I Feel Love

Goodbye to all that

2003-08-06T00:56:00.000+10:00

As some of you know, for the past few weeks I've been beta-testing TypePad, the new combined blogging and hosting service from the Movable Type people. Well, I liked it so much that I bought the company. Er, no, not really, but I have signed up as a paying customer and I'm ready to unveil the new, pretty, banner-ad-free, comments-always-working version of...

I FEEL LOVE

So please come and check me out, and update your links if you feel so moved, because I'm giving this place the arse.

And suddenly I'm feeling wistful...

Oh grow up!

2003-08-05T01:01:00.000+10:00

I've never quite understood the appeal of "adulthood" as a selling point. I don't mean "adult entertainment," which of course is frequently delightful if it's the right kind. What I mean is adulthood in its non-euphemistic sense: whenever a movie, book or record is described to me as being "for grown-ups," my first thought is, in that case it's probably not for me. On the other hand, whenever a movie, book or record is derided as being "for teenagers," I'm inclined to at least give it a chance.

No doubt this means I have a big old Peter Pan complex and I'm a hopeless nostalgic, but aesthetically...well, put it this way, we teenagers get Justin Timberlake, you adults get Badly Drawn Boy, you be the judge!

***

I love this piece by Marcello Carlin--in uncharacteristically lighthearted mode, but still sharp as ever--on what you should be paying for every album in the current (UK) top 40. On the White Stripes' Elephant: "Recommended Price: 19s 11d – if you want it to be 1963, charge 1963 prices!"

Exposed: Redundancy in Text of Undignified McDonalds Promotion

2003-08-04T00:43:00.000+10:00

The new, sexed-up version of the Big Mac Chant bizarrely promises "cheese made with cheddar and milk" as one of the ingredients of a Big Mac. So that would be cheese made with both a type of cheese and the base ingredient of all cheese, would it? Thanks for clearing that up.

Also, those new "5 star burgers" are rubbish. There, I've said it!

(Incidentally, and I'm afraid I'm breaking a promise never to write about her, but my flatmate winningly announced the other day that she actually knew the old version--the "two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun" one--off by heart! I had to break it to the poor dear that everybody in our generation knows this off by heart, so much so that it's used with Gen Xers as a standard test for concussion..."who's the Prime Minister? Who won last year's Grand Final? Can you recite that Big Mac jingle thing?")

Into orbit

2003-08-03T23:02:00.000+10:00

Once the Doctor is exterminated, I shall build a new race of Daleks. They will be even more deadly! And I, Davros, shall be their leader!! This time we shall triumph!!! My Daleks shall once more become THE SUPREME BEING!!!!

Now that I've got that off my chest...

Today at the Film Festival it was Chris Petit's London Orbital, based on the book about the M25 by Iain Sinclair. Like Mark, I'm a bit ambivalent about Sinclair's writing (although I've only read bits of it, mainly in the LRB), but I actually found it worked better on film, its fulgurous succession of metaphors, digressions and tangents counterpointed with what seemed like an endless loop of the almost entirely featureless M25 as seen from a car windscreen--it wasn't really a loop I don't think, it was actually continuous footage, but how could you tell? This footage in turn was often reduced to one side of a split screen, the other showing scenes of one of the M25's real or symbolic tributaries, which in Sinclair's conjuror's mind range from Bram Stoker's Dracula (Dracula's English pied à terre is located close to the present-day motorway) to Ballardian ideas about consumerist landscapes and the "transcendental boredom" they invoke (Ballard himself appears in the film) to conspiracy theories and the omnipresence of camera surveillance on and around the motorway. (The single most compelling sequence of the film for me was some apparently authentic footage from a motion-sensitive surveillance camera which followed two people--perfectly innocent, as far as one could tell--across a car park until it lost them behind a building. It lasted for minutes and was completely chilling.)

***

"So: is the PoMo ironist seeking to protect himself - from irony?" Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes! (Yes!) That's exactly it.

Still being ironic

2003-08-03T01:06:00.000+10:00

I'm probably exhuming the corpse of a dead discussion here, but what the hell, it's better than getting into the whole "good bad writing vs bad good writing" debate, so just let me say a word or two in defence of our old friend irony.

Because what struck me in the recent mini-discussion on the topic was that nobody popped up to defend the idea of "liking something ironically"; everyone was in furious agreement that it was always and in every way a bad thing, which (a) makes me wonder whether we were attacking a straw man in the first place (I actually don't think so, because you can see the cultural effects of this idea everywhere, it's just that nowadays no-one wants to own up to it); and (b) makes me want to play devil's advocate and defend irony, or at least defend a kind of irony. As I said before, the concept of irony needs to be rescued from its postmodern vicissitudes (so, arguably, does the concept of postmodernism).

So anyway, first of all, let's not get too precious about the purity of our aesthetic preferences and their motivations; I'm sure we're all capable at times of liking things even though we also think they're not actually all that good, and there are lots of quite legitimate (as well as a host of illegitimate) reasons for doing this--the whole madeleine thing being one of them; you can be fond of something just because it takes you back to some point in your past, without necessarily thinking it's particularly great in its own right, or at least without wanting to defend it as objectively great, and that's perfectly fine. The problems start when liking things because they're "bad" becomes an aesthetic gesture in its own right, because (as people have pointed out) this is invariably a form of bet-hedging and plausible deniability, it's a way of defending yourself against the tastes of other people by making only equivocal investments in your own tastes. And that's daft.

But irony doesn't only operate along the axis of value. If we give up the idea of "liking things ironically"--as we surely should--that doesn't mean our aesthetics are suddenly irony-free. (To claim this would be as silly as all those pundits saying that irony was dead post-9/11.) Because irony can also refer to other kinds of incongruity, can't it? Like for instance incongruities of reception, the fact that you like a track for certain reasons which are quite different from what its makers "intended," you like something that in some sense isn't really for you. (Yeah, I know, intentional fallacy, but I think that's pretty unavoidable in music, pop at least.) Take for instance an adult who really, honestly likes the music of The Wiggles...there's a certain irony there, isn't there? Or imagine if the St Matthew Passion was Richard Dawkins's favourite piece of music (plausible enough--scientists go for Bach); a militant atheist loving a work written to glorify God, that sounds pretty ironic to me. Or think again of the fact that everybody nowadays loves The Carpenters, but we almost inevitably listen to them through the prism of Karen's illness and death, thus reading all these cheerful songs as melancholy and masochistic and self-abnegating "underneath." (Not that that stuff isn't actually there, but was it ever meant to be heard so explicitly?)

An acknowledgement of these kinds of ironies--if "irony" is even the right word, but I can't think of a better one--saves us from a position which is even less defensible than "liking things ironically", that is, the false universalism that says "it's all just music." The trouble with this latter position is that it is really a kind of solipsism, it involves seeing yourself as the ideal audience of all music, erasing the ways in which it functions differently for different people. And of course the "ironies" I'm talking about aren't in any way negative; on the contrary, many of the most interesting things about music revolve around them, from Dizzee Rascal bigging up Kurt Cobain to the notorious "30-year old white music critics" bigging up Dizzee Rascal.

So, kids, go ahead and be ironic if you want to! The backlash to the backlash starts here!

Transgender robots

2003-08-02T17:53:00.000+10:00

In the near future, everyone in San Francisco will be carried by transgender robots across the busy intersections for maximum safety.

Ah, Choire Sicha...he's even funnier when he's all bitter and broken-hearted. Not that that's a good thing, mind.

(Incidentally, did you know that someone got to this page via a Google search for "Mormon Tabernacle Choire"?)

Despatch from the black skivvy trenches

2003-08-02T00:57:00.000+10:00

Two more movies today! I swear this Film Festival business is exhausting...

