In a desperate attempt to pre-empt Familyhobgoblin's malicious blackmailing and bullying I present the following, actually rather nicely Warholised picture of myself. Now let's see what else you've got, Goblin! Is that the best you can do! And why do you have these photos of me anyway? What foul, tawdry uses have you been putting them to, in your nasty, moist burrow between the gnarled olde tree roots?

Coming up next, Tom from Bad Zero.............

I would like to unresevedly apologize for any offence caused to fellow Bloggers by my recent posts, especially to both Family Hobgoblin and PMPEP if I in anyway implied they were anything other than Adoni, divinely proportioned, the living embodiements of the Hellenic model of beauty and even slightly stooped, tubby or balding. I would also like to apologize to Mark K-Punk for my childish speculations and the suggestion that he may look a bit like Davros or the unfunny professor from the Fast Show.

I make this statement freely and under no duress whatsoever.

The first in an occasional series: this month...

Some guesses at what Mark K-Punk might look like in the non-organic flesh....

A couple of things

1) Bloody Simon Reynolds, first he obliges me to buy the Wire for the first time in years (and there isn’t even a free CD with it, unlike say with“Rock Sounds”. I mean I didn’t even buy it when David Thomas was on the cover last month…) Now to add insult to injury he is simultaneously disavowing cheapskatery and gloating (nay veritably cackling) over his victory in the International Quidditch Cup by picking up records for 12p. Yup, twelve pence. So victory is yours for the moment, but have I mentioned that as usual this year I will be visiting Argentina, a country whose recent financial tribulations (terrible for the local populace, of course, excellent for the globe-trotting Quidditcher) mean that twelve pence, is let me tell you, a veritable kings ransom! And should the economic situation have lamentably improved then Bolivia, Latin America’s poorest country, is just a hop, skip and jump away, where great virgin tracts of obscure vinyl are waiting to be strip mined by Quidditch Consolidated!

2) I’ve never heard Joanna Newsom but think I can assert without fear of contradiction from even the most staunchly loyal of her advocates that she has a profoundly irritating face. A degree of punchable winsomeness and self-satisfied artsy-slapability not seen since Bjork pig-tailed and boss-eyed her way into the public mind. Do these two share a missing chromosome? I suspect that if I actually read the interview then I’ll later have to kill her. This is why I should not buy The Wire.

3) Thinking about PMPEP’s post re Dg.307 it set me wondering how come if early Seventies Czech life with its repressive politics was a "cultural living death", it produced such fine music, yet at the moment as far as I can make out nothing much of authentic interest is going on there culturally, in fact, less than the early Seventies heyday, the post implies. So I wonder whether the cultural living death isn’t actually brought on by liberalization and the proliferation of markets and culture (dear god, the endless proliferation of it!) and the usual “repressive tolerance” shtick (as opposed to just good old repressive intolerance!) Does this mean I would argue for a spot of political repression as a way of sharpening up the music when it gets a bit flabby? Err… maybe I should go away and think about that.

4) I’m off to see Mr K-Punk do something in a garden on Saturday, rather looking forward to it, but naturally slightly apprehensive at being in the great man’s presence and back in a University again (shudder), even if it is only Godsmiths. Now I may have an over active imagination (and under active will) but I cant help but visualize the people whose blogs I read (all right, so I already know what Familyhobgoblin and PMPEP look like.) Initially I though that picture of John Foxx on his blog was Mr Punk himself and was seized with envious rage. He looks like some of kind of cool, underground Eighties rock star, I thought, look at those cheekbones! Now I imagine him as a kind of eight foot, purple-dreadlocked Cyber –Goth harrying Academia with the cold eye of a raptor and clad in a metallic pseudo-skin that scintillates in the light of South London staffrooms. Of course I know that’s absurd so I immediately flee to the other extreme and imagine him instead as a tiny, bald, clawed, pop-eyed homunculus with orthopaedic shoes on both feet, poisonously haranguing dissenters and dragging round a hardback copy of “The Anti-Oedipus” that he uses to stand on when he has to get something down from the high shelf. Anything but normal, you know.

Ah that’s interesting. So in fact, he would look like a combination of Family Hobgoblin and PMPEP, then.

See that, see what I did there!

4) Re that “Death is their Zion” thing I notice that there’s a track by “High on Fire” who have affiliations to Sleep as was, called “ Blood from Zion.” (and it’s pretty good!)

