So that was the Bank Holiday weekend, then.

Some went to the Carnival, some (the missus) went to Barcelona, others got together with friends and family for sundry social purposes. Muggins ‘ere turned his back on all that in order to spend seventy two hours “ writing” and produced about a thousand not-very-good words. Of course this thousand words was liberally interspersed with e-mail checking, tea making (and numerous subsequent trips to the toilet), searching through piles of CDs for that essential spur to the creative process and resultant distractions, ( “Must just read the sleeve notes to this Thin White Rope b-sides and live rarities compilation.”) inevitable, no-nonsense, no-more-distractions fact-checking internet missions that were almost immediately hijacked by whimsical impulses ( “I wonder how much David Thomas actually weighs? Perhaps it’s on the Ubu site. Perhaps I’ll be able to find out the population of Indonesia on the Resonance FM forum…”) vital forays to the corner shop and Blockbusters just to buy biscuits and find someone to talk to plus long periods of gazing despairingly at the monitor, saying, “This is rubbish anyway, it’s incoherent, juvenile, asinine, and no-one wants to read this stuff. Where is this going? Just scrap it and write something else/ what’s the point anyway? Why don’t you just pack it in and live life!!!!!” which naturally alternated with, “ You’ve come this far and now you want to turn back, typical, gutless whingeing, you never complete anything. Do IT!!! Prove them all wrong!!!! Prove yourself wrong!!!!! This will be a masterpiece!!!!!” and the inevitable half-hourly litany of, “ Right, at X o’clock I’m going to knuckle down and get seven/six/five/four/ solid hours work in before lunch/dinner/bed, finally culminating in the “it’s a bit late now, might as well watch a DVD”, followed by looks of steely resolution to self in bathroom mirror while cleaning teeth and the absolute certainty that tomorrow is THE day. Yes!

Hmmm. What is it with me and high-pitched, bare-chested blokes in big hats? (hang on...is that his hair?)

God bless you Caetano for giving us not just the magisterially monged-out "Araca Azul", (Tropicalia's "Starsailor"?) but also the greatest cover of all time

Caetano Veloso - Cucurrucucu Paloma

Obvioulsy not up there with "You're In A Bad Way" or like, the works of Dubstar or whoever, but y'know.....

crappy translation (and this really ISN'T an attempt at false modesty) follows below...

Dicen que por las noches
no más se le iba en puro llorar.
Dicen que no comía,
no más se le iba en puro tomar.
Juran que el mismo cielo se estremecía al oír su llanto.

¡Cómo sufrió por ella, que hasta su muerte la fue llamando!

"Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay", cantaba.
"Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay", gemía.
"Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay", cantaba.
De pasión mortal moría.

Que una paloma triste muy de mañana le va a cantar
a la casita sola con las puertitas de par en par.
Juran que esa paloma no es otra cosa más que su alma,
que él todavía la espera a que regrese, la desdichada.

Cucurrucucú, paloma, cucurrucucú, no llores.

Las piedras jamás, paloma,
qué van a saber de amores.

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,
paloma, ya no le llores.

They say that in the evenings
he could do nothing more than cry

they say he woudnt eat ,
and could do nothing more than drink

the swear that the sky itself
used to tremble at the sound of his cry

how much he suffered for her
and even in his death he was calling out to her

"Ay Ay, Ay, Ay" he'd sing
"Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay" he'd groan
"Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay" he'd sing
and of mortal passion, he would die

a sad dove, early in the morning begins to sing,
outside the little house with its doors ajar
they swear that this dove is nothing less than his soul
that still waits for her, the desolate ones, return

Cucurrucucú, dove,Cucurrucucú, don't cry.

the stones, will never, litle dove
know anything about lovers

Cucurrucucú, dove, dont cry

Certainly an appalling (non) translation, but you get the gist. There are some truly amazing up-tempo, yodelling Mariachi versions around too.

the final line (spoken) is " this Caetano has set my hair on end." Mine too, mate.

Essential veiwing!

http://www.dreamingmethods.com/film/index.html

The Impostume shall have more to say on this man's work shortly. In the meantime however it should be getting on with some of its own.

Mahavish"NO MORE!!!!"chestra!

How many insanely scratched M.O/John McLaughlin CDs can one slightly worse for wear Blogger pick up for a quid a pop of a sultry Friday evening wending (read: wincing and staggering) his way home from work? Yep, that’s right, SIX!. Jesus Christ. And what about a couple of rather florid Herbie Hancock CDs? CHECK! Or a “Return to forever, featuring Chick Corea,” CD (first tack title “ Vulcan worlds”!). CHECK! Yep it’s Spacejazzprog weekend round at Impostume Heights, with liberal smatterings of ermm… Primus ( Oh, I’m SOOO sorry, yes, that’s right, "Primus". I haven’t got a leg to stand on really, have I? However, I stoically refuse to accept the concept of “ guilty pleasures.”) Incubus ( bloody awful actually, I’m listening to it at the mo… give me Tool or the Deftones/Team Sleep any day, Linkin Park (gluagh!) with a few bits of obtrusive scratching and "ambient" synth-drone plastered around the edges to make it seem “smarter”, basically) CSS (errr.. not a patch on Out-Hud vibe-wise or even Brassy sass-wise (whatever happened to Brassy, they were friggin’ great!)) Janet Jackson and something called “Mutations: Sonic City” which features a track by Merzbow among a lot of rather theoretical types, including some Goldsmith's MA students (say whut?) and a track entitled “An abstract model for something that, In Intervals, Occurs all the time.” (Feel free to insert suitably derisory comment of own (ie.. errr.. flatulence…??? Rectal spasms? etc) between these brackets). I listened to the Merzbow track and my immediate feeling was one of Utter Fatigue, he might have hit an unsurpassable boundry (and painted himself into a corner) sonic extremism-wise but let’s face it, here’s a man whose output makes The Ramones look diverse. Alright, we’ve got the point, now do something else, already !!!

There was a really brilliant release, entitled “ Extreme Music from Africa” out on Susan Lawley a couple of years ago that basically pissed all over Merzbow ( I suspect he’d love that!) and his ilk as it brought in drums/rhythms to the mix (and not some cheesy, Digital Hardcore splatter-core stuff) but a series of revolving, interlocking/interacting rhythm patterns spinning at different speeds, like a couple of huge, multicoloured cogs. “Extremism” generally seems to equate to piercing/fast but that release ( while it had its share of that stuff too) in a couple of instances seemed to point to a different set of ideas and practices, a new set of possibilities…. so the question is .. why haven’t I got a copy?

Ok. The seven hour Mahavishnu-thon has just begun, with “Love, Devotion, Surrender,” by Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin ( Jan Hammer on keyboards!) I’m sitting here in full Druidic pomp wearing a flowing white robe, my hair luxuriating floorward in sylvan folds (I wish!) and my eyes apprehending that which lies beyond, giving of myself not only to that which is both one and is also not one, to that which is also both child and not child, to that which is not only the Yin but also the Yang, not only the sacred Cheech but also the ineffable Chong, etc…

An exhortation to ruinous giving!

Currently reading “The Sea,” by John Banville ( Haven’t finished “Yellow Dog” yet, I confess). What can I say, a humbling experience as per bloody usual (“just give up, you’ll never be able to do THIS, will you,?” he seems to be whispering in my ear as I read). Read a couple of interviews about his Booker win last year and was amazed to discover that his novels, in general, sell around about 5, 000 copies. I can’t believe it’s so few. So, he must make virtually nothing from his work. Same thing applies to say, Andrew Crumey (not quite of Banville’s stature I hasten to add, but who, in fact moved out of a house in Leeds just as I moved in many moons ago and who seems to be a thoroughly lovely chap) who was long listed for the Booker, nominated one of Granta’s best young novelists etc and couldn’t give up his day job either, until he won a substantial writing prize. So what is the point, I ask myself again, in aiming at orthodox publication when, (although, I have many other reservations too) if you’re writing fairly non-mainstream stuff you’ll actually probably make a few grand at most from it? I’d rather just give it away again (the next one, “Jason Phereus”, on which I’m about to resume work, after a work and blog-heavy hiatus).

A certain point was brought home to me quite clearly a few years ago at a tedious dinner party with a group of other, self-appointed “creative” people. People who like to introduce themselves as "film-makers", "musicians" etc even though they all make a living doing other things. I like to introduce myself as an English teacher. I really hate this idea that if you're not "creative" somehow you should be ashamed. It's the Donald Barthelme thing, what's wrong with being a waiter/teacher/accountant, especially when we're glutted with mediocre kulcha/self expression/theorizing/criticism. Being a self-styled "writer" these days carries (or should carry) the same cache as being a Bricky did thirty years ago.

