful if someone could point me toward it. I also found myself describing music as “ the last of my vices” to my sister on the phone the other day. Hmmm! ) and why I had this anti-writers rant by The Lapsed Writer in “White Diaspora.”


"No more. No more. You’ve written enough, you’ve pursued this empty, idle myth of yourself for long enough. It’s a sham existence. The life of your mind. Your great thoughts, your art. People do more, with the sweat of their brows in an eight-hour day’s work, to affect the world, to change lives, to connect.
Accept it. Maybe there was a time when art could change the world. Thought. Literature. But not any more. Now it’s just entertainment, or decoration, or academic point scoring. Yeah, yeah, sure, it’s the repository of the permanent truths of the human condition and all that stuff that transcends the local and temporal vagaries of era and culture, but also allows us to understand the social/historical context in which a previous generation, blah de blah, blah. And all that.
Great, nothing wrong with that, but maybe first, if you truly are interested in life, you should try and help to sort the world out somehow. This is what Adorno meant when he said, no poetry after Auschwitz. Until the problem of the world is solved, until the poem of the world is perfected, the lesser forms of writing, the ones that exist as words on paper instead of actions that twist the currents and mutate the structure of the world, are trivial. Not that no poetry is possible, but that there should be a moral injunction against it, that the best minds must, that the refined sensibilities that, whatever, that those who care about life must bend all their effort toward the shaping of the world. That literature is debased, diluted politics, impotent, ersatz. That politics is literature by other means. Higher means. Politics is to literature as war is to peace.
And as for writers….
Writers are hermetic and cowardly, the most vain and absurd of creatures. Writers are always pacifists aren’t they, always conscientious fucking objectors. Only the Active have the right to call themselves artists, they shape the reality that the lesser artists rebels against or affirms, the context in which he reflects, acts, feels and records his condition.
How many more paintings do we need, how many more novels?
How many more movies? Who needs your books? Whose life will be worse without them? What will be lost to the world?
Something so minuscule it’s unworthy of consideration.
A man can spend his time more productively than that."

So I guess I would say that I’m trying to write myself out of writing, or at least that fiction is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake, and that the awakening is an awakening into action. In this struggle with myself I feel that certain people (k –punk being one ) are on the side of the healthier, more noble side of that within me which is fighting against me. The side I want to win.

On my daily, post-work "pound" through my local second-hand record shop I came across a few bargains that I would have bought were it not for the fact that I own them already: "I" by arkane (a Monster of an LP!) for two quid and various bits of Indy-shmindy stuff :Crooked Rain, Deserter's Songs, Spiritulized Electric Mainline and Blowback by Tricky ( much reviled, personally i love it) all for a quid.

Not the world's most exciting selection of slightly scratched cds (except for that arkane mutha, of course) but it occured to me that probably someone would be grateful to know they were there so they could pop in and buy them... if only there was a way I could let my fellow sufferers know .. then in a flash of inspiration it hit me: " but Carl, you can! Remember the power of the internet and its unregulatable info- flow before which dictators tremble and the Very Face of Kapital itself blanches ) wouldn't it be great if there was a site where people could philanthropically post info about bargains they've just spotted but already own, seriously underpriced records and so on......might we not join together as one, sharing a common vision!

ergo, ladies and gentlemen i give you this....

http://thequidditch.blogspot.com/

probably something very similar already exists....but if it doesn't, feel free to make the most of it.. username and password are there so anyone who wants to start posting.....off you go.... and any more technically adept potential users who could find someway of grouping the info, by all means do so...spread the word far and wide.. scratch that Quidditch till it bleeds!

Nice to see that Simon Reynold’s lovely erstwhile research assistant Geeta (how do you know she’s lovely, smirking phallocrat?! Ok, err..minging research assistant then.. err…*panics*) is also a “bargain hunter” reluctant to shell out more than a dollar on a record (yes folks, at the current exchange rate that’s 0.539375 GBP! Respect! Tighten up yer own nasty belt, ghal!) and presumably we are just the tip of the iceberg, the first of a massive subterranean movement to come up out of the trenches, waving our Cheap-Flag, unashamedly dedicated to spending as little of our (in my case only moderately) hard-earned moolah on the poxy bloody “Kulture” that THEY ( yes that’s right THEM , AGAIN!) have addicted US to.

Don’t know exactly what Geeta’s motives are but mine are basically the fact that its so easy to get so much stuff for free that paying for it seems wrong, somehow against the spirit of the times and also that I’m increasingly less and less selective, or maybe less and less trusting in hype and critical-consensus (“What kind of stuff are you into?” “Two-quid stuff.”) and more keen to take absurd low-cost gambles. Godley and Crème’s “L” anyone? Van Dyke Park’s pastiche Light-Opera “Tokyo Rose?” (probably Stephen Merritt’s favourite LP, or something.)