5) I’d be really grateful if you could just forget numbers one to four.

Early 70's Czech proto-Industrial protest rock?
That woud be the latest post over at FrothingSpleen, then.
Burn anybody who wants one a cd?
I reckon so.

Neighbours

For Familyhobgoblin!

Stills Of Michel Foucault

For Billy!

Some characteristicly fabulous and tricky points from Ireland’s Most Promising Young Poet Billy* in the comments box (I’m just relieved to get any kind of message from him frankly, the mysterious blighter) and Bad Zero’s Tom.

First of all, re: the complexity/simplicity of the music thing as opposed to other art forms, well, I would guess that there is no literary equivalent of “Ace of Spades” for example, in other words that certain effects are only attainable through sound, volume, rhythm etc. That huge surge of adrenalin is pretty inaccessible in other medium (I don’t think cinema can hit the same kind of peaks either, it’s just a less direct assault upon the system) so I think any analogy between the pleasures to be had between music and literature is only useful up to a point. Also the pop world for example is a much more personality driven affair than the world of classical music, (its seductions are heavily bound up in identifications with style/attitude/standpoint etc.) So I think in several ways we’re talking about different beasts. I also think that the lines are pretty blurred re “elitist” movies for example. Quite what constitutes elitist movies these days is hard to know, I mean could you find any hip, self-styled intellectual who didn’t like “ Blade Runner” or “Aliens”, I’d say my two favourite movies were probably “ Le Jour Se Leve” and “Night of the Hunter”.. ok, so they’re old and one of them is French but, y’know…equally Tom’s love of totally obscure trash Cinema could easily be regarded as a storing-up of hip cultural capital and ergo elitist, though the films themselves wont be making any critical top tens in Sight and Sound.

Also I guess that “complex” Cinema is relatively accessible, in a way that “complex” music isn’t, you just need to read a couple of books of film theory to clue up on the grammar or the specific idiom of the films and that makes them relatively simple to relate to, ( cue hackles rising at audacity of this statement.) I do think that it’s the case for example that people who can play an instrument tend to like things that total non-musicians such as myself just can’t hear anything appealing in (check out the Technical Death Metal stuff, quite what’s happening with those guitars that’s so technical and awe-inspiring is lost on me for example, my judgement of whether it’s “good” is based on other, much less tangible factors. Why do I like Hendrix, but not Joe Satriani for example, it’s certainly not based on any ideas of who’s the better guitarist.) or they tend to like similar stuff but for rather different reasons. When we’re sitting there listening to it, I know they’re hearing all kinds of stuff I’m not. But of course if you subtract subjective factors from criticism/appreciation then we just end up arguing about who/which school is most technically accomplished/formally advanced. I dont think any of us (meaning me, Billy and Tom) are really advocates of that kind of dry, sentiment-purged theoretically-derived poetry.**

However I am a bit unsure what the drift of Billy’s argument is, as in, whether I ought to be less elitist re: Film/Lit given my position on Pop, or whether I ought to get my music knowledge up to the appropriate level. Naturally I plead that, being an elitist in terms of Literature and Cinema I just don’t have enough time to also be an elitist in terms of music.

I notice Familyhobgoblin is getting a bit huffy about this post over on his blog too, so I’m also wondering what’s so aggravating about it.

Can I also point out in my defence that I have never liked Yo La Tengo

*Get on a plane, lad!

** Actually this is why I’m not an "elitist", I’m basically a middlebrow, left-liberal humanist/sentimentalist who is/has been struggling to become an elitist and can’t resign himself to his failure of intellect/nerve/rigour... or an elitist who's intellect/nerve/rigour are rightly tempered by his middlebrow left-liberal humanism etc.. take your pick, either way you've got a halfway house (come on in, plenty of room!) I refer you to this bit of text (again):

He leaned in confidentially, long, maybe one-time handsome face drawing closer.

"Frankly there are only two adequate ethical responses to the world, suicide or terrorism, and we all fucking know it." His voice hardened to a sneer on the last six words and then he bared tobacco-streaked teeth at them in what passes with the lapsed writer for a smile. An ambiguous, triple or quadruple edged smile. Seems to be challenging but at the same time dismissive or resigned or, dunno, its tricky to pin this bastard down.

Faintly pathetic like, but faintly unsettling too. They didn't really want to get into all this stuff. But with the lapsed writer there's not much option.