I explained that I was writing a book about a man whose family is killed (or who kills them) and who then spends all his time wanking over home-made videos of young girls etc, that I wrote a book that went backwards halfway through, blah, blah, that my first one was about a man who brought his dead girlfriend back to life and had a child with her via a bit of pre-resurrection necrophilia. Not a trace of shock or concern on the assembled faces re: my daringly near the (five) knuckle (shuffle) content. When I suggested that I wasn’t going to be looking for an agent for my latest and that I was already selling the other one non-profit on the Internet there was, however, general horror and consternation, even outrage. It reinforced to me that the most shocking thing you could do as an “artist” was undercut the profit-motive, content won’t shock anymore, you’re not going to cause any scandals and bring the bourgeoisie to apoplexy with your art that way, (“raped babies, you say? Could go down well with the Thailand package-tour contingent, something for the beach, maybe?”) but what really disturbs, what really can’t be assimilated is not your content, but the use you make of your own product, the principle of the gift, the act of giving, the social, generous use of your work. Not that, “oh well, you can’t sell it so you might as well give it away” thing, but that you might write it with the intention of giving it away. That you might want to write in order to have something to give.

Fun!

Prague’s Most Poisonous Ex-Pat sends me the following, uncharacteristically moderate message:

“I've just ordered a load of bollocks off these fascist bastards, hopefully it'll cost them loads of money. Terrorise neocon scum!”

and the following link…


http://syndicated.livejournal.com/warrenelliscom/715657.html

Pass it on!

Breaking news!!!!

Five time Coventry’s Angriest Man winner, Ashley (currently Prague’s Most Poisonous Ex-Pat, a title he holds for life, apparently) informs me that The Impostume is now in the hands of Shudder to Think’s ex-bassist Stuart Hill (friend of a friend, apparently) and may perhaps eventually find itself to the Wedren himself (in whatever dark cave/ steamy jungle enclosure the great fleecy, multi-octaved beast is currently slumbering), thus through the magic of the internet the sins of ten year’s past may be expiated!

Ashley also informs me that an essential addition to the proto-Wyatting tape was “Partially Submerged” by Cabaret Voltaire. I can hardly remember it but apparently, “About 2 thirds of the way through the several minute epic an 808 hi hat comes in and goes tk-a-tss, tk-a-tss for about 5 seconds for no reason at all (maybe to torture us with some hope of listenability), and then disappears again, leaving the relentlessly ugly blob of sound that preceded it.”

Ahh, the Cabs!

The Impostume’s most devoted correspondee the lovely Sam (how do you know he’s lovely, smirking…err.. hang on, hang on...I’ve seen him, alright!!!) at blogglebumcage wonders (and possibly worries) about my Etienne attack, (it was a slow Sunday afternoon round Impostume Heights, frankly, Sam) and poses a few questions/ rebuttals. Which I shall address below...

Why are Saint Etienne evil but Jonathon Richman isn’t?

One word: Smugness!

Another word: Poetry: “ Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste.” (A heartbreaking plea) Versus “ Hug my soul” ( can you see the fluffy, heart- shaped teddies cuddling???)

Can Saint Etienne be politically correct if they’re not multi-ethnic?

Another (several) word (s). Yeah, I reckon so. Plus I don’t know how “white” their sound is, it’s certainly dance-orientated, non-riffy, un-hairy, Disco-derived. If you mean “white” in the sense that it’s down the line from Kraftwerk then I guess Afrika Bambaattaa could be making “white” music too. I guess the Riot Girl/ Bikini Kill stuff was also P.C and pointedly rock, so I don’t think the boundaries are all that fixed.

Isn’t childishness good?

I’m not sure it’s childishness per se that I object too. In fact, it’s not, but rather,… well… “Twin Infinitives” by Royal Trux is a fantastically childish record for example, the sound of a couple of very smart, talented and presumably somewhat wasted junkies really just playing around with no regard whatsoever for the rules/values etc. ( The Residents have that whole sense of joyful play and experiment too.) When they (the Trux) got more “adult” (and less “self-indulgent”) they got a lot less interesting in some ways. It’s the version/ notion of childishness I guess. A liberated, childishness-as-praxis, Mess-thetics , versus prettiest little-prince/princess in the school play cuteness.

Actually, I probably have a lot more to say on this, ( a veiled w ay of suggesting that I may not actually have thought about it enough at this stage, speak first, think later has always been my approach, I’m afraid ) but should save it for an entire other post. First I have to try and finish one entitled, “ The Associates Versus The Blue Orchids” which may actually have become too complicated to complete.


A transatlantic challenge!!!!!!

It seems that Geeta over at the Original Soundtrack is claiming victory (by default, I note) after what was merely, to me, the opening skirmish in the Transatlantic Quidditch Challenge, due to the strength of the pound ( I like a woman who can turn the very weakness of her currency into an advantage!) and the resultant impossibility of my finding anything so cheap it could absorb the two-dollars to a quid advantage she has over me. Ha, ha! You may have your cool, sun-kissed, Californian, ultra-hip record stores but I have Woolwich, Deptford and Ramsgate, the charity shop capital of the UK, I have the cassette section of Blackheath Oxfam, I have Thamesmead’s weekly car boot sale (god help me!) and if all that fails, Geeta, I have SHOPLIFTING!!

Excited (no not in THAT way.But then again.) by the Porn Symposium going on in the distant but dazzling InfiniteTragedyPunkMap constellation of the Blogmos.

Infinite Thought seems to have been extremely thorough in her research (such rigour!), I can only assume she is now one of the world's leading Bukkake experts (I mean, information-wise, obviously) and I am tossing my own two penneth worth (not much of a moneyshot, that!) into their eager, upturned faces with a bit of an extract from the last thing I wrote, FICTION, I hasten to add (trying to skillfully navigate the conversation around the "thinly disguised autobiography" rocks). I was going to post a lot more of it but frankly thought it was too offensive for the sensibilities of The Impostume's delicate readers (if indeed it has any, delicate or otherwise) though after that photo of Craig Wedren in a floppy hat and fur coat I can only assume that if you're still here you have a cast iron stomach. And besides, anyone whose fancy is tickled, interest piqued or titi lated by the piece can always just download the whole thing gratis from the "two aborted novels" bit on the sidebar. However, should you do so, don't say you weren't warned!(Least of all don't say I didn't warn you that it has never been properly proofread.)

short extract from "Three Men, One room."

It’s 7:52, Monday the 17th of August and I’m drinking a cold can of Stella in my new room, the one bedroom flat I have bought in my old hometown, down on the south coast, and watching a video projection of the Bikini Carwash Company (1992) a soft-core comedy featuring a trio of largely forgotten ex-Playboy actresses. Kristi Ducati, a lynx-eyed, apple cheeked brunette with a sleek ponytail, my favourite, Sarah Suzanne Brown, a buffed blonde, pre-nose job but post-boob job and a very flat-chested but extremely lithe and tall pre-op Neriah Davis.

I am having a break from the video cataloguing, viewing and editing that has taken up most of the day and I’m watching it as a kind of aperitif, preparing myself for the evenings full entertainment in which I will be devoting myself to the works of no- less-a-figure than Tera Patrick.

The film has only just started and in the opening scene a fairly plain but very hard-bodied beach babe is topless sunbathing while a geeky college graduate tries to get directions from her to his uncle’s Carwash, the business he’ll be taking over for the summer.

The proximity of a women as unselfconscious about her body as the sunbather causes the student geek to sweat and fumble, trip over his words, drop his map and, in his haste to retrieve it, accidentally grope the beach Hottie. She, by implication, is used to being around men who are not only not shirt and tie wearing collegiate nerds but who can also handle the force of her nudity, a nakedness she openly displays, perhaps as a challenge, as a way of disposing of the inferior men that gather around her, moths to a flame, drawn to her by her beauty but who, unable to contain the violence of their response to it, are severely discomposed. Her contempt for the geek’s weakness, his inability to deal with the spectacle of her narrow, very firm, very tanned waist and extremely large breasts, her well sculpted legs, the thin strip of material covering her cunt, the fact that she’s lying with her legs apart and applying suntan cream to her belly, arms and breasts with a slightly dreamy, solipsistic air, absorbed by the power of her own physical presence, all suggest that she belongs to a different Order of Being to the geek.

It’s difficult not to speculate on what her boyfriend must be like. Certainly he too must belong to that Different Order, must perhaps be even higher in the chain than she because her provocative, petulant air suggests that she is not looking for a man to dominate but to be dominated by and the absent, though implied partner must be A Stud of some kind, possibly a tall, very well-toned, well-hung surfer dude who feels perhaps something of the same coldness to her as she feels toward the geek: she is just one of the many girlfriends that he fucks expertly in the flickering light of beach fires, the sound of the waves breaking on the shore mingled with her transported gasping and moaning. And so through the interaction of babe and geek a third figure is introduced and stands at the edge of the screen, the figure of the anti-geek. The Stud. I have one hand down the front of my shorts and I’m masturbating playfully without any real sense of commitment, enjoying the geeks humiliation and discomfort, the beach-babes exploitation of it, the spectacle of her semi-naked body and perhaps most of all, the real erotic charge of the scene, the invisible, implied realm of The Stud floating in the background, an Olympian sexual realm from which the geek is for ever excluded and who’s excitement at the Babe’s body, whose exited remoteness, forever pressing his nose against the sexual shop-window of life, is identical to that of the viewers, viewer and geek are as one, so that I too, through the conduit of the geek and his interaction with the Babe am aware of that great, haunted, monstrous, dizzying realm from which I am excluded, that super-human, that Ideal realm, The Realm of Pornography.