First was A Cold Summer, which I saw mainly because I felt morally obliged to see at least one Australian film, and this looked like the most appetising of a fairly dull bunch. (There was also one with Ben Lee, which looked OK if one could stomach Ben Lee, which unfortunately one can't.) This was patchy but overall quite rewarding, a love triangle film with lots of dialogue that sounded improvised, giving at times the impression of a third-year impro class at NIDA, and also at times going the typical indie cinema route of using confrontation, shouting and general nastiness as an attempted short-cut to emotional authenticity, but the characters and their stories were quite interesting and unusual, the performances were good--especially from the actor who played "Phaedra" (!)--and I particularly liked the score by Claire Jordan, a Bartok-y/Janacek-y string quartet thing that worked very well.

Then a quick dash from the Capitol to the glorious Forum to catch The Sea, which I think I can safely say is the only Icelandic film I've ever seen, a family melodrama about a Lear-like patriarch calling his children home to decide the future of the family firm (a fish processing plant). At times quite overwrought--Icelandic people being passionate, fancy that!--this was very watchable and (shallowness alert!) the scenery was pretty. Best of all I ran into a very close friend who I haven't seen for a couple of years, which is the kind of thing you're always expecting to happen at the festival but in fact it rarely does.

***

Very good new-ish blog at It's All In Your Mind. In the couple of days since I first visited, though, the title seems to have been changed; it was a quote from Ulysses. What's wrong, Peter? I don't think "Ineluctable Modality of the Visible" was a pretentious title at all!...

(PS Peter: it would be nice to have permalinks on individual posts, and also where's your e-mail address? Don't you want people to write to you and tell you how great you are?)

[Update: also, Peter, apparently the underscore in your blog URL is an "illegal character" and prevents some people from loading the page...see the comments to this post.]

But...but...but...huh?

2003-08-01T01:11:00.000+10:00

Tonight's Film Festival session was the Korean noir sci-fi thriller Yesterday, which I saw with some friends, and I must admit we all left the cinema scratching our heads. Some very nice Blade Runner-ish design, but the plot was completely indecipherable, something to do with genetic manipulation, cloning, secret government projects and paternity, but...er, yeah. It didn't help my concentration that I realised about half an hour into the film that I'd forgotten to set the video to tape the Angel season finale, either.

The Ugh Effect

2003-07-31T00:15:00.000+10:00

Sometimes, there's just one particular small thing that makes it simply inconceivable that you could ever like something, no matter how much your friends insist it's the best thing ever. Some examples:

The Secret Life of Us - it's that voiceover innit? The conceit, I believe, is that "Evan" is writing a John Birmingham-style bestseller about the ups and downs, the laughter and the tears, of twentysomething share-house living in Trendy Cosmopolitan St Kilda. A book which, if it ever gets finished, will clearly be the most boring ever written, since the voiceovers--ostensibly drawn from this opus--consist of nothing but the most astonishingly dull platitudes and statements of the obvious: "It was then I realised that being in love wasn't as simple as I'd thought," that kind of thing. I'm no show-don't-tell fascist, but a voiceover is supposed to provide a counterpoint to the events we see, not tell us things we can quite easily work out for ourselves. Frankly, the show as a whole is also crap, but even if it wasn't, this voiceover alone would make it unwatchable for me.
Dave Eggers and other McSweeney's types - If nothing else, the arch and stomach-churningly precious use of italics by this crew makes them a no-go area.
The Lord of the Rings films - The musical score by Howard Shore is the instant killer here. Lacking even the memorable (albeit frequently pilfered) hooks of a John Williams score, this has all the bad elements in droves, principally the crushingly literal cue-pandering--"oh, look, someone's riding up on a horse, he looks a bit heroic, let's have a crescendo here," that kind of thing. Really quite unforgiveably bad and it just throws me out of the movies altogether.
The Magnetic Fields - Rick Moody likes them.

***

I wish I knew why there have been about twenty different Google searches for my name resulting in visits to this site over the past couple of days. Is someone checking up on me? Does someone want to offer me a job? (Yes please, don't be shy, even if you work for a right-wing think tank or something…I can produce position papers on why hip-hop is ruining black people's lives, anything you like!) You know who you are, spill!

Bad links?

2003-07-30T15:45:00.000+10:00

Apparently the links on my sidebar aren't working for Ian Penman. Is anyone else having this problem? They work OK for me.

And if they don't work for you, do you have the same problem with Philip Shelburne's blog, which uses the same template? Just so I can narrow down to a Blogger problem vs a me problem...

[Update: The problem seems to be Mozilla-related and should now be fixed, thanks to John. If anyone is still having problems, let me know.]

Consider the feeling pushed on

2003-07-30T01:34:00.000+10:00

Mark in the same post I linked to yesterday also had some mean things to say about Kylie, which I'll largely ignore, because my love for her goes beyond such banal considerations as "talent" and "looks."

But I will say that I never quite understood the fuss about "Can't Get You Out of My Head"-- its eponymous claim is true enough I suppose, but when I first heard it it sounded to me like just another one of the thousand or so tracks that nicked that particular three-or-four-note-staccato-melody-on-sort-of-Rhodesy-sounding-keyboards thing from the Nightcrawlers' "Push the Feeling On." (Since I'm not a dance music archivist, I couldn't swear that the Nightcrawlers themselves didn't steal the sound from someone else, but I seem to remember that track sounding quite novel when it first came out, almost like the house equivalent of pop-trance, with its focus on simple simple simple melody above all else). So to me "Head" sounds a bit like a throwback to the mid-90s, which would be fine except that (in common with the other tracks I've heard from the Fever album) it also lacks any real melodic inspiration of the kind that would compensate for its lack of sonic innovation. (I know what you're thinking, but a song that lacks melodic inspiration can too be impossible to get out of your head.) Is "Head" just celebrated for being the tune that broke Kylie in the US? In any case, I actually think that Dannii Minogue is currently putting out better songs than her sister…and it's nice to have an opportunity to big up Dannii, since she only just missed out on both my top 10 singles and albums lists.

Anyway, that Nightcrawlers track brings to mind something which Mark talks about in his reply to my reply: what he calls "the anti-madeleine effect," or "records so eternally on replay that they attain a Timeless Presence." In dance music I suspect it's less a question of particular records than particular sounds--that "Nightcrawler" sound for example, or the famous "Mentasm" stab that now just sounds totally ordinary, to the extent that it's actually difficult to hear Joey Beltram's "Mentasm" as a stand-out track in any sense. (Definitely not true of his "Energy Flash" incidentally, which still sends shivers etc after all these etc.) The paradigm case of the anti-madeleine effect in dance music would, you would think, be the 303 acid squelch, except strangely I think that of all sounds in dance music that one actually retains its ability to estrange. Maybe acidy squelchiness is just eternally interesting and renewable?

Oh and Mark is so right it hurts about "irony." (The concept of "irony" itself needs rescuing from its postmodern vicissitudes of course, but I'm hardly the first person to make this observation.) Can you believe there are still people who think my Buffy love is in some sense "ironic"? Would you credit it?

***

I do like that new Jamie Oliver show, but I have what you might call issues with the way Channel 10 has been promoting it. "Jamie Oliver risks everything to give these jobless gits the chance of a lifetime." Jobless gits??? That's certainly not how Jamie thinks of them! And what's so great about your job, arsehole, you do voiceovers for a TV station, it's hardly rocket science is it? (Just how difficult is rocket science, incidentally? Is it much harder than other kinds of science?)

Madeleine-free

2003-07-29T00:55:00.000+10:00

In a post on some UK Channel Four program about the Top 100 British Singles, which he delightfully describes as "a madeleine-free experience," Mark at k-punk takes the opportunity to vent some spleen in Tom Jones's direction:

…The William Shatner of Pop, with the same unfailing knack of sledgehammering any trace of subtlety out of anything he comes into hollering distance of. And the comebacks are even worse than anything he produced in his 60s heyday. The grotesquerie of the 'Kiss' cover - how to turn something butterfly's-wing-precious and rare into a cheap, nasty, garish, 1000-storey-Shopping Mall: a three-minute summation of everything that was bad about the 80s.