Why did they decide to sit with him again? Moths to a flame, like.

"And which one would you be, like?" Billy asked "Suicide or terrorist?"

The lapsed writer settled back then, smoking a Ducados, peering at them through its eye-drying, black tobacco gauze. Pulling it away from his mouth and flicking the ash with a flourish. Partly knowing, maybe. Demonstrating a certain irony about the conventions of ironic gestural overstatement, like. A slippery customer, this one.

"Well now, boys. I have discovered that, despite the surface gloss I've tried to paint over my life in my wilder moments of self-delusion, I'm essentially a bourgeois liberal. The three humours, shall we say, that have dominated my life are: Guilt, Cowardice and Vanity." He re-drags on the fag.

"Hence, re suicide/terrorist I seem to have adopted a weakened form of both positions. I'm killing myself slowly by drinking too much and annoying as many people as possible on the way down."

an extract from Jason Phereus: A room of his own!

Dave’s lucky. He found a flat in Holborn, not far from Russell Square, three or four years ago for eight hundred quid a month. Two rooms, one very big, small kitchen, smaller bathroom, in a characterless, modern, but suitably chalky-grey block. Of course, on Dave’s current wages he can’t afford to live there on his own anymore, so he occupies the largest room and sublets the smaller as a bedroom to whoever. At the moment it’s a Polish girl who’s, oh, long story, the friend of an ex-student’s older brother.

So he has his room. The most you can ask for in this city, to have a room of one’s own, but Dave’s room is posing him problems. The biggest being that he has too many books, too many by far. He’s a bibliaholic. Always has been, he reads while he’s cooking his meal, he reads while he’s eating it and of course he reads while he’s crapping it out. Not too extreme maybe, but Dave reads while he’s buying the food in the first place, while he’s watching films at the cinema, while he’s talking on the phone. He reads while he’s cleaning his teeth, while he’s doing press ups, while he’s masturbating, while swimming. Read in the bath, you’re normal, read in the shower, you’ve got problems, read in the communal shower at the Gym you go to try and burn off the pounds you’ve piled on from sitting around all day reading, and you may need to examine your habits.

That’s Dave, a compulsive purchaser of miscellaneous books, books on any and every subject as there is nothing, after all, that doesn’t interest Dave. Books that have to go somewhere to be stored, that shore up or slide down from each of his flat's four walls in banks and buttresses, that mound and hummock or tower in floor to ceiling columns. Every day there’s more. A mere eighteen months ago he decanted nearly all of his stash to his Dad’s attic, a mammoth three day endeavour that left them aching and ink-stained for weeks. There’s no more space there. So, it’s a problem. It’s a problem that he can’t go past Oxfam or Help the Aged or, god forbid, Quinto’s without diving in for a rummage and a root through the down-to-a-pound cellar stock, investing a couple of quid in say, Ortega Y Gasset’s “ Revolt of the Masses” in the original Spanish, or “Boriss Spaskeys 400 selected games” or “Chinese for your Trip” by Charles Berlitz.

A problem, a problem. A problem he had hoped to alleviate but may only have exacerbated with his scheme, result of an insomniac brainwave at four-thirty one Tuesday morning as he lay sweating on his futon, yes, the flesh may be weary but not all the books have been read, to create a number of mini-rooms within his own larger room by means of a series of curtains hung from rails attached to the high ceiling, creating a kind of mini-flat within his room, complete with a library and with bookcases that would rest against the curtain-walls, that could be found in curtain-alcoves and in the recessed end of curtain-corridors. He could transform his room, make it something between a mini-house and a grotto. What he needed, he decided rolling over on the futon and punching the pillow up into a ball under his head, was some books on Japanese house design.

Always more books. People ask him if he’s read all the books he has in his room, and he tells them of course not, no, but he has looked at all of them. What more can he do, given that he’s interested in everything? How is he supposed to pass them by, in the bookshops, be they second hand or remaindered, when they call out to him promising new worlds, new selves, even the simplest of them. Even the simplest of ideas creates a new self, he says. Others say, no, it just adds to the self and Dave asks them back, how can something be different, bigger if we can think about it in those terms and still be the same? The smallest of ideas, the tiniest unit of information alters the thing that absorbs it. Fundamentally? they ask and Dave says, but there is nothing fundamental, is there? And they mostly think, oh no, Dave’s off on one again, Dave’s talking rubbish, Dave’s lapsed into incoherence, but they don’t grasp it the way he does, they don’t grasp that they too are just information systems, much more than that too, but also really that, an information network constantly being added to and adapting itself, the ultimate Adaptive system, and that every new unit of info adds to the whole and creates a new functionality.