I think it’s also oddly that, even though I have never been anywhere near a pair of “Dexs” and have yet to be initiated in even the most basic precepts of the arcane art of “Mixology” I spend my entire time creating mixes in my head and am actually, on any given disc looking for just one track, one perfect track of ideally really suprising provenance ( “you mean this is actually Bruce Forsyth? I could have sworn it was early Omni- trio!”) that I can fold into say “Dark Congo Rain Mix” or “ Industrial Dub-wound” or “Folkgabba.”

However, point remains that there must be a term for this kind of behaviour, whatever its motives. I see a semantic gap, mate, I fill it, common sense, innit? Initially I went for “Pounding” as in “ I’ve been pounding up and down Berwick street all day” or “ I gave Southend Oxfam’s tape section a good pounding the other day” “ Your missus never says no to a spot of pounding of a Sunday afternoon, does she Jezz?” etc. However, after sober consideration I’ve decided that the complaint itself, rather than the activity should be what were looking to define, I therefore suggest (with no apologies whatsoever to J.KKK.Rowling) “Quidditch” as in, “I’m off down to the bargain basement to scratch the old Quidditch.”

Talking of all things Merritt-tricious, just heard The Divine Comedy’s version of “Party Fears Two” (and then had to sluice the original round me lugholes thirteen or so times in order to rinse Hannon’s version away) however even at that remove it’s impossible not to be struck by the sheer abandoned, desperate… well… fear of the end of love and the collapse into bingeing and burnout in the lyrics, it really is a hell of song isn’t it? Puts a sheet of ice up your spine even when being nasaled-up horribly by those unfit to suck the spilled claret from the hem of Billy Mackenzie’s magnificently purple cape

Warning: those with low adjective-tolerance levels may wish to look away now.
My attitude to prose has always been: any colour, so long as it’s purple.

So it’s only the second listening thus far of Juana Molina’s new album “Son” but I feel it’s safe to say, with typical modest understatement, that my initial impressions were correct and it is in fact an UTTER MASTERPEICE and precisely what I wanted/wished and hey, even dreamed it would be.

Ironically, a few days after posting that these days everything feels faintly tinged with might have/should have been…the inevitable corollary of eclecticism being that everything tends to sound insufficiently like something else to be truly satisfying, along comes an album that sounds like nothing else and represents the fullest realization of an already hugely talented, (gulp) artist, an extension of and a deepening of her previous work.

Whereas Tres Cosas and Segundo were definitely collections of “Songs”, “Son” is much more like a suite, one long, emollient, pastel-coloured, vary-focus drift. The more orthodox structures of the earlier LPs have ruptured here or more likely been gently corroded from within (the Impostume!) by the thick currents of candy-coloured psychedelia that were lapping at the underside and edges of her sound from the start, a pink and sweetly corrosive fluid that here comes eating through the superstructure, partially collapsing it and gently carrying it away as along it all flows, twists, bends, warps, involutes, bubbles and overflows. Tracks melt into each like the colours in a block of softening Neapolitan ice-cream, the guitar surfaces and then recedes, snatches of melody dissolve into long, pitch bent glitch-riffled drones and off-key keenings, Juana multi-tracking her scat-sung vocals and scattering them through the mix, rhythms surging up to clatter and pulse, field-recordings leaking in, birds song , animals, mewling, a child at play.

There’s a maternal quality to all of Juana's stuff, (her mother is a famous actress, if that means anything) and the sense of a matrilineal descent, of songs written for and about mothers, grand-daughters and especially in this case, Juana’s daughter is strongly present in all her work ( “no seas antipatica con tu mama!”(don’t be cruel/unfriendly/hostile to your mum!) Juana chides her daughter on one track)) earlier tracks name-check her grandmother ( “ROGGUNFUGGINROLL!”) and somehow I’m always struck by the idea that Juana is trying to communicate with her child, to enter the world that poor old Agnetha had so much difficulty getting into in “ Slipping through my fingers”. All the usual “wombadelia” motifs are here, organic pulsing , uterine soft-focus shiftings , roseate womb-warmth and pre-linguistic, polymorphously perverse babbleogues of Chora-l crooning. If it’s reminiscent of anything at all it’s the worlds of “ Starsailor” and “69” and “ Bitches Brew” (and is the equal of those works. Sez me! Alright!?), worlds in which the boundaries have yet to solidify, the contours stand out sharply, or the senses separate. The world of the very young ( or the inveterate Ketamin and Special Brew abuser) where gravity is difficult to control and everything pitches and yaws away from you, where articulating a word is a mysteriously effortful undertaking of uncertain result and where, as of yet the sense of self as distinct from the world hasn’t taken hold. If Juana Molina’s stuff reminds me of anyone outside the sphere of music, it’s actually Dylan Thomas with his numerous attempts to somehow portray the very early, pre-linguistic stages of perception:

“All world was one, one windy nothing,

My world was christened in a stream of milk.

