One swallow doesn't make a Summer/but one'll do for now/and as if i had a choice/ I didn't get where I am today/ by being too choosy/ I've got what it takes/ to take what you've got....

one of the greatest lyrics of all time..

oh, let's get up to the Fells/ Show me what a Lancashire lass you used to be

King of the Slums - Bear with Me

a really great, unfairly neglected band IMnotveryHO

DUB SEX - 'Instead Of Flowers' - 1988

Crispy Ambulance: The Presence

sign this.

and pass it on to be signed by others.

Who writes this stuff and are they actually paid for it? an occasional series.

Looking through Time Out to find something to keep The Spleen entertained on his annual visit I discovered that WU LYF, who I rather like (cheers, Alex!) and are about the most Mancunian sounding band imaginable are apparently Tropicalia (a fairly broad “genre” in and of itself anyway) and Animal Collective influenced: well they’re certainly heavily Bromantic and maybe the rhythm section is a bit more exuberant than your average Indy landfill but they sound a lot more like Crispy Ambulance, or Dub Sex to me. Maybe I’ll go and play it to some of my Brazilian students telling them it’s Giberto Gil and see if they can spot the difference.

Is this just ‘cos of the vaguely tropical video for “spitting out blood”?

Happy Birthday Owen!

The Hauntological Orchestra are the UK's foremost explorers of the art of audio hauntology - sparkier than a bri-nylon spacesuit, cooler than Jacques Derrida's old fridge-freezer. By turns painfully hip and mind-bogglingly kitsch, the Orchestra exists at the point where the funky but fashionable faux pas gives way to a vintage electronic vibe to die for. Your MC for this night of unbridled pleasure is Jonny Trunk, doyenne of retrofuturist chic, record label magnate, pop-cultural historian and presenter of Resonance104.4fm's acclaimed OST Show.

(italics mine)

Nice to see all that hard theoretical work done by Simon and Mark over the past few years, especially in Mark's attempts to provide music with some kind of forward orietation through reconnecting it with the modernist project, utterly travestied by whoever wrote this.

Who did write it btw? Because they should drop the term hauntology as a far as I can see before they completely devalue it. I mean I know it has underground cache and it's kind of new and makes you sound interesting and cutting-edge but crate-digging chillaxing hipster esoteria is not really my understanding of what Hauntology is all about.

In fact I'd be so bold as to say it's a thoroughgoing mis/nonunderstanding and as such does no-one any favours.

Here's some of that Biwa action. That's a female vocalist, by the way, probably in her 70s at the point this was recorded. You kind of wonder why anyone would view Ground Zero as extreme after 26 minutes of this.

I am getting into Tomokawa Kazuki.

My attitude to Japanese rock is pretty much perfectly summed up by Reynold’s chapter on it in Retromania and predictably it seems like the traditional music and the folk is way more interesting/exciting than the Boredoms or whoever (I was initiated into the Biwa through the Mimi Nashi Houichi section of the full length DVD release of Kobayashi’s awesome Kaidan, the Shamisen through tiny folk clubs in Okinawa.)

Actually the same seems to go for films and writers too, I can’t help but think that many of the artists who are feted in the West (I’m thinking here in film pretty much about Oshima who I have to say has made some dreadful films, Empire of Passion is a colossal turkey, innit, Realm of the Senses utterly tedious) are basically loved for being The Japanese Goddard, the Japanese Kafka, the Japanese X, when in fact most of what I’ve seen that’s really great in film (not a lot (in terms of quantity of films watched, I mean, admittedly I’m still picking my way through it) Ie Samurai Banners, Seppuku, Vengeance is mine or even the Death Note series, seem to be fairly straight forward, non-self-consciously auteurist projects.)

I’m just thinking out loud here and off the top of my head from a position of virtually total ignorance of the language, history and culture of the place so I won’t say anymore as I’m really still completely groping around in the dark re Japan (back off to Fukuoaka in September) and typically many things I had no interest in ie Manga turn out on closer inspection to be this incredibly rich and complex, multifaceted artform, with, for instance, a really strong social realist strand among other things. Actually there’s a point there about my assumptions, based on Manga’s reception, promotion, and its admirers in the West: it looked like tedious “exotic” wacky shit loved by smug or geeky “alternative” types that enjoyed a brief popularity on the back of Akira and that wave of New Tech optimism and cyberpunk Nipponophilia (remember the inconsequential and absolutely revered Tetsuo, by “the Japanese Cronenburg”?) that we had to put up with in the early 90s.