Maybe it’s because of the work he used to do that he tends to think this way. For a few years, straight after he’d completed his MSC in The Philosophy of Science, he had a job in IT. He had the run of his flat then, no need for lodgers, or at least he would have done if he’d ever been at home instead of working six days a week and spending every spare minute at the weekend out, trying to compensate for his job by drinking, dropping pills, not sleeping and searching somehow for a moment of pleasure, a high, a moment’s transcendence that could stand as a counterweight to the working week’s endless, weighty, anxious hours. A moment of freedom, just a moments real, true escape, a door opening somewhere at three am that he could slip through into peace and forgetfulness, a peace profound enough to compensate for the week's struggle. Where was that door? On the dancefloor? At the party, in that girl's arms, at the end of that backstreet, in a dealer’s pockets? Hunting down the night’s loose edges, hunting the crack, the fissure, the tear that he could pry his fingers into and work open just enough to slip outside all this for a moment. Maybe, he used to think, with more effort and more help he’d see it, that if he concentrated enough, maybe he could crack reality. Bang his brain hard enough against the front of his head, maybe something would open under the pressure.

Didn’t he see it one night, wasn’t it the night his mum died, the thirteenth of April 1998, on the dance floor of some club he can’t even remember, staring up at the ceiling, something opening before his eyes, a soft fold, a slow creasing as though the fabric of reality were slowly collapsing under its own weight, sagging, rain-soaked velvet thumbtacked over a broken window, Dave center- stage fretting the world’s tatty backdrop threadbare with the intensity of his gaze? And then it was gone and he awoke the next day sick with exhaustion, brain misfiring and spluttering, spitting sparks, singed, wretchedly on the cusp of the Big Come Down and vowing for real this time that he was going to have to change his way of living, saying it out loud to himself as the phone rang, only to discover that it was his dad, phoning from the hospital, and that now things had changed definitively, in the deepest of ways and forever.

I have a problem that I can’t quite define, a problem in regard to my response to certain bits of formulaic Hollywood product and which possibly mirrors my response to (some) Robbie William’s stuff. It’s hard to describe but I’ll have a go by drawing on a real-life example.

A few weeks ago I was forced to watch “ Love Actually” and “Pulp Fiction,” again ( I saw the latter intentionally, when it first came out, the former “by accident” as I had to wait three hours for a flight and it was the only thing on at the cinema) watching both of them for the second (maybe third time) I found myself again in the position that I’m often in with this kind of stuff, that of being moved despite myself, or rather I should say intensely moved, affected even though if you asked what I “thought” of both of those films I’d say I disliked them.

What seems to happen is that it’s precisely my fight against the film that intensifies the moments of “emotion”, if I were less suspicious, less distant, less analytically lofty and superior, less desperate to be above the movie and more engaged and involved I would probably find them moderately moving or exciting, as it is, my desire to be Completely Unaffected by them (because they’re banal, manipulative, shallow, deceitful etc) sets up an enormous amount of inner turmoil that heightens everything and which result in my having, at moments, tears in my eyes, getting goosebumps or my heart hammering, this only angers me further of course and sets up a catastrophic escalating chain of conflict that often results in me, who doesn’t like the film, being more affected by it than anyone else, and practically hysterical by the end.

This doesn’t mean of course that the film isn’t bad, or that I “like” it, but it does I think demonstrate that component of negative emotion which is often attendant on intense experiences. I think Robbie’s “work” is in this category as are the other main names in my ongoing, rolling Book Of Evil, Hornby, Curtis, Ritchie. It doesn’t happen with something like say, James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” as this was clearly written by someone of sub-normally low intellect/gifts as a songwriter/lyricist ( “I’m sad, so sad, you’re bad, I’m going mad, I feel so blue, without you, what a to-do,” etc) whereas the others are very shrewd if not always awfully subtle manipulators of our emotions/desires. One of the most awful aspects of all this is of course the extent to which it tells me exactly who I am. You’re just another middlebrow, middleclass Kulcha-Ho susceptible to the same set of Pavlovian tear-jerking/rock-and- roll-cool bell-ringings as the fools you strive to set yourself above, you too are constituted THUS! These films set up a kind of struggle within me which is, in effect a short, intense burst of the lifelong process of someone trying to overwrite their coding, if I weren’t SO determined to be unaffected by them, if I could just say, ok, yeah it moved me here and there, I laughed at that bit, so what? It was corny but corny works and these guys are the Einsteins of Cheese, I am as susceptible to it as anyone else, then maybe this would be ok, but as it is actually I find these films threatening and aggressive. They’re a combat zone, and effectively the pleasure I get from them (a kind of thrilling, pulse rattling anxiety) is probably akin to the excitement of being in situations of actual danger. You’d really rather you weren’t there.