Phew..sorry.. had to get that off my chest!(He's got issues this gezzer, hasn't he? More deserving of pity than scorn at the end of the day...)

I feel that I’m in an undeclared price war with Geeta over at the Original Soundtrack re spending as little on records as possible and proudly trumpet some of my recent finds….

Quidd UP!

Scott 4: Recorded In State LP.

Really pretty good as far as I can tell after a couple of listens. Obviously calling your band “ Scott 4” is like dropping your drawers and asking to be hit with the hubris stick and this bears little resemblance to the LP of the same name, but is an odd, quirky amalgam of synth/ drum machine, splintered, trebly-guitar riffs, Country-picking, Fall/Happy Mondays’ drawl-funk and tricky studio jiggery-pokery, years ahead of its time, but only in the sense that it came out in 1994 not 1982. I’d definitely be up for more of this stuff and if they remind me of anyone it’s the (cliché alert!) criminally neglected “ “The Nectarine No 9” (who, I suppose, are on hold now that “The Fire Engines” have reformed, but whose “I Love Total Destruction” Lp is, against all the odds (especially with that title) one of the most upliftingly glorious pop LPs of the past couple of years).

Playgroup:

I guess it’s just called “Playgroup.” I made a point of avoiding this when it first came out as it looked like exactly the sort of clever-clever, irony-heavy, Shoreditch electro-clash cack that I was errr…… not really very into a few years ago. However..well.. Edwyn bleedin’ Collins is on it…(have I been stupidly ignoring this man’s output for years?) and frankly it’s pretty great…. maybe up there with Big Chief’s “Mack Avenue Skull Game” and Pigeonhed’s “ The full Sentence”as an example of how a pastiche/tribute ( in the latter two instances, of Blaxplotation flix and Prince) if it's done with authentic regard can transcend itself…. although “Make it Happen” the track that put me off in the first place still irritates with its overly-contrived faux Euro-dominatrix vibe.

Akron/family and Angels of Light

Well, for every Devendra Barnhart there is, thankfully, an Akron/family in the Young God’s roster. (Quite how Michael Gira got from “Raping a Slave” to endorsing him is one of life’s great mysteries.) The Family are great, a heavy Beatles influence in this one I guess, especially in the vocal harmonies, a kind of “Abbey Road” Beatles meets Beefheart with a bit of Buckley (Tim) and early Sonic Youth thrown in.

Two Quidd!!

God bless promo CDs! Now at last I have “ Flow motion” “ Saw Delight” and “Rite time.” (you mean you haven’t had them for years, shame!). I’d always avoided the later Can assuming it was a bit shit, this seems to be the critical consensus anyway, but actually it's great, much more fragmented and much more like the solo stuff that got collected on the “Cannibalism” comps, but really there’s a handful of amazing tracks on each one, (especially “ Laugh till you cry, live till you die.”) I suspect my favourite of all their albums is destined to remain “ Future Days” however. I was also lucky enough to get “ Gospel Soul” out on Soul Jazz which, despite all its strengths etc, does contain two absolutely killer tracks, an ultra-groovy version of “Eleanor Rigby” by Kim Weston, the most foot-fuddlingly funky thing I’ve heard since Anne Peeble’s insanely sassy “ You’ve got the papers (I’ve got the man)” had me up and mincing round the living room when it was reissued on the Rza compiled “ Kings Of Funk” last year–ish, and another by the Sons of Truth called “ I Dont Know Where We’re Headed,” a frenetic, full throated, jazz-funk barnstormer.

Really pushing the boat out now…Three Quidd!

John Martyn: “ One world”

I already had “Another world” ( which contains a really brilliant bonus disc of instrumental versions) so not sure how essential this was but there you go…err..the track listing’s different! How high does John Martyn score on the Kool-ometer? Pretty low I'd guess. (If you ask me, Tricky has spent plenty of time ripping him off, especially Martyn’s version of “ I’d rather be the devil.”) Still, “One world” is frankly amazing and the influence of his extended hiatus doing double-strong bong hits with Lee Perry was not put to waste.


Interestingly (to me at least) I also picked up a copy of a Saint Etienne singles compilation, thinking perhaps that time may have mellowed my attitude toward them and that I may be on the cusp of another revelation of the “King Creole” variety. Well, I tried, but after about thirty seconds of the pointedly twee “ Only love can break your heart” and then skipping through a couple of tracks the urge to go out and commit acts of public indecency grasped me so strongly that I had to eject the CD, burn it and have the ground that it had lain upon sown with salt. We may indeed have found one of my own personal Wyatting-points here. Maybe Hell would be a bright plastic room filled with toys, hairclips and badges in which Saint Etienne played endlessly and there was nothing to do but stare for ever at Sarah Cracknell’s bright-eyed, Blue Peter-presenter goony-ness and listen to the two geezers in smug, anti-fashion sweaters congratulating each other on how un-rock they are.

Actually I’d go slightly further (stop me if I go too far). I’d say that I find Saint Etienne repulsive. Now, many people whom I have admired have loved Saint Etienne, but here’s the point where my sympathy, my desire to see it from someone else’s perspective, to try and figure out why it’s appealing runs up against an absolute impasse. I find them evil and anti-life. I guess that Saint Etienne represent in some ways the zenith of a certain type of politically-correct pop, all trace of nasty, sexist, phallocratic rock purged, a vigorous policing of the sound so that no breath of anything like passion or even wit or anger or yearning or loss can seep through. A thoroughgoing niceness prevails, “ Join our club” , “let’s kiss and make up.” It’s a Hallmark greeting card, Forever Friends, “ I wuv you!” It’s Nick Hornby, it’s Richard Curtis, it’s that sequence in “"Notting Hill” in which the thirty-eight year old Julia Roberts says to the forty-year old Hugh Grant “ I’m also just a girl, talking to a boy….” (ahh, diddums! No you’re not.. you’re a middle aged woman!!!!) A world in which, inside, we’re all just a bunch of big-kids who want to hold hands and dance to tepid House-pop. Being anodyne as an ethic.

It’s interesting the way that the political correctness of the mid-eighties through early nineties dovetailed so well into a certain stream of Indie (the shamblers) and then on to Saint Etienne. This is certainly politically-correct music and you can feel its pallid self- righteousness everywhere. It attempts to make a virtue of its own restraint, its own pinched, sour, sententious avoidance of all “Nastiness” (yuk!), here meaning sweat, funk, emoting, physicality but especially lust. In Saint Etienne’s Poptimist universe we can all be friends as long as we all agree to some kind of imposed democracy of normalcy, if we all wear the same, nice, normal clothes, and if we avoid letting icky thinks like emotions or drives or will get in our way, then we can all be a big, fun club (super!).

It’s a fantasy of a banal and reductive kind, no less simple-minded than being a metalhead perhaps, but at least metalheads are prepared to/can let themselves go, whereas Saint Ettiene are always in control, politely staring at you with the glassy-eyed smile and fierce desperation of a recently converted Krishna. Who are you trying to convince here, me or yourself? Why do I detect underneath all that ferocious ordinariness that there’s a grim, hard and malevolent streak? Is it because there’s the underlying assumption that this is “ethical” music, that this is music which has avoided making the “mistakes” that other forms have, that ethics is prior to aesthetics, we all sit a round and decide what the best kind of music would be then someone goes out and makes it and we all feel happy about what clever and decent people we are, tap our feet along, hum, maybe even dance in a slightly bashful way, eyes raised to the ceiling, holding our skirt timidly and feeling all brave and self-conscious like we did when we were at schoolmate’s birthday parties? Music by fiat? It sounds nice and democratic, anti-Aristocratic even, but judging by the limited interactions I had with this (the Indy Pop-kid) crew, mostly when I was at university, it was noticeable just how strident they were, how insular and how critical, regarding themselves as a kind of elite of the enlightened, believing I suppose, that they had reached a state of such unimpeachable ideological perfection that the job was now to go about excising any Kulcha which still seemed hidebound by those nasty “isms.” Re-educating those who were getting it “wrong.”

In a lot of ways this Pop-self looks like an adolescent, pre-sexual self, one that doesn’t look with lust, one that doesn’t have to compete, one that isn’t struggling to articulate a coherent persona or set of response in the face of life, fundamentally one that isn’t deeply conflicted, (the libido hasn’t kicked in yet) but, the main complexities of adult life expunged, can stay at home, nice and cosy with mum and dad and have its clever friends round to listen to super(ego) music in the bedroom, to talk about what they’ll all do when they grow up. However, as the title “ Join our club” so rightly puts it, there are other less democratic, more domineering forces at work within it, it is a club, a club overflowing with admonitions, suffocatingly English and middle-class, presided over by the liberal parents who greet their child’s overflowing enthusiasms and giddiness with the remonstration, “That’s a bit silly, isn’t it darling?” and most importantly of all, the demand “ Play NICELY!”

AHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I didnt get a ticket for Juana Molina at Greenwich Picturehouse and now it's sold out! How dare she be so popular!

I am an imbecile!

I can only beg anyone who has a ticket and isn't going to email me and i'll happily take it off your hands!

Here's a confession...

......it's.......