On the whole I completely agree, especially about the comebacks (he was essentially a Trojan horse for that whole risible notion of people being "ironically hip," which forces those of us who really do love, say, The Carpenters, to constantly explain that we like them because they're bloody good, not because some rubbish indie band guest-programmed one of their songs on Rage…). And oh yes, that "Kiss" cover with that awful, awful mid-80s proto-big-beat production that those of us with no access to anything outside mainstream rock lapped up at the time because it was the nearest we could find to an actual beat that you could dance to (see also, speaking of sledgehammering, Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" and the entire Simply Red catalogue).

But…I do have to make an exception for "What's New, Pussycat?" and perhaps one or two other songs from Jones's "classic" era. "Pussycat" is itself such an over-the-top parody of lewdness (I mean, come on…"I'll soon be kissing your sweet little pussy-[ahem]-cat lips") that it can only really be sung by a walking, breathing, sweating cliché like Tom, and indeed it's one of the few Bacharach songs that seems inextricably wedded to a particular voice, almost to the point where you can't imagine anyone else singing it. ("The Look of Love" would be another.) Having said that, according to AMG it's been covered by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Bob Marley, but oh well the point is you think of the song and you hear Tom's version, don't you? (It's also a candidate for the best blog title ever, incidentally.) And of course "Pussycat" is on my 3/4 compilation, nestled nicely in there just after Jimi Hendrix's "Manic Depression." (Speaking of 3/4, how did I manage to forget Herbert's remix of "Street Lullaby" by Two Banks of Four? That's definitely going in the final version, now I just have to work out who to ditch, Elvis Costello perhaps, but I digress…)

I wonder, would we actually look back more fondly on Tom's older stuff if he had never had a later, irritating pseudo-hipster incarnation? I'm reminded of another Welsh singer for whom undersinging a song is about as likely as Saddam Hussein going in for some minimal Bauhaus-influenced interior design in one of his palaces. And yet no-one ever has a bad word to say about Shirley Bassey, do they?

***

Tonight's Film Festival session was Taste of Cherry, my second Kiarostami film. Fortunately, after Chrisopher's experiences with Homework, this film was actually screened! Pretty slow going but ultimately extremely moving. Kiarostami, who is fast emerging as an absolute sweetie and total non-diva, introduced the film with a quote from E. M. Cioran, "Had it not been for the possibility of suicide I would have killed myself a long time ago," which gives you a good idea both of the subject matter of the film and of the grim (Iranian? or just Kiarostamian?) humour that runs through it.

***

Something you have to get used to about the Film Festival is spending a lot of time standing outdoors in long queues (big theatres, capacity sessions, small foyers, late starts). One fact has been repeatedly brought home to me as I notice the strange looks we festivalgoers get from passersby: people in queues always look silly. I mean it! When you see people lining up for something, especially outdoors, especially in inclement weather, isn't your immediate reaction "what's so bloody important? You're wasting your lives, morons!" Or is that just me?

Ships that pass in the night

2003-07-27T18:27:00.000+10:00

It was vaguely on the cards that I could have met no fewer than three of my fellow bloggers yesterday (separately, I mean); the actual number ended up being zero but that's cool, it's nice to know I have potential new friends in any case.

Anyway, I've been to three more Film Festival sessions. First up was Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, part of a Kiarostami retrospective at the festival. I'd never seen any of his films before and it was guilt as much as anything that made me go to this one, but I was totally overwhelmed by it. I won't repeat Christopher's excellent description, I'll just encourage you to see it if you ever get the chance. The performances are absolutely astonishing, especially from the actors playing the main protagonist and her son, and (although it somehow sounds wrong to praise a film for this, but whatever) you do get a unique insight into the lives of modern Iranian women. But can I take a moment to diss the festival program: did the person who wrote that the film was made up of "10 separate sequences, all of varying lengths and without cuts" actually watch it, or just have it described to them? Because there were plenty of cuts in virtually every scene, sometimes between two cameras, sometimes jump cuts, but all of them noticeable.

Then last night was New Zealand director Gaylene Preston's Perfect Strangers, which I admit I went to mainly out of curiosity to see if Sam Neill was really as charismatic in real life as he seems on screen. Sadly, Sam wasn't there, despite being promised to us in the program, but there was a message from him shown on screen. Poor substitute! The film itself (this was in fact the world premiere) was an odd thing, a thriller that changed halfway into a very warped romantic comedy. It was one of those films that aims to be shocking and perverse and unsettling but somehow contrives not to leave much of an impression at all. Good performances from Sam and the lovely Rachael Blake (not making any attempt at a Kiwi accent, incidentally), but I didn't love it. And could that title be any more banal and obvious?

Today it was Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy. Another black mark for the program here, it wasn't a pseudo-documentary for Christ's sake! It was a film about film-making, sure, but would you call 8½ a pseudo-documentary? No, I didn't think so. Anyway, I found this a delight; if anything it seemed too close a fit with the preoccupations of gender studies and film studies (it's no doubt being added to a hundred syllabuses as we speak), lots of really interesting stuff about the visual representation of sex acts, and a frank demystification (which might have also been an arch remystification) of the actor-director relationship. Good stuff.

Anyway, must go, Australian Idol awaits!

[Update: On second thoughts, I realise that people who write film festival copy often haven't seen the films they're writing about, and are relying on second- or third-hand information. So let's just say I'm pointing out the mistakes as a public service, without necessarily apportioning blame...]

A lot of animals were harmed in the making of this picture. We mean it, loads.

2003-07-26T00:42:00.000+10:00

Just back from my first Film Festival screening, Le temps du loup at the Capitol. I'm reminded again of how much I love that theatre; I don't think I've ever been so amazed on first walking into a building. (I mean, obviously St Paul's is nice, but I expected it to be nice.)

Anyway, the film was a gay post-apocalyptic survivalist romp from France, except not so much of a gay romp as all that. Pretty harrowing actually, but cinematically quite amazing, only natural light used as far as I could tell, lots of shots at night lit only by the moon or a fire, and some absolutely amazing scenes captured in pre-dawn near-darkness. Reminded me of school camps actually, both the light (I always used to wake up early in my sleeping bag, which would be all dewy, and it would always be freezing cold) and the cruel, atavistic state-of-nature milieu.

What struck me thinking back on the film was that I don't think a single animal appeared in it that didn't end up dead. And often you would see it being killed, too, and I mean actually killed in front of you.

But don't let that put you off! Lots of people--vegetarians, perhaps--left before the end, but they really should have stayed because the final scene was breathtaking.

Please, someone suggest a title other than "The Day the Muzik Died"

2003-07-25T16:03:00.000+10:00

It's a pity that Muzik is closing. As Scott at somedisco says, it was just starting to get interesting, and I'd just started buying it, and it was a pleasant read with enjoyably juvenile humour. Now I suppose I'll have to seek out Jockey Slut, which is almost impossible to find in Australia--I've only seen it twice I think, and even then it's covered in plastic so you can't actually sneak a read of it in the newsagent. Boo! (UK readers will be amused to know that it's actually easier to find Careless Talk Costs Lives in Australian newsagents than Jockey Slut. For real!)

There are still several dance music magazines left, of course, but none of them (apart perhaps from the elusive Slut) are what one wants: there's the drugs'n'clubs, how-I-got-trashed-in-Ibiza glossies, with pictures on the cover of sheilas in that state of blank-eyed ennui meant to subtly suggest that they are on drugs and having lots of fun (Mixmag and--the absolute nadir--Ministry), and then there are the worthy but dull magazines for DJs, with about 5,000,000 ten-word vinyl 12" reviews in every issue and a big section at the back about "gear" (this time actually referring to equipment), and pictures of DJs looking awkward and, let's face it, none too pretty on the cover (DJ Magazine and International DJ--it took me ages to work out that these are actually completely different magazines!).