So what is this particular type of pleasure, if we can call it that, the pleasure of being set against yourself? It’s a sensation I largely avoid by avoiding the films themselves but I wonder whether it isn’t the underlying pleasure, or at least the addictive charge in a lot of “Product” especially pointedly Po-Mo stuff, that in a subtle, insidious way the pleasure is augmented by your rejection of what’s being offered you, and that by rejecting it you only tighten its grasp on you.

Pere Ubu - Sleepwalk

Terrible quality, but...

pere ubu-waiting for mary

The greatest band in the history of everything, I can't even begin to hope to imagine thinking about the possibility of approaching an attempt to describe how much i love them, and the Fontana years POP stuff as much as anything they've done.

First up, just quidditched that new Little Axe that K-Punk's bigging up at the moment, (about which more later) along with “Warrior Dubz” (god bless promos, eh?) so quite heavily in the K-ster's corner of the universe musically at this very instant (The Impostume coming to you live and direct from a South London garret!!!)

I notice that “Warrior Dubz” has a very metal title and a very metal cover, but then again Mary Anne Hobbs may be rinsing out those off the hook Grime and Dubstep white labels until the early hours these days but it wasn’t that long ago that she was headbanging in a fringed leather biker jacket, reeking of patchouli oil, necking back the Newcastle Brown and shouting out for the rewind on Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts and The Ram Jam Band as I recall. I’d forgotten that Metallica / Motorhead/ Molly Hachett (insert metal band beginning with M here for purposes of own amusement) Anne Hobbs was one of the main playahs on this scene. Presumably her record collection goes Kode 9/Lethal Bizzle/ Loefah/ Plasticman/ Ratt. I reckon ALL these guys have got Saxon , Diamond-Head and Man ‘o’ War LPs tucked away behind the sofa. Hey, didn’t that Kano album sample “War Pigs”? It’s the New Wave of British Heavy Meckle.

PMPEP is confessing to a liking for Robbie William’s “Come Undone” over on Frothing-Spleen, something which has unfortunately provoked me into yet more musings and tusslings on the same subject, of which, again, more later. But don’t worry I will give you advanced notice so you can make a cup of tea while I post that one!

Mark Stewart - Hypontised

Mark Stewart and the Maffia - Resistance of the Cell

A quick, On-U-Tube tribute to the mighty K-Punk!

2)
"In his exultant, beer-blurred mind he already knew how it would be when he took her home-how she would feel to his exploring hands in the dark privacy of the taxi, and how she would be later, undulant and naked, in some ultimate vague bedroom at the end of the night."
Richard Yates " The B.A.R Man"


In this bar the beer don't work on me
In this bar beer don't work on me
All the men that hang around they are prayin they are free
All the women that hang around are lookin for a Bukowski
But the rails have turned to rust
and I see you laughin at the sea
E pluribus unum, oh honey,
the dust will set us free
Is that fire in your eye?
Is that fire in your eye?
Is that fire in your eye?
Is that fire in your eye?

On another night
On another world
In another planetary system
I mighta been your lover
I might've been your friend
I might've been something in your life
But the rails have turned to rust
and I see you laughing at the sea
E pluribus unum, honey,
the dust will set us free
Is that fire in your eye?
Is that fire in your eye?
Pere Ubu: Two Girls (One Bar)


"The great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers"
Tenesee Williams " Sweet Bird of Youth

Come Home

"In the backseat of a blue fin mystery
I hang my head & cry
Outside the night birds call
Early morning mists swim free
I'm at the bridge & the river's enraged
I'm a bird but the bird's encaged
I'm a free man otherwise engaged
I'm a fool
I'm a fool"

“O to break loose. All life's grandeur

is something with a girl in summer ...”
Robert Lowell, “Waking Early Sunday Morning