And earth and sky were as one airy light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot,

the lifting Hand, the breaking of the hair,

From the first secret of the heart, the warning ghost,

And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,

The sun was red, the moon was grey,

The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.”

“From Love’s First Fever to Her Plague”

Unreservedly recommended, and certainly worth two quid of anyone’s money. Hell; I’ll make an exception for something this good, let's push the boat out, I’ll go so far as say it’s worth three.

Currently reading :Yellow Dog by Martin Amis.

Why?

Well, it was a mere two quid from one of Greenwich’s many remaindered bookshops. My choice of everything “Kultural” these days seems to depend on whether it breaks the all-important two-quid threshold. In fact I seem to have developed something of a reputation for, errr.. let’s say thriftiness.. around the Barrios second- hand and discount shops.

Recently, for example, the terrible moment arrived (I have highly developed gag-reflex when it comes to swallowing my pride) in which I had to ask what the track they were playing in my local Music and Video Exchange was. Had to! Generally this is something I desperately try to avoid doing, usually attempting to figure out who the artist is through a process of deduction/elimination as I flick through some section or other, ears on the alert for tell-tale, ego-salvaging clues, a chorus, a reference, a self-reference if it’s hip hop or dancehall. ("T.O.K an BEENIE MON, GIVIN YA SUMTIN SPECIAL!! TOK and Beenie Man, then is it? Thank you very much lads!)

The fact is that I’ve still never really recovered from the trauma of asking the gorgeous, dredlocked princess behind the counter of Jumbo records in Leeds, circa 1990, what this absolutely amazing, totally essential bit of Vinyl was, only to be told, “ERRRR, it’s Slint!?” with an air of amused and weary condescension.

This time they informed me that it was a Phil Spectre production (“ I knew that, you pathetic fools! THAT'S WHY I’M ASKIN!!!!” I gloated inwardly, nodding sagely, with an indulgent smile on my face) of some otherwise-cheesy Sixties pipe-and-rocking-chair crooner, some species of Williams or Doonican. Naturally being more mature and self-possessed than in my callow youth, and with the consolation that, well, really I was asking on my sister’s behalf as she is a big fan of all things Wall-of-Sound-y I felt I handled this potentially difficult admission of NOT KNOWING SOMETHING especially NOT KNOWING SOMETHING ABOUT MUSIC with the easy humility that befits my advancing years. Everything would have been fine were it not for the, to my mind gratuitous follow up comment as I perused the CD case that, “ it costs more than a quid though, mate.”

Oh, Record Shoppe what a Crucible thou art!

Currently listening to: New York Downtown Sounds: an Organic Mix of music from the Knitting Factory.

Yep, it cost me a quid!

It’s actually a bit of an oil-and-water mix of Illbient (currently known as Dubstep) Improv and Postrock, that’s about as “Organic” as a packet of Skittles washed down with Sunny Delight. Not to say that there isn’t some tremendous stuff on there, of course. The problem I have with this, the problem that I have with everything, is that of course I immediately imagine how much better it would be if it were different in some way. In other words everything I listen too, watch or read immediately feels like the lost possibility of something more interesting that it might have been but which now only exists in my head. So all the time I’m listening to something super-eclectic I tend to think, “ oh, this needs to be more consistent” or “ oh no, it should go in a different direction, now” whereas anything relentlessly mono-themed i.e. Cell Recordings Volume One mixed by Temper D (quid!) immediately has me thinking, “ right, so is it just going to do this for a AN HOUR, is it?” This means that I do of course get maximum value for my quid as any given mix is always surrounded by several phantom mixes that whirl about and around the actual mix, spawning multiple mini-mixes and ramifying endlessly as they go along.

Doesn’t this happen to everyone? Whenever I see any post-rock gigs I spend my entire time writing lyrics in my head and singing along to the various portentous noodles and thrums, thinking how much they’d be improved by a vocalist and a bit of poetry, a human touch, GET A SINGER! Whereas when I see three-minute Indy bands (rare for me these days, I have to admit) I immediately curse their lack of ambition and want them to stretch out and break the template and stop being so personality driven. DUMP THE SINGER!