No, it's been said before, but what's really needed is for the best of the music bloggers and the ILM people to band together and sweep all before them, whether it's dance music or pop in general we're talking about…although in reality that project is much more likely to be realised on the web, hopefully in the form of the revamped Freaky Trigger.

***

Now, I realise that I should be probably be cultivating a more aloof blogging persona, trying to be one of the tough kids smoking behind the bike sheds like Ingram, instead of squealing like an excitable convent girl every time someone notices me. But when in the space of 24 hours you've had your pigtails pulled by both Tim Finney (the brilliant young prefect who everyone's got a crush on) and Ian Penman (Head Girl), I think you're allowed at least a tasteful, ladylike gasp.

My urbane life, continued

2003-07-25T00:50:00.000+10:00

Also, after "Ten" and "Perfect Strangers" on Saturday night I'll be heading over to Deep Chord for some minimal grooves, and it would be even better to see people there...

All MIFFed up

2003-07-24T00:14:00.000+10:00

Well, I've booked all my tickets for the Melbourne International Film Festival. This is no small achievement: reading the brochure, working out what films you want to see, and trying to fit them into a logistically feasible schedule, is a bit like playing chess against Deep Blue, and then there's the always-joyfully(ahem)-chaotic MIFF box office to negotiate; oh well, it's all part of the charm, and now I'm sorted I'm looking forward to it. Here's what I'm seeing; if any Melbourne readers are going to the same sessions and would like to meet up, let me know!

Time of the Wolf, Fri. 25/7, 9.15 @ Capitol
Ten, Sat. 26/7, 5.00 @ Capitol
Perfect Strangers, Sat. 26/7, 9.00 @ Village
Sex is Comedy, Sun. 27/7, 3.00 @ Capitol
Taste of Cherry, Mon. 28/7, 6.45 @ Greater Union
Yesterday, Thurs. 31/7, 9.15 @ Capitol
A Cold Summer, Fri. 1/8, 5.15 @ Capitol
The Sea, Fri. 1/8, 7.00 @ Forum
London Orbital, Sun. 3/8, 3.15 @ Greater Union
The Great Dictator, Sun. 10/8, 5.00 @ Village

Felixremixed

2003-07-23T01:58:00.000+10:00

What is it about Felix da Housecat's tracks, in particular the ones that use Miss Kittin's vocals, that inspires remixers to respond to them by producing extraordinary, emotionally cathartic tours de force? The originals hardly seem promising for the purpose: dry, laconic, with a studied affectlessness and a sly, swaggering, 80s-inspired robotic groove. (Let me make it clear, lest that seem ambivalent, that I love the originals.) And yet, when remixers take hold of them…well, we have Jacques Lu Cont's string-laden Thin White Duke remix of "Silver Screen," possibly the lushest, most unashamedly "epic" product of the entire electroclash movement. Then Tiga adds his own vocals to "Madame Hollywood," in the process revealing the maw of spiritual yearning that lies beneath the material aspirations of all the world's Which? queens. (Well, yunno, maybe.) Finally, there's Röyksopp's "Follow the Sun" mix of "What Does it Feel Like," which takes Miss Kittin's monotone Eurotrash patter and turns it, via lovely twinkly glocky bleeps (like the ones in all Röyksopp's other tracks), into a big warm hug.

You know who should remix him next? Ewan Pearson! He's doing everyone this year, and he can match emotionally cathartic tours de force with the best of 'em.

***

As you may have noticed, Enetation, my comments service, has been having one of its turns for the past few days. The comments themselves are working, but the number of comments displayed in the link isn't being updated, so some posts look like they have no comments at all, whereas in fact epic discussions have been taking place there, absolute sagas, lasting for days, cross-referencing each other and being referred to endlessly on other blogs. We are assured that the old girl--Enetation, that is--will be back on her feet in no time.

Regina Regina

2003-07-22T02:49:00.000+10:00

Which of course means "Queen Regina." Am I the last person to figure that out?

So, the finale was fantastic of course: that walk from the house to the studio, reuniting with housemates along the way, is always great and was done with real imagination this year, and all the emotional buttons were pushed on schedule.

But was I the only one who, staying tuned for the (great!) new Jamie Oliver show, saw an ad for Rove's "2 hour Big Brother special" and thought "eh, I'm over it." I doubt I really am over it, and partly it's just my intolerance for Rove in any form, but I must say my BB grieving process is becoming more streamlined year by year.

***

Why do people with excellent politics so often make crappy music (and vice versa)? Everyone may deserve music, but no-one deserves Michael Franti's "Everyone Deserves Music."

If you want to be like me, buy these!

2003-07-21T16:51:00.000+10:00

I basically agree with the ILM consensus that lists of albums are inherently less interesting than lists of singles, but nevertheless, to fill in the hours before the Triumphal Entry of Regina, here are my ten-and-a-quarter favourite albums of 2003 so far (in no particular order):

Barbara Morgenstern - Nichts Muss
Jan Jelinek avec The Exposures - La Nouvelle Pauvreté
Audio Bullys - Ego War
Four Tet - Rounds
Moloko - Statues
Black Box Recorder - Passionoia
Coloma - Finery
Freaks - The Man Who Lived Underground
The Go-Betweens - Bright Yellow Bright Orange
SCSI-9 - Digital Russian
Beyoncé - Dangerously in Love (tracks 1-4)

I think it's been a good year so far for albums, but perhaps not a good year for great albums…the only ones on that list I would give an unhesitating five stars to are the ravishing Four Tet and--total surprise this one--the Audio Bullys album, which I'm loving more and more on each listen. Hooligan house forever!

Anyway, we mustn't be greedy, and I haven't yet heard the new albums from Luomo, Dizzee Rascal or the Matthew Herbert Big Band, all of which could potentially vie for top honours. (Even Alexis Petridis in The Guardian has given Dizzee five stars, albeit via the infuriating, typically rockist gesture of praising the particular to damn the general, ie all other garage MCs are rubbish, which even I know is patently absurd.)

Albums which I have heard but have gravely disappointed me: Massive Attack, Beyoncé (tracks 5-16).

And now here are some mix CDs and compilations from 2003 which I've loved (it's been a good year for these too):

Miss Kittin - Radio Caroline Vol. 1
Tiga - DJ Kicks
Le Future Le Funk (Hooj)
Swayzak - Fabric 11
Michael Mayer - Speicher CD1
Schäffelfieber 2 (Kompakt)

The five-star effort here is the Swayzak, which is amazing, every bit as good as I'd hoped. Miss Kittin comes pretty close too…pity about those boring downtempo tracks at the end.

It's official

2003-07-20T22:43:00.000+10:00

A woman will win Australian Big Brother 3! That's all I've got, no analysis of underlying social trends, no citations of French philosophers, I'm just sitting here as slack-jawed and stunned and excited as everyone else.

It will be Reggie of course. It would be even better if it was Chrissie, but it will be Reggie and that will be completely wonderful.

On your knees, constable!

2003-07-20T17:41:00.000+10:00

Events on The Bill last night confirmed what I have long thought to be two of the most immutable laws of television narrative:

If a man kisses another man, except in jest, he is gay. Women are allowed to "experiment"; men aren't.
This one is more esoteric, but even more ironclad: The jealous prognostications of vicious queens (à la Craig's boyfriend) invariably turn out to be true. As oracles, nasty gay men are as reliable as post-menopausal black women.

Having said all that, I can completely get behind Luke Ashton being gay (get behind, heh heh)--it's not like the lovely Scott Neal hasn't been there and done that--but does he really have to fuck Craig Gilmour, possibly the most pathetic character in the history of television? Luke, darling, there are plenty of men out there, trust me.