(clears throat)

It's... errrm

The Fine Young Cannibals'

(clears throat again)

ok... all right....The Fine Young Cannibals'....

errrmmmm.....The Raw and the Cooked ....

is uncannily similar to the Pere Ubu album

Story of My Life and therefore

rather....

good!

Notice a comment from South London’s resident wunderkind, the impressively nomenclatured Owen “the Hathster” Hatherly (possibly not a man to try and show your slightly ropey knowledge of the modernist movement off to down the local Wetherspoons. Pah! Man? According to his Blog profile he’s twenty –four. Obscene! Illegal! Unfair ! ( You’ll be telling me K-Punk's just finished his GCSEs next!) I prostrate myself before him. Hathster- Fari liveth and conquereth!) that “Tell Me Easter’s on Friday” is in fact the best song ever written, or at least the best by the Associates.

I’m listening to it as I type and I’m forced to confess that it is amazing, especially the way that backward spinning, speeded up tape loop resolves into the plinky, toy plastic-piano riff at the start ( merely one among a multitude of other bedazzlements), but, more significant than doctrinal disputes among the disciples of the Church of Big Billy Mackenzie ( now I’m listening to “Fourth Drawer Down,” I might actually go for “ The Associate” as their best… oh… hang on, what about "Message Oblique: Speech”?) can we not at least agree that “ Tell me Easter’s on Friday” is certainly one of the funniest titles in pop?

I mean, under what circumstances would you ever say that? “Tell me,” usually precedes some impassioned cry for re/assurance. “Tell me that’s not last orders being rung,” “Tell me you love me Roger!” “Tell me I’ve got at least a few more weeks, doctor, at least until the baby’s due!” “ Tell me Easter’s on Friday!” It always implies to me some kind of wheedling Larkinesque, ultra-fop, (aha! Morrissey), Kenneth Williams in high dudgeon over his holiday plans…

Oh, hang on, there goes “An Even Whiter Car,” doing it’s kind of cod-Wagnerian, synth-dub, metal banging thing, so ….it’s an embarrassment of riches, mate, will we see their like again?

Aha! So James Lasdun has a new novel out ( immediately beats his way through the crowds thronging Ottakers). This is why he was mysteriously bigging up Irvine Welsh in the Guardian a few weeks ago. One of the few writers whose work makes me tingle with anticipation, " The Horned Man" was a kind of masterclass in measured, resonant storytelling, everything that crowds around and weaves its way into the interstices of the story is the real story, a novel in which everything unsaid and unrecorded becomes what's vital, and which unashamedly pitches off full tilt into "fantasy" toward the end, too. An amazing writer. Give him the booker! Banville then Lasdun, two of my faves on consecutive years, that'd be great.

And you say that (from the sublime to the ridiculous) Tim Willocks has also got a new one out! I loved "Bad City Blues", "Green River Risng", "Bloodstained Kings"...looks like that's my holiday reading sorted out....

In ascending order:

The Locust:

Spazz-rock Supremos, the bastard offspring of Devo and Napalm Death. Incredibly bracing in a thirty second blast (the length of an average song) utterly tiresome over the course of even a very short LP. Rather like locust themselves, I imagine they soon outstay their (heavily qualified) welcome. Did release a blinding remix album “I’ll be a Monkey’s Uncle” however which contains not only a top Kid 606 redo but a totally blinding kind of electro-pulse pummelfest by “I am Spoonbender”.

Halo of flies:

Interesting post by Sam over at the Blogglebumcage re the “ethical” dimensions of one’s record collection, and the extent to which really unpalatable content both repulses and attracts. Interesting that he should have posted it now as I was mulling over just that set of concerns with reference to this one, by Halo of Flies, a song of such pathologically glowering misanthropy it actually makes me laugh, while at the same time thrilling me and inciting my contempt and incredulity. The choicer lyrics go like this, just in case (quite understandably) you can’t be bothered to actually listen to it:(shouted) “This ain’t no heartfelt shit, this is Halo of Flies!”“Burnt fucking chasm is my thoughtThese are ugly times and that gets me off!”“You can take your emotional banner and put it away‘cause I don’t want to hear that crap again.”“Don’t want no feelings or other useless thingsyou think your weakness is a higher being.”“Get a way, you fuckers, you’re so, fucking weak, fucking ..I ain’t got no time for love… it’s as useless as your emotional flood…(followed by Iron John style militaristic chanting and strangled screams)Question is, should I allow myself to listen to such pointedly anti/illiberal sentiments? Answer, well, for better or worse I enjoy them, they don’t excite merely my contempt as they might in other loftier, purer souls, they just excite me. I enjoy the apocalyptic levels of cold disgust and anger, and not in any kind of detached/analytical way (“what a fascinating glimpse into the male psyche, ahh… see how he relates emotionalism/ femininity to a swamping excess etc.. we must tolerate it for the insights it brings.") to paraphrase the song: these are ugly sentiments and that gets me off!One of the most wearying and galling things about liberalism (do I actually mean Popism here but don’t really understand the term? Is there a Popism primer somewhere?) is the fact that it denies the deep attraction of violence and hatred. I personally have ugly thoughts, bad moods, moments of rage, enjoy coming out on top in arguments, indulge in all kinds of grotesque fantasies. None of this, however, makes me a bad person, ( I’m polite, considerate, even affable, if a bit of a self-important, long-winded, old gobshite) it simply makes me a person who, like everyone else struggles to be as reflective and honest about his own shortcomings/motives/behaviour and as patient and understanding with others as he can be given the combustible admixture of elements that is the human psyche, (oh, for the pure souls of those neutered angels of liberalism!)I think there is a large extent to which music is/can be a release valve for all those sentiments that daily life requires us to repress, offers a catharsis, a vicarious indulgence. Though I don’t say this is its main or only function. It can also unite people under a common political cause, provide solace, exalt us etc … the fact is that music, as our creation, is as “incorrigibly plural” as we are. Unless by listening to/buying it you’re specifically propagating some kind of ideology/supporting a political group then I think it’s fine; bitterness, hostility, rancour and misanthropy (to name but a few of the things that make life worth living) have just as important a place in art and as stubborn a toehold in life as any of the “ nobler” sentiments, I guess.

http://blogglebumcage.blogspot.com/2006/08/what-am-i-to-do-carls-concept-of.html

The Birthday Party:

The first band that I really just didn’t understand but felt like, deeply attracted to. Something I hadn’t seen before, some new, rawer, darker muse was being hymned!

Speedy J:

Equal doses Neubauten and Nasunbluten Speedy J made a great big Gabba-concrete meisterwerk with "A Shocking Hobby" and last year's “Collabs" was a wire-wool-on-the-stylus Industrial techno treat. Dutch, obviously. Hey Shpeedy, letsh get naked and shmoke!

The Young Gods:

Another band that challenged my sixteen year old ears to understand them, and are still rewarding the effort twenty years later. They do a weird, minimal techno version of “Requiem…” y’know. Actually it’s rubbish, but never mind, they were great at the Scala a few weeks back.

Age of Chance:

Well, I really liked them, I confess. Are they shameful? So be it! Admittedly, watching the video memories of EMF and Jesus Jones kept surfacing (shudder) but Age of Chance at least pre-dated them and were certainly one of the first bands to make a serious attempt to integrate house/techno and noisy guitar shenanigans. I mean I was fifteen or something, what did you want me to be into? Morton Subotnick? The Close Lobsters?????

Eno/Byrne:

I had this ( “Bush of Ghosts) on a nasty, very sticky cassette in 1987 and it made no sense to me whatsoever. Actually I think it just frightened me (I was yet to discover Throbbing Gristle etc) yet was strangely compelling. Another after-which-the-world-was-not-the-same type affair.

The Associates:

Is “Q Quarters” the greatest song ever written? Or is it “ White Car in Germany”? Or is it “Q Quarters”? repeat ad nauseum.

Serge Gainsbourg;

It seems that the entire “Melody Nelson” LP is on You Tube ( how I love thee!) along with lots of other great Gainsbourg footage. This is clearly from some movie I know nothing about but must immediately track down and see, even if all the shops are closed, its half past eleven on a Monday night and I have work in the morning! Pah!Let there be no impediments to the reception of Genius!

Serge Gainsbourg - Requiem Pour Un Con...

Associates - Club Country (Top Of The Pops 1982)

Brian Eno & David Byrne - Mea Culpa

age of chance - kiss

The young Gods - L'Amourir

Chris Liebing & Speedy J ( Collabs 3000 ) - Cream 3 ( 2005 )

The Birthday Party - Dead Joe [Live]

HALO OF FLIES 'No Time' Amphetamine Reptile

The Half-Eaten Sausage Would Like To See You In His Office

For Ashley, in lieu of the compilation, a number of videos.

Some evidence here, I think, of the Wedrens almost Wookie-like levels of hirsuity. Is he really wearing a jacket or did they just shave a strip up his front a few hours before the shoot?

August is here, and with the onset of winter my thoughts turn to acquaintances old and new, the fact that there are only 170 shopping days left till Christmas (I’ll have a two quid CD voucher for Thornton Heath “Help the Aged”, please) and the need to take stock and reflect upon what one has been and done thus far.