1)

Pere Ubu’s work is generally divided up into three distinct period (Early years (pre-punk-post-punk)/ Fontana years (POP)/ post Fontana years) but really everything from The Tenement Year on seems to have been covering the same ground, distilling the same set of lyrical concerns, as has Thomas’ side-project with The Two Pale Boys. The latest “ Why I Hate Women” continues this series of takes on Mythic America, specifically the America of the Fifties and the quintessential figure of the haunted, driven man drunk on the enormity of the American Sublime, (the “ crazy green of a mid-summer nowhere”), knuckles white on the steering wheel, the constellations wheeling above him as he heads for the promise of the low, distant lights, deeply foolish, grimly hanging onto the belief that there really is something out there, somewhere out there that will restore him to himself, somewhere life is really lived. In the pre “in-here” America of the new Industries of self-improvement, pop-psychology, self-help and Prozac, it’s the place itself that must be sought out, a concrete, really-existing ideal-community that incarnates American Values and in which all the white-picket principles of good-neighbourly-ness and a shared vision of life can be enacted, where the cruelly irreconcilable split at the heart of the American Dream that one can be both ruthlessly self-seeking and also community-minded, is sutured closed. Thomas is always the idealist, the Utopian clown, who cannot reconcile himself to the futility of his search, to the endless American night which can never be plumbed, ( “In my head, morning never comes”) and is always in transit, always eager for the promise of the road, the always unfulfilled, displaced promise of the next town, with nothing but the ghosts of a former, disavowed life, swirling up at him through the headlights and the eerie drift and crackle of the radio to soundtrack the misgivings at the heart of his hopes, and the hope at the heart of his misgivings, a speck in the vast night of an America desolated by the weight of its own impossible promise.

Mea Culpa!

I received this e-mail today from Paul East head of the set of concerns listed below his correspondence:

From: "Paul East" <paul.east@t-online.de>>To: "Carl Neville" <white_diaspora@hotmail.com>>Subject: White Diaspora>Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 07:32:08 +0200>>

Carl>>>>

It would appear that you have absolutely no intention of paying the money>you still owe me: 700 euros to be exact.>>>>I´ve not been around for most of this year mainly due to illness and am only>now starting to catch up on things. According to my records, you still>haven´t bothered to reply to my mail sent on 10th December last year.>>>>

To be honest, the money is not the most important thing here – I don´t like>being taken for a ride. I want an answer within the next couple of days>letting me know when I can expect payment.

As mentioned, you have the>possibility of paying into my mother´s bank account in England so you have>no excuses.>>>>

Don´t fucking disappoint me – you have one more chance and, believe me, I>don’t fuck about with lawyers and all that shit.

>>>>>>>>Paul East>>The Pyramid Group>Business Park Ulm>Einsteinstraße 59>89077 Ulm / Germany>>Tel: +49 731 3976976>Fax +49 731 3976977>Mobil +49 (0) 170 1842435>>

HYPERLINK "http://www.thepyramidgroup.biz>
Specialist English Training>

HYPERLINK "http://www.ebooksworld.de>
E-publishing & Print On Demand>



I quite understand Paul's frustration he's been trying to get that money off me for ages, though I suspect seven hundred euros is a rather fanciful figure (it's more like five hundred, as far as I recall, but I'll check) I did arrange a bank transfer years ago but it got lost at his end and then I just, very conveniently for myself, didn't really get round to sorting out another one despite numerous requests from Paul, the last one was last year, when I was out of the country and I had frankly forgotten all about him until today.

Now my reluctance to pay Paul promptly is based entirely on the rotten quality of the service he offered me (though he didn't ask for money up front, the only advantage in fact of getting involved with him) and the resultant bad-will on my part as a customer. As an emerging POD publishing magnate for example he was incapable of even converting a Word file to PDF, certainly couldnt sort out White Diaspora's complicated pagination for me (in fact couldn't even understand it) and couldnt typset the book, all of which I ended up having to do myself. Once the novel was printed up he then seemed to be incapable of getting it to about fifty percent of its intended recipients (there was a long and amusing set of tales on The House of Leaves board about the fact that one punter actually received a fondue set instead of the book), later when people I knew ordered copies from him, I had to chase him up about it and at least one, to my knowledge had his bank account debited and received no novel subsequently. (I still have all these e-mail exchanges available for inspection, M'lud.) Indeed not long after I got involved with him the guy who had suggested I try him out in the first place asked Paul to stop handling his stuff due to his staggering incompetence and, like me, sought out a more reliable service.