Is Yellow Dog any good? It’s…well let’s just say its pretty UNEVEN and coming straight into it after reading Andrew Miller’s brilliantly honed, elegant and elegaic Oxygen (yes ALRIGHT it cost TWO QUID too!) Yellow Dog can’t help but feel a bit fatuous and a bit try-hard in the Hip stakes, a bit forced in its attempts at pungent satire, a bit schoolboy-ish, really. It’s hard to know whether there will ever be a Mature Amis, or whether effectively he’ll always be the slightly noisome undergraduate of the Rachael Papers. Of course its very readable, partly because parts of it are so monstrously misjudged, and probably not deserving of the all-out odium it attracted but already I sense it may not be a finisher. Especially when both The Book of Disquiet and the Sea are still sitting and waiting on the mantelpiece.

looking forward to: Volver.
Junior Boys.

Good to see this is online again....


http://www.dreamingmethods.com/


now i just have to finish Jason Phereus..

By way of an introduction.......

(please note: interview took place prior to Petridish Anti-Wyatting rant)


1.what is your age, job and home-town.

I am an unfashionable thirty-six, an English teacher and i currently live in London, originally i'm from.. wait for it.. Barrow-in-Furness..

My cadre of hardened Wyatters are all drawn from the lower end of the social spectrum, one of whom can legitimately claim to be from an underclass background ( taken into care along with his five siblings at a young age) and another of whom, now in his sixties, was illiterate until he was fifteen.. my own Northern, working class background makes me pretty much the Toff of the group.

2. can I have your permission to use what you sent in to Simon Reynolds' weblog (This will save time. And if there's anything you sent him which he didn't put up, perhaps you could forward it

Yeah of course you can and no i didn't send him anything additional

3. Which particular pub do you Wyatt at (I'd like to interview the owner - but I promise I won't blow your cover by either directly asking him about Wyatting or using the name of the pub in the article.)

We use XXXXXX in Ramsgate… if he has any idea about our activities i'll be surprised!

4. What would you say to accusations that this kind of prank is childish and annoying (I should emphasise this won't be the line I take)

Ahhh..well...i would say that it is childish and annoying, but that's precisely its appeal. it is a prank, we live in a very prank-y culture...spoof interviews, hidden camera, Jackass etc.. so there’s no point denying the underlying appeal of the mindless, mildly antisocial act, the wind up, the piss take, the delight in another’s confusion etc.....

However I can partially exonerate myself by saying that at least I'm not simply passively observing others being wound up on my behalf from a safe distance but actually risking the possibility of a perfectly justified smack in the teeth.... I mean if you are going to put all four sides of Swans "Public Castration is a Good Idea" on (should you find it, of course) there's no leaving the pub before its finished for the truly committed Wyatter!

5. Is Wyatting just revenge for overbearing people playing bad music in school common rooms?

Here's how it is.. there are those who doubtless object to the whole white middle class Musos sneering at the working class etc kind of thing, however being working class or at least from working class backgrounds ourselves we don't partake of that horribly sentimentalized middle class viewpoint that its horrendous to sneer at "normal" people and disrupt their "normal" perfectly harmless Friday nights out etc, we've stood quaking in chippies in depressed provincial towns at chucking out time as the lads go on the rampage, had our heads kicked in at Margate bus stops for having pink hair etc.....

If it's expressive of anything its probably of our love/hate relationship with the class that we were always estranged from but for which none the less we continue to nurture a kind of angry hope..we are appallingly conflicted ourselves.. there is for us a particular heightened poignancy in, for example, putting on card-carrying-Commie Robert Wyatt's exquisite version of "Red Flag" in a pub full of pissed-up Proles and watching them pull faces and shout to have it turned off... a particularly bitter amusement, compounded of many emotions...

On one hand we want to liberate them by sneaking the unknown into their lives, but we don't know what benefit it will bring them...... what good has it done us after all if the best thing we can find to do with our time is dream up new monthly excruciations for the unlucky punters in our local....on another we want to punish them for having made our lives miserable. For being so simple and being good at things that always eluded us (being tough, good at football, getting the girls) and for which we secretly yearned.... Not everyone will have the same motives of course... ours are vague, certainly illegitimate and confused... I have a friend who is using Wyatting to discover what aspects of modern music are finally inassimilable into the sensibilities of the po-mo, omnivorous pop-savvy middle classes by undertaking a series of Wyatts in Hoxton/Shoreditch.... how do you Wyatt a bar full of Resonance FM listeners.... a bar full of super eclectic, super ironic Fashionistas (I'm guessing M-People's " Elegant Slumming", is pretty much the key.)