Shamefulness!


This reflective mood has probably been brought on by the fact that I caught up with one of my oldest and cheapest friends, notoriously ireful midget Ashley Davies (he won "Coventry’s Most Hostile Man" award five years running and is considered something of a medical marvel with the largest organ in his body being his spleen (second largest is, of course, his bile duct)) on his annual peregrination from the land of the sinking Budvar. He was, as usual, gracious enough to remind me of various shameful episodes from my university years, ( episodes I have largely repressed, I suspect) when seven of us lived in a pokey death-trap behind a Pizza place in Leeds Six. (charmingly, our landlord went to jail for statutory rape about two months after we moved in. I once had to open the door to the pregnant, statutorily raped fourteen-year-olds’ father and sundry male family members demanding to know where he was and suggesting, in fairly direct terms that I express their displeasure to him next time he came around and reveal that they would be seeking redress. “Will do, will do, no problem,” I repeated, dry-mouthed for what seemed like seventeen-hours as they re-sheathed the Stanley knives. Ahh, University!)

It transpires that the seeds of Wyatting were bearing early fruit, even back then, when asked by a “posh” friend, Jo ( I mean she really was posh, photo in Hong Kong Tattler and all that, this isn’t my parochialism showing through because she ate the peas off her knife or some such) if I could do a compilation for her equally posh, Public-school boyfriend who was off to Sandhurst (or summat) and who “quite liked Pearl Jam” and “ this “grunge” stuff." ( I was her token "alternative" friend, all the best people had a provincial Goth as an aquaintance that year, darling.)

Apparently I immediately set about filling up a C90 (them was the days!) with Whitehouse, Ramleh, Skullflower, Neubatuen’s “Ich Bins” “A” by the Butthole Surfers “LA Blues”, Skinny Puppy and a “Strafe fur Rebellion” track that largely consisted of fifteen minutes of a dog barking and a car starting up, then, just to pour salt in the wound, stuck the opening thirty seconds of the just-released, “Smells like teen spirit” on the last inch of tape before it ran out.

Tut, tut! I’m not proud, really. Yes alright of COURSE I am.

I can only insincerely apologize, and while I’m in a contrite mood I would also like to insincerely, publicly apologize to Shudder to Think for my disgraceful behaviour at their gig at Leed’s Duchess of York in 1995, not solely for the expressive, highly individual manner in which I danced throughout their performance, (I was the only person who did so, eventually creating a crescent of empty space stage- front in which I could express my enthusiasm more fully through the aformentioned medium, truly Terpsichore was mistress of my soul at that moment! Twas either she or Mistress Biddenden, (an especially potent Scrumpy, a horrendous beverage the colour and consistency of cheap cooking oil that smells of dung and tastes as though it’s flavoured with essence of un-mucked stable,)) nor entirely for my repeated, very loud observations about how hairy Craig Wedren’s back, shoulders and torso were (especially in comparison to his shaven bonce, initially it seemed to my Biddenden’s bewitched eyes that he was in fact wearing a comedy gorilla suit but had taken the mask off. I mean he really is hairy this geezer, if you shaved him head to toe you could stuff a King-sized duvet and still have some left over for the pillows), nor, indeed, for my obliviously bellowing requests for songs that they had already played two or three numbers before, but perhaps more pointedly, for my post-gig behaviour when I decided that the summit of their ambitions would be to encounter me, on the tail end of an all day Cider-thon awaiting them backstage. Thus I inveigled my way into the “dressing room” to await them. I soon got bored (they may possibly have been avoiding me and loitering elsewhere) when they didn’t turn up, then promptly nicked the rider, in this case a crate of beer that I quite fancied, carried it out through the pub in full sight of band and bar staff only to immediately drop it to the pavement outside the door, smashing everything, before disappearing into a passing taxi with no money.

Tut, Tut, I....Actually I am chidlishly and inordinately impressed with myself for that one, so why pretend otherwise, eh?


Looking back I have a sneaking suspicion that these kinds of things may have subtly contributed to the decline of the relationship I was in at that time. Hmmmmmm!

Terroricity!

With regard to Billy’s suggestion in the comment box below re: my scepticism over the latest Heathrow outrage, (I’m assuming that’s Billy Rammsel, one of Ireland’s most promising young poets, hero of the overlooked, masterpiece novel White Diaspora (never read it myself, heard good things about it though!) and a man who has shared with the Impostume many a moment of character building, Barcelona-based privation). What can I say? Yes of course the appalling catastrophe that we have luckily been saved from seems plausible on one level for all the reasons mentioned, but on another, well, there’s just something so contrived and poorly stage-managed about the whole affair, some level on which it doesn’t convince, something which feels poorly scripted and acted without real inner conviction. Something of the absurd bathos of it all was captured in the Metro’s report on the day, a timeline, which concluded “ 5:00 George Bush thanks Britain for “busting this plot” by “Islamic Fascists”. The Police raid a bungalow in High Wycombe.”

Fine, I understand the asymmetry of this particular “war” but one of the side-effects of the asymmetry in situations like this is that it produces comedy, let's face it. There is a rambunctious, mordant slapstick to the repeated cock-ups, fudgings and denials (shooting Brazilians, the Ricin plot, the dawn raids that produce no evidence…)

There’s also the extent to which it feeds into personal/institutional fantasies of power. I look for example at John Reid (looking very different these days to his time in “The Jesus and Mary Chain”) and my suspicion (not very scientific, that!) tells me that here is a man who has spent his whole life wanting to be a great, hard-bitten Churchillian, crisis-manager. Andrew Jareki’s (brilliant) “ Capturing the Friedmans” gives a chillingly prescient example of the extent to which certain types of institutions create a need for offenders/crimes, ("otherwise, so why are we here?" It’s not so different to the post I have about managers, really,) and that the public, keen to collude with authority/ coerced by it, often travesty there own insights/ memories in order to support the institutional fantasy. ("If they’re saying it, it must be them that’s right and me that’s wrong.").

On the other hand, all of the above could simply be an enormously sophisticated plot on the part of the Blair government to really prevent the terrorists from “disrupting” us. You know how they’re always banging on about the fact that the terrorists have really won once we start being frightened and changing the way we behave etc, so perhaps the Government are deliberately making it look as unconvincing and poorly conceived as possible in order to increase our scepticism and thus our resistance to fear. If so, they’re doing brilliantly and it will have been one of this government’s few notable successes. In which case, well done Mr Blair, I don’t believe word of it, just exactly as you hoped I wouldn’t!

a "liquid of some kind," eh?


Nice and specific that, then. Cans of Special Brew that would be force-fed to pilots in order to make them lose control of the plane? ("fugging rat-arsed, mate. Do you wanna fly for a bit, don’t hit any fugging buildings mind or I'll loose me licence.") Excuse my scepticism, given the excellent track record of shooting completely innocent people and failing to find any evidence whatsoever that the Boys-in-Blue have demonstrated thus far (ahh, but we don’t see the tireless, highly successful invisible work that goes on night and day in order that we may sleep safely in our beds at night, only condemning the few highly-visible trumped-up fabrications...err..sorry "operations" that do occasionally, regrettably, yes, go wrong..)

I have no doubt that the moment I clock eyes on a Tabloid/The Torygraph/The Evening Scumtard it will be proceeding editorialy with doggerel of the nature of " and this is why we must fight terrorism with every weapon at our disposal home and abroad etc, etc" Come on, Mr Blair you can do better than this, we’re just not convinced anymore, (remember those tanks being deployed to Heathrow a few years back, to shore up public opinion just prior to the invasion of Iraq. HAHAHAHAHAHA!, how we smirked). In fact short of having yourself blown to pieces by a ululating mullah on the steps of ten Downing street very little is going to convince the British public that this isn't another botched PR move to take the heat off you and your utterly cowardly subservience to the US Imperium.

Although if you need to use John Reid as a proxy assassinee, by all means be my guest.

Shudder To Think - X-French Tee Shirt

ahhhhhhhhh!!!
oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
huh!

The song that got me through 1996.( I could tell you some stories, mate, break your heart, like). Can that really have been ten years ago?

“They said, "You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”

Wallace Stevens

“The Man With the Blue Guitar”


Predictably, my interview with James served to only partially validate my world-shattering thesis that the ascendancy of Indy was a result of a reaction against the omnipresence of “ black” cultural forms during your childhood/teen years (as though, like, one interview would in anyway prove this), but did, instead lead us onto an interesting and possibly more fruitful discussion on the nature of pleasure and difficulty, or the fascination and rewards of engaging with “the difficult.” (And it gave me a chance to refine my “ascetic bohemianism” and related quandries shtick, a bit.)

Thinking about his own musical “progression” starting from an early introduction at twelve or thirteen to drum and bass via a mate’s brother’s mix tapes and through to his current fascination for Led Zeppelin the overwhelming common factor seemed to be that there was something in each that, at the point of contact with them, he didn’t “understand”. At first with drum and bass he couldn’t figure out how they did it, how the sounds were produced, the art of the mix etc and that fascination, (what is it?) drew him in, much the same as ten years later, via an excursion through Hip-hop, (again a recognition on James’ part to a perceived greater complexity, a greater fullness, an operating-on-more-levels-ness, a higher degree of production excellence, (“how do they get that snare so crispy?”) the much greater difficulty of mixing hip-hop, scratching etc) onto Led Zep and another epiphany of the how-the-fuck-does-he-play-that? order re Jimmy Page’s guitar work and the overall meshing of the instruments. Many will disagree but for James, “ Led Zeppelin are infinitely more complex than Drum and Bass.”