There is however no question that I owe Paul the money for the printing of the books, but of course it sticks in my craw slightly and I have been ignoring this fact and hoping that he just forgets about it(or dies).. looks like that's not going to happen,though.. so.. i can only assume that his letter represents a threat of physical violence/attempt at intimidation ( being nice has got him nowhere) if I don't cough-up. However equally understandably, Paul, people respond very POORLY to threats of physical violence, as I am now doing, though this begs the question as to who is going to be doling the beating out to me. You, Paul? Are YOU going to come over and sort me out yourself or do you have some " lads" who are going to do it for you? Your son lives over here, doesn't he? Is he going to do it? But you ARE threatening me, aren't you, Paul East of Pyramid Communications.(oops, hope this page doesn't start coming up on web searches for your sites, Paul). All of this begs the question, if you're not going to use the legal process, which I suspect you're not because A) you can't afford to and B) you don't have any coherent records of your own business transactions then what I'm asking myself is how much of a kicking am I willing to take for this putative seven hundred euros and my feeling right now is , well, I'll take one. What are you going to do, stab me, have me shot? I advise you that I am six foot four so have a good reach and am currently bench-pressing one forty, so I'll take my chances. Specify exactly what the nature of this threat is Paul and then i can make an informed decision as to whether i consider it worth paying you to avoid it,or indeed how credible a threat this really is, Paul East, Specialist English Trainer of www.thepyramidgroup.biz and www.ebooksworld.de

The ball's in your court, Paul, I always think it's best to air one's dirty laundry in public, the Impostume receives a modest hundred or so visits a day on average (feel free to check the site stats below. Hey, maybe more now if some of your clients start picking this up on google searches, cool! and it will at least allow them to get an informed perspective on your management techniques and the testimomy of at least one dissatisfied customer, eh?) , any further e-mails you send me will be coming up here too.. i suspect neither of us will come out of it looking too noble but so be it. So Paul what does that last sentence mean EXACTLY

Guitar Wolf

Anal Cunt- Your In A Coma (8/27/05)

fantastically enough in the youtube comments someone says "fuck, i love that song."

Machine Head - Davidian

Pantera - I'm Broken

MURDER JUNKIES-I kill everything i fuck

PMPEP is rather understandably bigging up Guitar Wolf over on Frothing Spleen (actually his smoothly measured, rather urbane prose style should fool no-one!!!!!) which set me to thinking about the way lots of rock has been recycled wholesale but with a retro-pastiche gloss in order to allow the educated to get off on it without compromising their self-image as essentially above that kind of adolescent/unsophisticated/prole/white-male stuff. I guess Guitar Wolf fall into this category (as do, say, Pussy Galore) along with all that Electro Clash and Kitty-YO/Ironic-Hoxton-AC/DC-t-shirt palaver (though PMPEP certainly doesn’t share that approach, I hasten to add (and I also suppose your allowed to listen to Sunn0)), Earth, KK Null’s stuff and so on, in other words bands that are “intellectually” interesting as they allow you to demonstrate your smarts by cross referencing Phill Niblock and Paul Shutze etc* ). You know how it is, you want to be dumb, but in a clever way, you wanna rock out to big, hairy, dick-waggling riffs but maintain your enlightened, Liberal-P.C cred, you certainly wouldn’t want to be seen to be really into it, you appreciate it with the refined distance of the connoisseur (just one more tasty morsel on the cultural smorgasbord of Late Capitalist life, pick and choose but don’t gorge on any one thing, now) and rather than being involved or overwhelmed by anything, agree instead to meet the experience halfway, I’ll listen to you, even dance, but don’t for a moment think I take you seriously, or that you have truly captured my heart, don’t expect me to commit.

There is of course a huge, unconsidered, infra-critical-dignatum area of rock that largely survives starved of mainstream press attention (maybe “Terrorizer” is it’s main outlet in the UK, maybe even “Rock Sounds”) the whole Thrash/Grind/Speed/Black metal/ hardcore fraternity which as far as I can make out has a lot closer ties to some of the hipper, current doyens of the dance/electronica scenes than we might like to admit. (Kevin Martin, Justin Broaderick, Mick Harris, whose Scorn seems to have been a big influence on Dubstep ( and if the “Isolationism” comp is a telling reference in that regard it’s worth pointing out how many old garage-rock revivalists and Metalheads there were on it, side projects from Zeni Geva, Skullflower, Godflesh, Napalm Death, God, ex Loop, Spacemen Three etc).