Everybody needs Downtown

2003-07-19T19:56:00.000+10:00

I was a bit worried that I might have unintentionally plagiarised that Marcello Carlin piece on Petula Clark, so I looked it up. No plagiarism as such, I don't think (I was relieved to see no mention of the word "flâneur"!), and Marcello's take does turn out to be if anything even more melancholic than mine, but it was certainly Marcello's ideas that first got me thinking about the song along those lines, and this is as well worth reading as everything he writes.

Marcello also reminds us that the composer of "Downtown," Tony Hatch, went on to compose the theme to "Neighbours" (which is surely the paradoxical suburban counterpart of "Downtown," at least as Marcello and I read it, finding human contact in the proverbially sterile suburbs while "Downtown" fails to do so in the proverbially fertile city)…so I missed a very obvious segue in my last post!

Thanks to Christopher for pointing me in the direction of the lovely "Downtown"-sampling-and-referencing tune "Downtown Once More," by abstract electronic types People Like Us (sigh, the knots I tie myself into to avoid using the terms "IDM" or "electronica"!), who also seem to interpret the song as yearning and melancholic. (Does anyone actually think it's a happy song?). You can download it as an MP3 from this page; it's a bit hard to find, just do a search for "downtown." (I'd link directly to the MP3 but that's not really kosher is it?)

When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go…

2003-07-19T00:32:00.000+10:00

As you may know, Petula Clark recorded all her hits in French as well as English. The French version of "Downtown" was called "Dans le temps," which obviously doesn’t mean "Downtown" or anything like it in French…it literally means "in the time," but the closest idiomatic equivalents would be "at the time" or even "back in the day." (You can get the French lyrics and a translation at the superb petulaclark.net.)

In other words, rather than translating the English lyrics, Clark decided to go for a French phrase that sounds a little bit like "Downtown" (especially as said by someone with a headcold and no teeth). As the translator at petulaclark.net tersely notes, "This version of Downtown is melancholic when compared with the lyrics to the English version." Quite! But what this version does is to bring out something that is actually inherent in the music, which is precisely a nostalgic, melancholy quality underlying its apparent cheerfulness. As someone pointed out in some blog some time ago (Marcello Carlin, was it?), this bittersweetness is particularly evident in that beautiful little minor-key caesura at the 13th bar of the verse (in the first verse it comes at "How can you lose?"), where Petula's voice sweeps down to the very bottom of its range, before pepping up again for the lead-up to the chorus. (This is, incidentally, an "extra" bar…it breaks the 4-bar segment structure of the verse, making it a total of 17 bars long rather than 16.)

It also strikes me, reading the lyrics (I generally do have to read lyrics for anything about them to strike me!) that this song (the English version, that is) is the ultimate flâneur's anthem. Note that it's not until the last verse that Petula seems to imagine her interlocutor doing anything much with anyone else downtown; the compensations the metropolis offers are those of sights, sounds and smells, rather than human company:

When you've got worries,
All the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?

Paging Baudelaire! And it may be my techno-addled mind speaking, but even "Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossanova/You'll be dancing with 'em too before the night is over/Happy again" doesn't seem to me to promise specific interaction so much as a kind of generalised sociability (ecstasy culture avant la lettre!).

Of course, there is that final verse where Petula, belatedly realising that what she has been offering as a cure for solitude is in effect the very un-pop solution of more solitude, hurriedly avers that "you may find somebody kind to help and understand you," but this all seems a bit redundant, doesn't it?

***

Heard on Neighbours tonight: Lou, Harold and Valda, having taken a "mystery flight" together to Tasmania, assemble in the pub, where they tell Max about their trip, including the fact that they had fish and chips for lunch. (Can you see where I'm going?) "Best fish and chips in Australia down there!" Lou avers.

Now, I know the families and friends of Big Brother contestants are organising ever more sophisticated campaigns, but to actually get an endorsement on Neighbours, the show that leads in to Big Brother, a mere three days before the winner is decided…wow, Reggie's people must have great contacts!

***

Talking of which…interesting thoughts on Big Brother from Christopher, in particular an eloquent paean to Dan's "weirdness." (His heretical comments about Reggie are best ignored, though.)

Wannabe

2003-07-18T14:05:00.000+10:00

Blimey, I don't half go on about Big Brother, do I? Still, since I'm not a wannabe music journalist but a wannabe academic, I can be confident that uncarved.org's barb isn't directed at the likes of me.

How have I been portrayed?

2003-07-18T01:07:00.000+10:00

As the end approacheth (in Australia at least), some intriguing thoughts on Big Brother by Mark at k-punk…and I'm not just saying that because he has nice things to say about my panopticon post (honest!). Two of Mark's points strike me in particular; first of all, he agrees with me that the BB housemates always know they're being watched all the time (and therefore one of the key elements of the panopticon is missing) but goes on to qualify this:

Such knowledge does seem to be (merely) intellectual and cognitive; not something that the housemates can ever feel. The housemates, of course, are denied feedback, are unable to see themselves being mediatized. So the knowledge that they are being filmed is inevitably somewhat abstract, and liable to be overcome by more standard behavioural defaults. Which is what the producers are counting on, of course.

Yes, that's exactly right! For BB to be interesting, the housemates' knowledge that they're being watched has to remain latent (that word again); they have to engage in a kind of willed forgetting. And it seems to me that this may be one of the key differences between UK BB4 and Aussie BB3; whereas in the UK, according to Mark, "There's obviously been some kind of delayed effect from previous series: people policing themselves to an incredible degree," in Australia that hasn't been nearly so evident this series (it was actually more evident, I think, in the last series).

Why has this happened? Well, maybe part of it is that among this particular group of housemates, a group ethic has evolved according to which being visibly conscious of the presence of the cameras, or reminding other people that they're there, is a bad thing to do. You can see this in the fact that housemates (particularly Chrissie) have repeatedly used camera-consciousness as a reason to nominate people for eviction: "X keeps making remarks about the cameras, and that makes my time in the house less enjoyable, I want to forget the cameras are here." Not, of course, that I think the reasons given for nomination ever bear more than a vestigial relation to the real motivations, but the mere fact that being camera-conscious has (uniquely in this series, if memory serves) become a "nominatable offence" suggests that there is a kind of group consensus, even an unspoken one, about the desirability of forgetting.

Suppose I'm right, though…why has this happened? Why has this particular group of people seemingly come up with a joint determination to be entertaining, even at the expense of their own dignity or, occasionally, their individual chances of winning? It's as if they're a Brazilian soccer team! It's a mystery to me, but perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I am about group dynamics can offer an explanation.

The second point of Mark's that struck me was that, as a result of the above, "the fear in the BB house focuses not on the possibility of being watched…but on the possibility that what they are doing will be broadcast." In Australia, this takes the form of a phrase that appears on virtually every eviction show, "I don't know how I've been portrayed, but…" (I'm not really a selfish bitch, I wasn't really flirting, maybe you didn't see the incident that led to me hating this other person, etc.).

(Incidentally, this concern is still compatible with "forgetting" the cameras because it emerges post facto, it doesn't actually seem to affect the way people act. It's like everyone in the house has perpetual hangover guilt.)

What interests me about this is the way in which "media studies" ways of thinking have permeated everyday life, so that the Big Brother housemates (being, I repeat, actual real people) are completely used to the idea that narrative organises events in tendentious ways, producing particular meanings that the events themselves don't inherently embody. It's also interesting that they can use this knowledge to produce their own narratives: Saxon, for instance, insisted that it was only the storytelling designs of the producers that made it seem like he spent all his time with Joanne; in fact his time was divided more or less evenly among the housemates. Those of us who tuned in to the overnight feed know that this is actually a crock; he really did spend all his time with Joanne, and after she left, he spent all his time talking about Joanne. If anything, the daily highlights show understated the extent of Saxon's obsession; there are only so many wistful nineteen-year-old gazes you can fit into half an hour. But you still have to admire Saxon's determination to turn the producers' (openly admitted) narrative strategies against them. And other ex-housemates (notably Ben) have made similar attempts. (Whether they have actually succeeded is another question; I suspect largely not.)