Actually I heard Tomokawa’s “Inakamono No Kara Genki” ( translated superbly as A Bumpkin’s Empty Bravado (I mean I don’t know if that’s a superb translation but it’s a great title)) and thought it was alright, but hadn’t paid full attention to him till recently only to discover that he’s done some really superb stuff and his singing style is distinctive to say the least, but without seeming contrived or simply out for empty effects. There’s a live version of a song “Pistol” from Miike Takashi’s Izo below, ( which, regrettably, I’ll now have to see, despite Takashi being among, to my mind, the dullest hack directors working on the planet today) which gives a pretty good idea of his technique. And a charmer from his earlier (1977) A Natural Voice.

Like I say, I’m groping and I’m happy to be schooled by enlightened commentators.

Kazuki Tomokawa - Dagazugu

Kazuki Tomokawa : PISTOL

I have a colleague who teaches Business at the same private school/ college I work in who I would describe as loud, opinionated, right-wing on economic issues and aggressively philistine in the best neo-liberal tradition (intellectualism is pretentious wanking-off). We get on rather well as it happens, we’re similarly attention-seeking and argumentative, but coming from different directions.

Just before I went to Japan last March there was a strike due at Heathrow that fortunately didn’t impact on me but was going to interfere with my colleague’s holiday plans. In the staff room she complained long and loud about the situation and what bastards the unions were to her husband, a self-employed builder. She herself had had run-ins with inflexible, belligerent unions when working in retail back in the early nineties.

Now I would have described her as deeply unsympathetic to the trade union cause, in fact if I wanted to goad her I only had to start saying pro-Union stuff. A couple of weeks ago before the 30th of June demo I mentioned it to her, primarily to wind her up and have a boredom-relieving argument. She was surprisingly moderate on the whole thing. I thought you were anti-Union, I said. She denied this saying that she thought that there w as a role for unions but that the problem was that sometimes they went too far. This is a substantial softening of her position, though she characteristically acted as though she’d always felt this way.

Then yesterday there was a group of A-Level teachers having a moan about the pay and promotion bands, the qualifying criteria and the management's incompetence in addressing their concerns or following up on their promises.

Sounds like you lot want to unionise, I offered in my predictable leftist provocateur pose as I went past, expecting the usual litany of sighs, chuckles, condemnations and anti-Left quips, these are the patterned and predictable games we play, instead there was kind of shrugging silence. As though, y'know, actually, that wasn't such a bad idea

Slightly gobsmacked and keen to create scandal for sad psychological needs of my own I went further. Wildcat strike, Monday! I suggested. Better still wait till the first day of the new term.

Oh, then we’d really all get the sack, another teacher told me.

Now this is only my workplace, and this is only one person, but it is also a pivotal person in terms of the group dynamics, the person who stands up and talks, who argues, who pushes for stuff, who’s prepared to be unpopular: in this small circle an opinion former, a galvanizer, and the last person I would have expected to be moving even slightly leftward, ever. But these small shifts are signs of something, aren’t they? This woman here, that one there, things re-arranging, reality readjusting.

This is not the revolution, Carl, get a grip. It probably won't lead to anything. It’s just the loss of your workplace nemesis.

True enough. But still, trust me, that's not nothing.

Oh yeah, Philip Jeck is playing in the boxy white church next to my infant/junior school on Barrow Island and well, it seems Dopplereffekt are playing at the Bluebird club.

picks up jaw off etc...

Who is Curtis? I dunno, but he emailed to ask if he could post something, we said yes and the results are frankly excellent. Looking forward to a piece on the equally great Gremlins 2!

One thing about those blogs: we have no "editorial policy" or whatever, if you want to post you contact us, we add you, you post, we read.

So if you're out there, living in fear of anyone casting a jaded eye over your hard-wrought prose before flinging it back in your face with a haughty pshaw, that simply isn't how it works.

and you don't even have to become our "mate" and exchange hilarious-yet-trenchant Leftist email banter with us. After all, we don't do it with each other.

Can I also say again what an excellent blog Voorface is..

...and say, honestly, Wayne I've tried to add you to that links bar but Blogger say no....in fact go and hang your mouse over the top of the links bar and round the decades' blogs and you'll find two attenuated, invisible, phantom links to Pere Lebrun kind of lurking in the background like some kind of a sinister critique!

Owen Jones I could kiss you.