There’s probably a secret history of Nottingham waiting to be written somewhere.

Presumably the desire for “heaviness” for the disordering/disabling of the senses through sheer crushing immensity is common to both dub and metal, the desire to accelerate perception past the point of any critical/ analytical distance, toward a voiding of its own content through sheer propulsion, is common to lots of dance and to metal too. So why is metal such a no-no, why is it such a dirty secret, why is it so embarrassing? And on another level why is there something so disquieting, something faintly repulsive about it? Because of the hint of zealotry, because they really believe in this? That odd, slightly discomfiting, somehow inappropriate zone of life where actually, they really mean it, man, as both performers and audience. It’s A.W.O.L, Metal, (I mean, can you imagine anyone getting a “ Peaches” tattoo?) Remember the guy who SHOT Dimebag Darryl for splitting-up Pantera?


Given PMPEP’s inability to Blog from YouTube, I’ll do it for him and offer up what treats I can from that dank underworld where it’s not pretty and its not clever but where at the very least, you can headbang without having to pull ironic faces to your circle of similarly conflicted mates every two minutes just to reassure yourself that everyone is in on the joke.

*Am I the only one who picked up that Neurosis DVD on which they, amazingly enough, restaged Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” with their own stuff**?

** I Kid You Not!

The (sadly behind the) Times has just come up with this amazingly lazy retread of other people's ideas/work...


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2376975.html

Though it is amusing to note that the CEO of Inspired Broadcast Networks is called Norman Crowley. Now if ever there were a name that conflated the mixture of sinister Freemason and prosaic suburbanite essential in all CEOs, that's the one! And telling, also, that some pubs have scrapped them (Database Jukeboxes) as punters "Just didn't know what to choose."

Choice as burden.

Choice as vertiginous bewilderment. Adrift in the Choice-mos, trying hard to be a shrewd consumer, the good, rational, informed consumer you pride yourself in being (which is in fact your raison d'etre), trying to get your maximum value for your pound, but, indundated with options and anxious that you may fail to fullfil your duty, (does this selection really represent the best one, given that I can have anything, maybe I should think harder!) your self-esteem wavering, you decide, "Fuck it, let's just leave it off and have a chat." (The Impostume!)

Sweet. Is it only me or are we really reaching some kind of cultural breaking point here?

Andy Campbell's latest is absolutely stunning, probably Dreaming Method’s best work to date and a real refinement of that strand in Andy’s work that I can only describe as Northern Council Estate Gothic, unheimlich is precisely the word for this one. David Lynch meets Ken Loach anyone? Blair Witch in Bradford? Maybe the touchstone is something like Sydney Lumet’s “The Offence” or even Peter Collinson’s, “Fright” (did Ian Bannen only play psychos in the Seventies?) The product of a childhood (mis)spent watching the Saturday Night BBC2 Hammer Horror and Amicus* double bills and haunting the post-industrial dead zones of provincial Northern towns, high on cheap weed and looking for a good fear buzz, I’ll wager. (Much like myself then!) Andy suggests you get the lights down and the sound up for this one, and that there’s a lot of detail you won’t get to on even your third or fourth visit. The time limit’s a brilliant idea, a brilliant innovation, and adds real pace and tension to a form that can otherwise become rather diffuse, one of the main drawbacks of hypertext/new media stuff (unless you’re one of those arch-theorist for whom the whole point of the endevour is, like, how it challenges conventional narrative through it very diffuseness, yeah? and thereby justifies the whole freight of Academic propositions the project is supposed to illustrate (too much of this kind of smug, bloodless stuff around for my tastes.)) It also really helps that Andy has been worrying away at computer-based fiction for at least as long as, oooh, Robert Coover, for example and is a visual artist first by inclination and now by profession.

I can only pray that the highly-anticipated (by me, mostly) Dreaming Methods/ Six Aborted Novels collaboration (Six Aborted Dreams?) comes about. Man’s a genius!

Link Problems!

try cut and pasting this

http://www.dreamingmethods.com/theflat/

*when did we suddenly get so shit at/stop making horror movies?

UPDATE!

THE FLAT has now been updated!!!!!

Right, now I MUST get some writing done!