***

Talking of k-punk, this post on the canonisation of pop songs as banal retro signifiers actually brought tears to my eyes, it was so deeply felt and so right. (And I hereby institute a campaign to make Mark's coinage "Deja Vudu" part of the vocabulary of every thinking person…)

Please note also in this post that rarest of things, an invocation of Proust's madeleine that is actually pertinent. Sorry for gushing, but k-punk really is all good…there's a great post on Moloko (recently featured on my top 10 singles) too, and a link to this story about a play which is being written about the life of Delia Derbyshire, the producer of the Doctor Who theme tune, which I recently realised has had a more profound influence on my life than any other single piece of music!

Another letter from Cologne

2003-07-16T23:43:00.000+10:00

And this time it was from Mathias Schaffhäuser! If you've just tuned in, John and I had a music-geek disagreement about one of Mathias's tracks, "Some Kind Of," from the Kompakt Total 1 compilation, which I insisted was in 3/4 and John asserted with equal vigour was in 4/4. So I e-mailed Mathias about it and today, after going to the trouble of digging out the track and listening to it again (it was released several years ago), he got back to me.

So who's right? Well, both of us, or neither of us. According to Mathias, "the whole beginning and all the beats are in 3/4," but then when the big synth chords come in it changes into 4/4, and then alternates between the two. He also tactfully suggests that the vocal sample used in the song, which goes "Shouldn't there be some kind of structure?" is a big honking hint that such questions are meant to be undecidable. So I guess that makes it a draw. Mathias also says that he hadn't listened to the track for a while but has now put it back in his record box, so Cologne will be grooving to those block-rocking 3/4 (er, and 4/4) beats thanks to me!

***

Missjenjen has been in good form lately, fulminating against "human pop-up ads," those people who come up to you in public and, on any pretext whatsoever, monopolise several minutes of your time as if you've got nothing better to do. Of course, frequently you have got nothing better to do, but it's unpleasant to be reminded of this fact.

One type of human pop-up ad particularly puzzles me. This is a type which has only popped up over the past couple of years (in Melbourne at least): people who work for a charity, but don't want to take a donation on the spot. Instead, they want to sign you up for a regular donation scheme. Now, I'm a big fan of regular donation schemes (especially ones that don't engage in the neo-paternalistic rhetoric of "child sponsorship"), but is this really the kind of thing you would decide to do spontaneously when a perfect stranger accosts you on the street, especially since it presumably tends to involve handing over your credit card details? What could the strike rate possibly be? Also, I strongly suspect that these people tend to be backpackers working on commission, rather than volunteers. (I'm very happy to retract this if anyone knows otherwise.)

The annoying thing is, there's no easy way to get rid of these people. You can't just drop $2 in the tin, smile and walk away, and they always start the conversation by saying something innocuous like "Have you heard of [charity]?" I end up saying something very unwieldy like "I'm sorry, I already contribute in a similar way to another organisation," not the tersest of replies. Any ideas?

Letter from Cologne

2003-07-15T17:27:00.000+10:00

No, no reply from Mathias Schaffhäuser, not yet anyway, but I did get a lovely e-mail from Margit at the record label he runs, Ware--but it actually wasn't related to my e-mail query at all, rather she had seen my post on Ware artists Coloma! It was in fact a very lovely e-mail considering the mean things I said about Coloma's lyrics; she thanked me for "contributing to the discussion," and then kindly offered to forward my query about that 3/4 track on to Mathias. (Incidentally I've found another track on Kompakt that's even more unambiguously in 3/4 that that one, "Motor" by Jake Fairley, off the "Speicher 9" EP, so if the worst comes to the worst…) Conclusion: Ware are fantastic and are interested in what their fans think, so buy their records!

(That's what I love about small labels…can you imagine someone at Sony sending me an e-mail saying "Thanks for contributing to the discussion about Beyoncé, sorry you didn't like the ballads"?)

And once you've downloaded all those...

2003-07-15T00:36:00.000+10:00

...you must proceed immediately to Gabba.net and grab "Put it in your mouth," Missy Elliot's take on the Beyoncé track. Put what in your mouth? You may well ask. (Oh, and no fancy peer-to-peer software required, so you've got no excuse.)

For your downloading pleasure

2003-07-14T17:06:00.000+10:00

My top 10 singles of 2003 so far:

Dizzee Rascal - I Luv U
Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z - Crazy in Love
P!nk feat. William Orbit - Feel Good Time
Herbert - Addiction
Lea Klus - Deep Damage EP
!!! - Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard (A True Story)
tATu - All the Things She Said
Adam Beyer - Ignition Key (Speedy J Remix)
Justin Timberlake - Rock Your Body
Moloko - Forever More

If your favourite song isn't on here, that's because either (a) I haven't heard it yet; (b) it was actually released in 2002 (hence no shuffle-tech, all my favourite shuffle tracks turn out to be 2002 releases; also, re: Dizzee, limited edition vinyl promo releases don't count!); or (c) I have heard it, it was released in 2003, and it's rubbish.

Sweet justice

2003-07-13T23:34:00.000+10:00

It's not often that the world decides to comply with my idea of what's right and fair, but I was praying weeks ago that the final three on Big Brother would be Chrissie, Dan and Reggie, and thanks to Patrick's eviction tonight my prayer has been answered. I really don't mind which of them wins now. Chrissie would still be my first choice, but she has no chance. I hope it's Reggie just because I want a woman to win (although I'm not sure why, it's not as if it's my gender I'm barracking for; I think I just want to prove wrong the smug idiots who say that a woman can't win), but I could hardly begrudge Dan the money--what he loses by being a man he makes up for by being thoroughly weird, and really, you would have to be proud of a country that says, yes, of all the people we've been presented with, he's the one we want to give a quarter of a mil to. Hmmm, am I talking myself into changing my mind?

***

In the HMV dance department today they were playing Swayzak's new Fabric mix CD over the PA. This should be arriving in my letterbox in a few days; I can't wait. While I was in the store I heard Akufen's "Skidoos" then Luomo's "The Present Lover" then Herbert's remix of Louis Austen's "Hoping" (utterly mad, this--it has a woman's voice saying "jack me, jack me, jack me, jack me, jack me 'til I start to scream!", then morphs into a full-on Dean Martinesque orchestra-backed croonathon, but with a house beat--magic). Microhouse hits the big time! I love the fact that so many people will be exposed to this stuff just because they buy every Fabric CD as a matter of course. After all, I got exposed to microhouse by listening to Tiefschwarz's "A Little Help For Your Friends" (still my favourite mix CD ever, incidentally) and hearing the likes of Soul Phiction, Herbert, Recloose and Soft Pink Truth for the first time. In my case the gateway drug was deep house. And to think it was only a few months ago!

***

I've added so many blogs to my bookmarks lately (including the excellent Crooked Timber--I'm warming to the idea of academic blogs), I'm going to have to let some go. I think I'll start with Gawker…it takes ages to read and it's been increasingly tedious lately, with its stupid jokes about "hipsters" and trucker hats (just as stupid as hipsters and trucker hats themselves, surely), its daily celebrity sightings update (yawn), and its habit of linking to everything Choire Sicha ever writes…not that there's anything wrong with that, but I already read him so it's a bit redundant. So, it's the chopping block for you, Gawker…will somebody let me know if it gets good again?