There must, I guess, be a level of “difficulty/complexity” which approximates to the sublime. In other words we have to both grasp and not grasp what were given, if it’s completely alien, too distant, the result will be incomprehension or disgust/rejection (“that’s not music/it’s just noise” etc) but once it has been assimilated we can move on, seek out the next level/type of “difficulty”. I wondered whether it actually made any difference what the process was, where it started, and James admits that Led Zepplin may not be inherently more difficult or complex than Rat Pack (an early fave of his) and that the reverse journey, from “Moby Dick” to Dieselboy is just as feasible a “progression”. It depends where you start off. This grasping and non-grasping, this moment of fascination/difficulty ( isn’t the main component in fascination the possible revelation of the mystery/resolution of the difficulty: after all it’s only agony for Tantalus, cause he knows he’ll never get the grapes) and the pleasure in its resolution really puts me in mind of Steven’s dictum, “ The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully”. That difficulty is in fact an inevitable component in certain types of pleasure, moments of “exultancy”, rather than mere gratification. When James quite sincerely describes the day he grasped the brilliance of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic (don’t look at me!?) as “the best day of my life” it seems (certainly to me) plausible.

So difficulty and pleasure aren’t in anyway oppositional but generally, culturally we seem to consider that pleasure requires a retreat from complexity and we don’t expect to be taken to task or stretched or made demands of by our “entertainment” even by our “education.” Learning a language (something the British are stupefyingly bad at, and that increasingly includes English itself, apparently) is a good example. It takes a long time (YEARS!) before you can even engage with a native-speaker on a reasonable level conversationally and requires constant tending and practice, yet almost every survey suggests that it’s one of the most rewarding things you can do, (my own experience would confirm this.)

Perhaps the question is, what kind of selves do we want. Do we want the self that stumbles from experience to experience permanently dissatisfied and hungry for the next Kulchafix, or a reflective, more ample self that has some resources, a degree of independence from/within the Kulchazone, an “Entertained” or an “Educated” self, a self committed to engaging with difficulty or a self committed to avoiding it. I would argue that the latter self is the self that is the greatest asset to these who have invested in it, ( Lifelong Learning as a self-directed, purposeful self-enrichment rather than a market/fear-driven "skills" burden) something that's proof, pretty largely, against the vicissitudes of late-Capitalist life (chronic insecurity being but one of them. Make money/technology and the “experiences” it can buy you the necessary precondition for happiness and you’re in trouble).

I think the discourse that surrounds popular culture (here I guess I mean Music) is immensely important because it’s the entry point per se for many people into the world of culture and thought, especially in a world in which utility is becoming the measure of all things educational. It provided an entry point for me and continues to be a source of valuable ideas, (if it weren’t for the blogosphere,etc..) precisely by engaging with what you already love and offering you that little bit more in terms of interpretation, thought, and related reference points in cinema, theory, literature it enlarges you, it holds things out to you, holds them just beyond your reach, creates the urge in you to grasp them.

“a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.”

Jacques Barzun is apparently an appalling cultural conservative, (no fan of the post-structuralists he, but hey, crazy-upside down world that it is, suddenly the conservatives look like radicals. Do I hear Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to be Square” crackling into life on the tannoy?) nonetheless, I reckon he got it right when he observed:

“Pascal once said that all the trouble in the world was due to the fact that man could not sit still in a room. He must hunt, flirt, gamble, chatter. That is man's destiny and it is not to be quarreled with, but the educated man has through the ages found a way to convert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit in a room and not perish.”

Numerous bits and bobs

La vida Kulcheral!

The Quidditch most gratifyingly scratched by:

Kid Creole and the Coconuts: Just discovered the magnificence/munificence of Kid Creole’s “Tropical Gangsters” an album overflowing with scintillating textures, insane hooks and polyrhythmic peversity. It’s weird how things exist in the imagination, for example, Rat at Rat R’s “Free Dope for Cops and Kids” which I haven’t heard for about fifteen years is, in my mind, “the greatest record ever made,” a spiralling, free-form ten-minute ArtPunk wig-out of Bartokian complexity and rigour, whereas Kid Creole, who, up until Thursday I hadn’t heard for twenty years were leaden, dire, pastiche-funk drek. The opposite is of course true, Rat at Rat R are, I suspect, a bunch of one-note sub-Sonic Youth angsty poseurs whereas the KING is a mauve and tangerine clad Minstrel bestriding a multitude of genres and bending them all effortlessly to his impish, ludic will. What were my thirteen year old ears hearing? I had a similar revelation last year when, finally picking up a copy of “Rip it up…” ( the album) I sat ear-boggled by the whole thing (especially the way that version of “Breakfast Time” lurches off into the omniverse) and then wept bitterly realising, Jesus! I could have been listening to this for twenty years (except of course I was deaf to its brilliance until then) when instead I spent at least five years of that precious time wondering when the next White Zombie cd was out!!!!!!!

Doll by doll: Revenge of memory. One of those apparently legendary one-that-got-away-type bands, Jackie Leven’s pre-punk, post-punk crew live in Sheffield in 77, (pretty patchy sound quality), pitched somewhere between Television's winnowed psychedelia, the New Gold Dream of the Bunnymen et al and the Apopalypticism of “Requiem” era Killing Joke. There’s a bit of Doctor Feelgood in there too, (they may have dyed their hair Punky pink and green but their ale-brown pub-rock roots are definitely showing through). Leven himself, post smack-addiction, a vicious kicking in a Glasgow pub and the kind of weight gain that makes Giant Haystacks look like Audrey Hepurn, has gone on to make a set of really errr..interesting (in the best possible sense) folk/rock albums. Actually it’s a real grower and it's a shame that the original albums are impossible to find.

Well, at least they are for a quid.

Just seen: Miami Vice. No doubt had acres of press coverage. I enjoyed it I have to say, but then I’m a Michael Mann fan (like, what hip young film head isn’t, hey?) what I like most about his stuff (ahh… the kind of epic graininess of it all!) especially Heat (and to a degree "The Insider"/ "Collateral" ) and now "Miami Vice" is the way his “heroes” are absolutely, emotionally dead, pure products of what they do/the institutions they represent, functional nodes. In “Miami Vice” it’s taken to even greater extremes than in “Heat”, not just that heroes and villains are interchangeable (just different types of middle-class professional in America’s late–capitalist money-morality) but that the leads (especially here) seem to have no subjectivity at all and no “relationship” to each other as such. There’s a hint of romance and angst in both but it's vigorously purged by the demands of the job. “Life” (affective relationships, meaningful self-expression, human(e) interactions) is something foredoomed/foreclosed form the start and available only in the briefest of snatches. The remorseless reality is work. Has Mann been honing his vision of the life of the American professional classes and refracting it through genre? I reckon so. Somewhat ludicrously I’ve never read anything by Ballard (honestly!) but I suspect that Mann is “Ballardian” (correct me if I’m wrong), a series of affectless, semi-androids play out their programming against a background of clean, hyper-modern non-spaces from which they are barely themselves differentiated. Mann’s films are so “now “ they seem like science-fiction. Maybe this is why his films, especially “Heat”, some early sequences in “Collateral” and now “Miami Vice” always remind me of “Blade Runner” more than anything else.

Drugs!
An Impostume informant has suggested that GHB is becoming increasingly popular on the club scene, sold over the Internet for seventy-five quid a bottle as some kind of metal cleaner. Yep, it’s the drug that killed River Phoenix (though if you’ve ever seen River Phoenix, a willowy, snub-nosed, pasty-faced elfling who made Leonardo de Caprio look like Harvey Keitel, you’d have to wonder just how prospectively dangerous a drug that killed him was for anyone else). Apparently the resurgence in popularity of such drugs is a response to the increasing scarcity of good E. GHB’s effects are described as “really speedy, but clean” (well it is an industrial detergent after all!) but easy to overdose on. Apparently two of the five participants had a pipette drop too many in their beer and passed out, while another spent the whole night puking. I was also delighted to discover that C.K Lines (no, not a burgeoning country and western star) is now the polydrug binger's weapon of choice, alternating lines of Coke and Ketamine. A true and heartening indication of the “classless” Britain of the early twenty-first century, (we're all Underclass now!) after all, it was only ten years ago that Special K was viewed as the Chav’s choice, the Pikey's poison, and here it is now, happily side by side on the toilet cistern with a bit of good-old, respectable, middle-class Charlie. How times have changed! A cause for celebration for all of us I think, god bless you, Mr Blair!



Up and coming:

Baldness.Still loosing hair by the fistful: this whole thing about “ don’t think of it as losing hair think of it as gaining face” might be of comfort to some but given a face that I can only describe as already being “equine” in its proportions (“longer than a wet weekend in Skegness” (known locally these days as Skag-ness, I’m told so maybe a wet weekend there wouldn’t be too bad if you’d made certain lifestyle choices) as me old Mum would say) this is cold comfort.