Froth

2003-07-13T00:14:00.000+10:00

I forgot to write about my, er, good news. I was sitting at the counter in the front window of Caffè e Torta on Little Collins Street yesterday (a favourite haunt, especially on weekends when you can watch the wedding parties from Reservoir or Mount Waverley arrive to be photographed amid a bit of CBD colour and grime), when the woman who was sitting next to me leaned over and said "Excuse me, but I read coffee cups and I have to tell you, you have love coming in your life." She expanded: apparently I am due to meet my soulmate from a past life by Christmas, especially if I write down a wishlist of the qualities I'm looking for ("personal qualities, not physical ones"--damn!), in pink writing ("or whatever colour is romantic for you") on white or gold paper, and put it under my pillow.

It's funny, but I was actually touched by this encounter. I'm going to try it, too! What's the harm? I did admittedly immediately fire off a jokey SMS to my sister (her reply: "The leaves never lie, or was it grounds?"; me: "It was froth!!") and I also had a laugh about it with one of the waitresses in the café. But the woman actually seemed really nice and genuinely concerned, and she gets major props for not mentioning any gender pronouns, unlike some psychics I've encountered…I was standing outside a bank in Chapel Street once when a woman came up to a security guard and snapped at him "I'm a psychic and I can tell you're really bored and unhappy!" then, without waiting for a reply (surely "duh, I'm a bloody security guard at a bank!" would have been the only possible one), turned to me and said "and you'll get married and have six children!" Um, slight problem there...

***

Warning to anyone who is tempted to sign up for the pay-per-view service at Fairfax: make sure that when you pay to read an article it's not one you've already read. Mim told me there had been a review of Meistersinger in The Age, but she didn't know anything else about it; I found it, only available on pay-per-view, and dutifully paid my $2 or whatever it was to see it, only to find out that it was exactly the same SMH review I linked to here a few days ago! (No option for text-only or "printer-friendly" output either, thanks guys.) Now, you'd think that some indication of when an article was syndicated might be in order for an archive site. It's not that I begrudge the $2, but just on principle, surely they must get the type of search that says "give me everything you have on Delta Goodrem" (sorry, she's been on my mind, poor lass, I feel guilty for all the mean things I've said about her), which must turn up tons of duplicate articles from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, so you would think consolidating them might be a good idea.

***

Talking of Fairfax, weird instance of synchronicity: the front of the Review section in The Age today featured a checkerboard collage of thirty-six different cover designs for Animal Farm (illustrating a tribute to Orwell by "acclaimed author Margaret Atwood"…oh well, if she's "acclaimed" I guess I'd better take this seriously), whereas the front of Good Weekend featured a checkerboard collage of thirty different photos of…David Beckham! (Presumably this wasn't coordinated, since Good Weekend is put together in Sydney.) I mention this conjunction without further comment.

I only glanced at the Atwood piece (syndicated, naturally, although weirdly it came from a broadcast on BBC Radio 3), since in this centenary year I really have no further appetite for Orwell paeans (trust me, Terry Eagleton's is the only one you need), but I did notice this rather irritating sentence:

Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the 20th century and it got Orwell into trouble.

Leaving aside the rather cloth-eared prose, especially coming from an Acclaimed Author, this metaphor is all wrong: it implies something that I'm pretty sure Atwood doesn't actually believe (although many do), that Orwell was the sole dissenting voice on the left in the 1940s, that everyone else thought Stalin was an utterly fabulous bloke and the incarnation of the hopes of the worldwide proletariat. As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out (I tremble to bring up that much-reviled name, and I'm sorry to defy the yes-no interlude's call for a moratorium on mentioning his name and Orwell's in the same breath, but what can I say, I'm still a fan in spite of everything)…as I was saying, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, this very widely held view ignores, just for starters, the existence of the followers of a person called Snowball…er, sorry, Trotsky.

In any case, what "got Orwell into trouble" was surely not his being the first person ever to make the observation that revolutions are intrinsically prey to the possibility of the oppressed becoming oppressors in their turn…anyone remember a guy called Thomas Carlyle? My own take, though, is that unlike the Carlyle-derived Tory tradition that right-wingers want to co-opt him into, where the revolution is doomed from the start and it would have been better if had never happened, in the case of Animal Farm it's actually crucial that you believe in the revolution when it happens and moreover you believe it could have worked. The real achievement of the novel is a sentimental, which is to say an ideological one: it makes you feel like revolution is something worth trying, which makes its ultimate failure all the more devastating, but also makes you think about the ways in which failure could have been avoided. (The message of the book isn't "don't try to change the world," it's "don't let the nomenklatura tell you what to think.") If you don't feel this, then you can fuck off, this book has nothing to do with you and your agenda. (Again, I'm sure this neo-conservative co-option of Orwell is not actually Margaret Atwood's position, it's just that she chose an unforunate metaphor…I suspect, in fact, that the Emperor's New Clothes is always an unfortunate metaphor.)

DON'T click on this link

2003-07-12T03:42:00.000+10:00

OK, this goes against all my most deeply held principles, and I promise (for real this time) that I will never ever do this again, but just this once I can't resist (just be grateful I'm not posting the bloody graphic!).

(PS I got Oliver Wood...result!)

***

Where are we on a genealogy of shuffle-tech? Because my random playlist just brought up "Let's Get Brutal" by Nitro Deluxe (from the Warp 10+1 compilation), which the indispensable Discogs dates at 1986, and after seven odd minutes of classic, comfortable-as-an-old-jumper late eighties four-to-the-floor, suddenly, mere seconds before the track finishes, without any warning whatsoever the beat divides into three! And then it goes back to what it was, and the track ends and you can't quite believe what you just heard.

The Dialectics of Eddie McGuire

2003-07-12T01:44:00.000+10:00

I went to a production of Brecht's Mr Puntila and His Man Matti tonight. The play was…well, mildly entertaining (although Trades Hall has the most uncomfortable seats in the world, not ideal for sitting through three hours of agitprop), but what makes it notable was that the producer and director, Steve Gome (who is a friend of my housemate) funded it with the $125,000 he won on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Not only is this surely the most noble and high-minded enterprise ever to be the beneficiary of Eddie McGuire's largesse, but I don't have to point out the irony (quick mental check to make sure this actually is irony…hmm, yes I think so) of using your Millionaire winnings to put on a play by, of all people, Brecht!

***

I've been listening to the Coloma album Finery (on Mathias Schaffhäuser's Ware label, and no, Herr Schaffhäuser hasn't got back to me yet), and I keep wishing I had never come across Tim Finney's fiendishly astute observation that the lyrics are kind of like Tim Rice lyrics. It's so true; although the more obvious source is prog rock, with its fairy-tale/German romanticism aesthetic, and there's a bit of a windswept Euro high modernism thing going on as well, on top of all that there's an archness and over-cleverness to the imagery, an over-reliance on anthropomorphism, a "look, I'm setting a scene here" picturesqueness, that is pure Tim Rice (although I actually don't think Tim Finney meant the comparison to be a negative one)…"I want to wear the clothes that summer wears," "I'm the tailor who sews the emperor's clothes" (yes, clothes are a theme), or, to pick a more extended example completely at random "In hotels they are serving tea/Writing postcards, ringing the bell/They're still looking for the lighthouse key/So kiss me quick, I'll never tell"…ouch! You really have to be in the mood for this stuff. As you know, I tend not to even notice lyrics most of the time, but these are pretty hard to ignore, especially when, thanks to Tim F., you can't stop thinking "geez, what is this, Evita?"