An interview with James Couling: Who he? He a bloke I work with who I find fairly interesting ( faint praise indeed, sorry James!) and who abortively attempted to teach me how to DJ Drum and Bass. When it transpired that I still couldn’t tell whether the two tracks were beat matched when one was playing at forty five and the other at thirty three, and that I kept chronically underestimating the sheer tug of the turntables, repeatedly ending up with half my torso jammed under the stylus, we gave up. Basically James started listening to drum and bass young and has now graduated on to, err… Led Zep and the Beatles and like, strumming an acoustic guitar for kicks. When I suggested to him that he wasn’t, in fact, supposed to be doing this, that he was supposed to be part of the Wired Generation who had dispensed with all that old bullshit and were constituted as post-human, neural networks who jacked up on soniks and had superseded hoary old shibboleths like “meaning” and “ content” in favour of a praxis of “intensities” he looked askance and suggested that this kind of attitude was ok when you were thirteen but didn’t become an adult.

Interestingly I know quiet a few people younger than me (alright, a lot younger) who’ve gone through a similar “conversion” to Trad. A kind of reaction against the overwhelming influence of Hip-hop/drum and bass/Grime you hear all around you as a “ yoot” and a possible reason why Indy/Rock seem to be in the ascendant….anyway…we shall see.

This morning, (alright, yesterday morning) moaning a bit about having to go and teach (it’s been a long week) I wondered when I was going to get some “ Admin duties” (a perk) sent my way so I could have a break from my gargantuan efforts hewing away at the chalkface (we have more teachers than we need at the moment, hence someone is always surplus to requirements). I was told, quite jovially, that I would probably never get them again, as on previous occasions I was “crap” at them. This is certainly true in a literal sense I can’t even mono-task and am hopelessly disorganized but in fact, what being "crap" meant in this context was “ crap at not acknowledging that what we ask you to do is meaningless”, in other words failing to take seriously jobs that I’m given when there is no teaching work and which are effectively dreamed up a minute or two before by one of the managers/ treating them with any urgency.

Stuctural reinforcement is more important than competence/utility.(Although admittedly in my case you get neither. Employee of the month award perhaps going elsewhere again ). It’s not even that, ”we both know it’s useless/ pointless, but we mustn’t acknowledge it” game, they even helpfully suggested the ways in which I could more adequately pretend in order to fulfil the “admin” requirements (appear enthusiastic, appear keen for more, don’t sit for half an hour reading the Economist and drinking coffee in the corner first or spend a conspicuously long time in the toilet only to emerge with a paperback jammed in back pocket etc, but appear to be diligently working away instead) so the process was thoroughly and cheerily demystified but nonetheless remained.

I know that other work-places are MUCH worse than mine ( I actually really like mine, and feel pretty lucky) but here, being a manager (in this instance a cool, liberal, non-traditional manager, even an anti-manager) means insisting that others fall in line with your bad faith rather than allowing them to simply fester in their own. Why can’t we/they simply make that seemingly tiny but in reality apparently unthinkable shift into allowing employees to openly, rather than covertly do nothing? There’s a kind of ne plus ultra here, a linchpin, a foundationstone. Get rid of that and suddenly everything pivots and involutes, it must be held in place at all cost.

So far, so obvious, anybody who’s ever wandered around an office with a piece of paper in one hand and a purposeful look on their face trying to appear busy, (ie 98% of the population of Blighty) will know what I mean( arguably it’s actually more demanding and difficult in the long run than really being busy). What makes it especially strange though is, as I’ve said, that I work in a very informal environment vis a vis relationship with management and that, besides, if they didn’t give us anything to do during our non-teaching time, they wouldn’t get in trouble, (there’s no one above them) begging the question again as to why they bother. It’s not as though they themselves will be punished if we “slack off”, just do “nothing”, read , check our e-mails, write blog entries, go home for a while, sleep under a desk etc. So what’s at stake?

(aha! Is this the Big Other of which I have heard the sage ones speak?!)


On one level, nothing, as the invented job itself is non-essential, on the symbolic level everything. We must not acknowledge the futility of what we do, a “mature” attitude resides in knowing this. These kind of reciprocal, participatory fantasies are everywhere in life, obviously, (the Pub-bullshitter circles who accept the egregious, self-aggrandizing lies of their fellows, (“ this was back when I was jamming with the Stones, mind,” “ then the next thing you know Vinnie Jones rocks up and he’s, like, “ fancy a pint?””) knowing they are lies but refusing to challenge them as, reciprocally they will then be allowed their own opportunity to project their bullshit-persona on others.) Presumably this is because so much of what we really are is unbearable to us, in the same way that the evident meaninglessness of being a manager ( which consists in largely dreaming up pointless tasks which then have to be imbued with significance by the workforce) is unbearable to those who have invested in becoming one, just as much in those who have invested in the idea that they haven’t invested in becoming one, as in those who have.


postscript:

Actually that "bad faith" thing reminds me of a story about the late Donald Barthelme making a big, po-mo tit of himself in a restaurant he swept off to with his biographer.

" Hi, I'm your waiter," the waiter said.

" No you're not!" Barthelme replied.

" Well, yes I am your waiter, sir, " the waiter insisted.

"No you're not!" Barthelme was equally insistent.

This exchange went on for several excruciatingly arch minutes, with Barthelme constantly flicking glances at his no-doubt mortified guest, until the waiter finally relented and asked to know why Barthelme was insisting that he wasn't the waiter.

"Because," Bartheleme said, " in New York no-one is merely a waiter, they are a poet, an artist , a writer , an actor in waiting. This is why you are not my waiter."

At his point the waiter explained that in fact he came from a long line of waiters, had never wanted anything other than to wait tables and bore no other, loftier ambitions. To which Donald "Collage is the art form of the twentieth century" Barthelme replied,

"We'll start with the soup....."

15.60.75 Numbers Band Greenville 7.22.06

well, well, well....

David Thomas, (who recently pulled all Ubu videos off YouTube on the grounds of ..oh... i dunno... some spurious stuff about the artist's right to control representations of his art (so why not leave the official, sanctioned, presumably Ubu approved videos on?) when in fact we all know he was having a Crocus Behemoth-sized hissy fit over the fact that someone had caught him, not uncharacteristicly, bawling abuse at either a band member or soundman) claims that the first Numbers Band album "Jimmy Bells Still in Town" is one of the greatest records ever made. Well, what do i know (truly he is the Montaigne of the blog world this boy!), might not go that far but it certainly is a bloody exciting record, kind of amazingly driving, kinetic, horn-propelled, cubist R and B with some truly great deadpan, deadbeat poetry from Robert Kidney chipping and skimming over the top...actually David Thomas' liner notes on the CD are probably worth the price alone...slower number here..will they ever play the uk again?

For some reason I’ve been musing (he’s only gone and been musing , lads!) on the notion of “success” recently. I’m certainly “unsuccessful” by most of the standard measurements. I don’t own my own home, I don’t own a car, (in fact I can’t even drive) my “wardrobe” consists of three pairs of jeans, some very knackered trainers and a couple of t-shirts, my wage is quite substantially below average for London and for a graduate of my age and “experience” with a Masters (though admittedly even useless would be putting a positive spin on the general perception of Creative Writing MAs, it’s largely felt that if you’ve done one there must actually be something wrong with you).

And yet, nonetheless, I feel that the last few years have been pretty successful, more or less because of the things I haven’t done. First of all I haven’t accumulated any debt or useless possessions (errr, except for that gently teetering hedge of two-quid cds) I have stopped drinking (well three or four times a year, these days, a reduction by about three-hundred and sixty days on, say, the year 2001) I stopped smoking, I stopped eating crap, I haven’t taken any drugs, I stopped watching TV (haven’t had one for four years thus far). I also finished (of whatever quality) two novels I was happy with, learned Spanish to a reasonable level, travelled to South America for the first time (not having spent all my money, for once, down the boozer) and devoted as much time to learning and reading as I could.( Of course, much of this wouldn’t have come about but for the influence of my better-half. Fair play to you, gal!).

Frankly, I’m glad for it, but there was certainly a weaning-off period, a bit of cultural cold- turkey at the prospect of not going to the cinema four times a week irrespective of what was on, of spending every weekend trawling around mediocre gigs that offered nothing but the opportunity for a bit of self-congratulatory peer-group sneering. This unbearable itch to do something, even if it's crap!

The simple fact is that it’s also a relief to get past the point where any kind of “selling out”, where any kind of volte-face and desperate scrabble to “get with the programme” career-wise has passed. Not going to happen now, not at my age. While it’s there it’s always tempting you, “maybe, you should, maybe you could… after all they’re no smarter than you are…..”. The kind of auto-subjective-destitution that Zizek identifies in "Fight Club", the kicking the shit out of that within you which is attached to the “real-world”, needn’t be as violent as all that, (certainly not if you're as inclined to procrastination as I am) it just needs a certain amount of hunkering down, taking a deep-breath, letting the shackles of opportunity rust right off you until, hey presto! you’ve condemned yourself to the life you always really wanted.

I suppose what I’m up for at this stage is a kind of ascetic bohemianism, (yes, a toe-curling coinage, I know) NO! to the horrible, imaginatively-dead drudgery of the “real world” and YES! to the search for new forms of living and new ways of being, but minus all the decadence. After all, being a Bi-curious, Kulchahead mired in drugs and profligacy is hardly going against the grain these days, hardly shocking, hardly the sign of a radical. The average secretary’s weekend is a bacchanal that would have had Byron flagging mid-afternoon Saturday and Verlaine throwing in the towel before they’d even got in the queue for cheap entry at Fabric. What we might be aiming for (he’s talking about we now, lads!) I guess, is a kind of systematic re-ordering of the senses within a culture that generally wants/needs us to be as maximally sensation-hungry as possible.

A culture of moderacy and self-cultivation I don’t think need imply conservatism, some Buddhist struggle against desire and ambition and a lapse into acceptance, but it’s probably the important pre-requisite to coming up with anything else ( being in a state to come up with anything) not just getting off the “hedonic treadmill” but finding a spanner to stick in its works (though in this case maybe, “ the key to the treasure is the treasure”). I think that I regard my last couple of years as “successful” because (“hey, there goes the successful, balding thirty-six year old unpublished author in his Primark sweater and NHS specs, dashing through Greenwich Uni on the way to his low-income job!”) I’ve finally been able to fully abandon myself to moderacy.

Who knows then, cautiously optimistic and all that, maybe the first stage complete.

Question is, what’s next?

postscript:

That mention of “Fight Club” reminds me of an interview with Chuck Pahlaniuk that I saw on-line few years ago. Asked why he had switched to writing gothic horror novels instead of his customary zeitgeist nihilism he replied that post 9/11 the American public had no appetite for transgressive fiction. So there it is, the great, dark ironist, the arch torch-wielder at the bonfire of the liberal vanities, scourge of late-Capitalist inauthenticity, rather than ramming it home to the sad-sack, pussy, brown-nosing Korporate scum he despises while they are down and the whole edifice is shaking, is, instead,worried about loosing his audience, loosing those lucrative publishing deals, the film rights, the book tours, the adoration of a generation of backyard wrestlers. After all, once the market changes, only an idiot wouldn’t respond to it, right?

“The things you own end up owning you”, eh Chuck?

great dvd cover!

I’ve seen Pedro Almodovar’s “ Hable con ella” several times but yesterday was the first time on the big screen and despite my familiarity with it (if it possible to become familiar with such a work), its awful, mysterious power was undiminished.


After the slump into mawkishness and self- parody circa the mystifyingly popular “All about my mother”, “Hable con ella” represents a return to the dark, death-driven Almodovar of “Matador” and “ Atame!” rather than the jocular farceur of “Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios” and some of his earlier films (apparently Almodovar was recently awarded an Alabaster Oedipus at the Vienna film festival in recognition of his work as “ World’s most Freudian film-maker”).

It’s odd that Almodovar’s reputation generally rests on his strengths as a comic and his ostensible skill in portraying women ( especially given that in this movie the central female figures are largely comatose and that Benigno confesses, not in despair but in beguilement “ a woman’s mind is a mystery, in this state doubly so”) when in fact he’s probably the most disruptive, troubling (that word again) filmmaker aside from David Lynch to command such a large, an in Almodovar’s case, middlebrow audience.

Basically, “Hable con ella” is the tale of two men whose lives intersect in the coma ward of a hospital. One, Benigno, an ephebic, holy innocent of indeterminate sexual orientation is nursing (in a professional capacity) the woman he fell in love from a distance ( she danced in a ballet school directly opposite his flat) while attending to his bed-bound mother. The other, the more worldly –wise Marco, is a reporter and traveller who has struck up a relationship with a female bullfighter after seeing her interviewed on TV and then pursuing her, ostensibly in order to write a piece for “El Pais”.

The opening sequence closely allies the two men, (indeed, they may simply be two halves of one man) still strangers to each other, watching the first of the two dance sequences that bookend the piece ( the film’s opening shot is in fact a middle-aged woman in what appears to be a hospital gown, writhing , eyes closed at the front of the stage before hurling herself (or being hurled by some unknowable inner compulsion) across the room and into the far wall as “a man with the saddest face I (Benigno) have ever seen", desperately tries to push the chairs that litter the stage out of the way in order to give her a clear passage. (Is this all we do? Is this the best we can hope to do, hope to limit the obstacles and the injuries that the Other encounters as they are driven blindly onward, alternating between tortured flight and moments of catatonia? Is it the most we can ask of others for ourselves?) Benigno is as interested in Marco as he is in the performance, noticing that he weeps, as he does throughout the film for the loss of his other half, his “true love” whose absence he feels most keenly at moments of great beauty simply because she is not there to share them with him.

Through the course of the film the two men’s lives cross in the most literal sense. Benigno ends up separated from Alicia after raping and impregnating her, ultimately killing himself in prison after an attempt to induce a coma and “rejoin “ her , believing she is still in a vegetative state. Marco, after discovering that Lydia had in fact resumed her relationship with “El Nino de Valencia” her ex-lover, prior to being gored by the bull (in what appears an act of suicide), goes to live in Benigno’s apartment and, gazing from the window as Benigno had, discovers that Alicia has awakened form her four-year coma, possibly as a result of the rape and stillbirth. The final scene implies the possibility of the beginning of a relationship between the two.


The film itself proceeds through a series of chronological shifts that leave the present-tense of the film, the linear sequence largely suspended and the theme itself, the ungraspabilty of the other’s essence, the empty, unknowable, dark heart of things, the primacy of the death-drive, are refracted through a variety of styles and idioms, so that the whole piece resembles a tone- poem more than a story per se, a meditation on the old quote from Paul Valery that “ God made everything out of nothing but the nothingness shows through”. The Arcadian sequence in which Caetano Velosa hauntingly re-works “Paloma”, the film-within-a-film silent movie “El Amante Minguante” in which a shrinking man finally slips whole inside his lovers body, the re-occurring motifs of supine women being dressed or carried by men, the beautiful use of colour and costume always on the edge of gaudiness, the way in which the black, rippling back of the bull that Lydia sacrifices herself to after having slowly played out the death of a labouring toro before the eyes of her ex-lover earlier in the film is mirrored by the tracking shot of the swimmer rippling along below the surface of the pool before emerging into the grotto in which Caetano sings. In fact the surface richness of the film is overwhelming, proceeding through a series of interlaced symbols, motifs and visual analogies that amplify the meaning past the point of any possible “grasping” of its content.

Does that constitute the sublime?

The film makes me ask myself, whether this is the tragi-comic element in life, the pathos in absurdity, that on the journey through ourselves in order to reach each other we are destined always to miss each other, and that this missing of others, our struggling to orient ourselves, to find the thread that will lead us back out of the “Labyrinth of Passion”, this always being on the opposite shore or, like that archetype, the Cuban women that Marco writes about in his travel journals and who Benigno, in prison, imagines himself to be, gazing from her window caught in the slow throb of time and sunk, beyond rescue in her dreaming, is the inescapable truth of our condition. (“Only connect!” Ok, But how?)

It’s a chilling, chastening film and about as “gentle” (the description in Greenwich Picturehouse’s leaflet ) as a kick in the stomach. Love, for Almodovar isn’t the anaemic, benign, tritely redemptive non-force of Hollywood, it is instead a destructive reality- shattering, and violently invasive force, a form of torment,a sickness, an attack that must be met with equal agression. Love is not incompatible with violence and violation, quite the opposite, it’s akin to rage. Why does Antonio Banderas headbutt Victoria Abril unconscious and kidnap her in “Atame”? Because he loves her and “true love” will always overflow and erode the reality principle. Why do the lovers shoot themselves at the point of orgasm in the deeply uncomfortable conclusion to “Matador” (“ watch me while I die!”)? Because “true love” is the quest for extinction in the other. “True Love” is not what we aim for at all, what we aim for, what we want are “relationships”, a kind of being-together that holds itself apart from love and falls in line with values of liberal tolerance and respect. “Love, actually” is the dangerous state that we have to expunge, medicalise, persecute. People often comment on how “democratic” Almodovar’s camera is, (a principle he took to inflammatory lengths in the superb, vastly underrated “La Mala Educacion, the most Hitchcockian of his films, his most adroit reworking of “Vertigo.”, the final shot of which is the word “desire” zooming out to fill the frame) but really it’s a feigned detachment and in the end he’s full of tenderness for his suffering monsters , deformed by love,who have not or cannot learn to suffer in the right ways, or deform themselves on the general model.

Also recently viewed:

“Sophie Scholl”: Considerably better than Julia Jentzh’s last film, the dismal “The Edukators”, though Sophie’s earnest Protestant doggerel and hunger for martyrdom had me rooting for the Nazis by the halfway mark.

“Adam and Paul”. Day in the life of Dublin-junkies that rightly makes being a junky look about as glamorous as bowel-cancer, better than the execrable, irresponsible “Trainspotting” by a country mile, nowhere near as good as Peter Mullen’s “Orphans”, which it closely resembles.