Meanwhile, though, the music is gorgeous, certainly better than anything that talentless baboon Andrew Lloyd Webber ever served up: microhouse textures with real pop songcraft, melodies that make you realise how unmelodic most of what gets taken for "melody" in dance music actually is. And the singer can actually sing, which makes a nice change from most microhouse, where the vocals (when there are vocals) tend to be in an expressionless Teutonic baritone that sounds exactly the same no matter who is actually singing. The Kompakt voice, I think of it as, and very effective it can be too, but it's become almost as much of a cliché as that spoken "Ving Rhames doing a boarding announcement" basso profundo you hear on every single tribal house record, so it's nice to hear something a bit different, although the marked estuary English accent (Coloma are English but they live in the coolest city in the world, ie Cologne) takes a bit of getting used to, especially when it's singing those lyrics.

Overall, this is the kind of record I can imagine giving to a music theatre fan who was curious about microhouse. Rather a tiny market segment, perhaps, but I'm glad they're being serviced.

Can't take my eyes off you

2003-07-11T13:38:00.000+10:00

The funny thing about Big Brother commentary in the UK is that even people who vehemently, furiously disapprove of it all seem to be quite relaxed about the fact that they still watch it! It's almost as if they feel they don't have a choice. None of the self-exculpatory "oh, I happened to catch a glimpse of it the other night, I don't really watch it, but...Vincent must go!" stuff you get in Australia. I mean, check out Penman the other day:

I find it truly mind boggling, if you want to think about it for a second, that in however many weeks days hours it has been, not ONE of the Big Brother people has said a SINGLE interesting or controversial or off-menu thing. Not one. Not ONE.

Which just confirms my view, by the way, that the UK show must be much blander than the Australian one, because we have had plenty of off-menu stuff, from Kim's racist joke (I've decided to lose the scare quotes around "joke" because they're priggish and dumb--there's no question that it's a joke, an utterance intended to amuse, it's just a bad joke, and surely calling it racist is enough indication that you disapprove of it) to Chrissie's absolutely magnificent demolition of poor Daniel the other night. Dan is lovely, but his problem is that he just doesn't believe he's capable of being patronising or thoughtless. But darling, darling Chrissie really nailed him--"I find it interesting that you would say to me 'I think it's great that you're not bothered by your size' but you wouldn't say to Reggie 'I think it's great that you're not bothered by your limited vocabulary'"--I'm paraphasing but it was almost that sharp. I just hope this plays well with the public and they vote correctly, ie Patrick to go.

Master Bates

2003-07-11T01:08:00.000+10:00

As for what's keeping me from Harry Potter 5, it's Oliver Twist, a book I've strangely never read, despite being a big Dickens lover and having seen at least four different versions of it at various times. (The David Lean film, the recent BBC adaptation, and both stage and screen incarnations of the sublime Oliver!)

There are a couple of things you don't pick up from any adaptation though. Firstly, the rumours are true, there really is a character called Charley Bates who is referred to several times as "Master Bates." Secondly, Fagin is called "the Jew" by the narrator more often than he's called "Fagin." The antisemitism is right there.

There's a story about that, by the way. Forgive me if you already know this, but I wish it was more widely known: a Jewish lady wrote to Dickens complaining about the Fagin caricature in Oliver Twist, and he was so convinced by her arguments that when he came to write his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, he not only included sympathetic Jewish characters in it, but made one of the subplots a blistering critique of antisemitism. This is a nice story to tell people who try to tell you that everyone in the nineteenth century was antisemitic, that it wasn't even an issue anyone gave a second thought to. (Of course, it never seems to occur to people who make this argument that, just for starters, many Jews weren't antisemitic, so it could hardly have been "everyone".)

***

Tonight I watched Rio Bravo on DVD. I don't think I've seen more than a handful of Westerns in my life but this was fantastic! (I love Howard Hawks' other movies, of course.) The script was just superb, and oh my God Ricky Nelson! Holy shit, just look at that photo, need I say more?

***

Very funny (and spot-on) thread at ILM.

Slo-o-o-ow Love, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ballad

2003-07-10T15:09:00.000+10:00

After Luka's admonition that "slow jams are great and if you don't like them you're a sourfaced puritan who puts exactly the same amount of toothpaste on your brush every single day and night," perhaps I should stipulate that I do in fact completely agree, ideologically speaking, and what's more I certainly love some slow jams (Prince's, obviously, for example), it's just that when the beat slows my attention does tend to drift a bit. Siegbran at ILM said something interesting about this a while ago; those of us who have 4/4 dance music in the blood (ie Europeans, mainly, but Australians too) simply find anything slower than 120 bpm difficult to deal with, which is why we (at least Siegbran and I), much as we love a lot of recent R&B and hip-hop, also often wish it could be speeded up just a little bit. Oh well, that's what pitch control is for I guess. Yet another reason I need more vinyl in my life.

***

I promise this will be my last word on Harry Potter (er, probably), but I wanted to respond at slightly more length to Jim's comments, both here and at B.org. First of all, when I said that the HP books could have been written 50 years ago, I didn't mean this to sound as dismissive as it no doubt did. What I mainly meant was that they're not conspicuously contemporary in the way that a novel by Ballard or Don DeLillo or someone would be; the Hogwarts kids don't use the internet, they don't watch Big Brother, they don't have mobile phones, etc. Jim insists that, on the contrary, despite the old-fashioned trappings of Hogwarts the kids and their schooling are actually very contemporary. I'd love him to expand on this, perhaps in his own blog (ahem). But also, remember that 50 years ago was the fifties, which might have been the decade of Father Knows Best but it was also the decade of Les 400 coups, so it's not like the idea of children as bolshie/flawed/unhappy was exactly unknown back then. (I'm cheating by citing Truffaut, obviously, but I’m sure you could find examples of this in children's lit of the era too.)

Still, it's good to see the books defended so vigorously for once, even (or especially) by someone who goes on to stipulate that he doesn't actually like them all that much! Have you noticed how, by way of contrast, the most ardent HP readers tend to get all embarrassed when you ask them why they like the books, and say things like "I know they're not very well-written, but they're real page turners"? Fuck that! The fact that snobs like me don't rate Rowling's prose style is all the more reason to maintain that she's the best thing since Tolstoy. If you're going to be a fan of something, at least believe in it!

Also, I forgot to mention that I myself enjoyed the first four books and am looking forward to reading the fifth (without being in any particular hurry), so I'm not a hater, honest!

I'm sorry about this, but it's a legal requirement that every blogger posts on this topic at least once

2003-07-09T18:00:00.000+10:00

Is there anyone in the world (apart from me) who is currently reading a book that is not Harry Potter 5? My flatmate is reading it; everyone on public transport seems to be immersed in a copy, my on-line forums are ablaze with considerately spoiler-fonted discussion of it, even the sixtyish lady sitting next to me at the opera the other night was reading the damn thing! (Fortunately only during the intervals; she was able to tear herself away for the opera itself.)

Now, I find Harry Potter scepticism just as tiresome as Harry Potter fanaticism. (Or rather, much more tiresome, since naïve enthusiasm always beats weary condescension.) But…oh, damn it, you know where I'm going with this, and the moderate Third Way, the "I come neither to praise Harry nor to bury him" approach is just as boring a cliché as the other two isn't it? (On top of which, soi-disant moderates always have the particularly annoying trait of believing that everybody else is an extremist.) Oh well, taking for granted then that I have nothing to say about this subject that you haven't read a thousand times before, I'll try to make this quick…

I just find it amusing that this cultural hysteria has occurred about a series of books that could quite easily have been written fifty years ago! The fevered anticipation of the release date, the compulsive need to finish it so you can talk to other people about it, the minute exegeses of Harry's adolescent emotions…(Hmm, there's a thought: Dizzee Rascal is Harry Potter for hipsters! And I may well be the first person to say that.) If you were writing a story where people got that excited about a new novel, you would make it something with a bit of social energy behind it (to use a Reynoldsism), wouldn't you? Something a bit Ballardy or Gibsony, postmodern, zeitgeisty, streamlined. Or, if you were more pessimistically inclined, you might choose some ghastly series of cult novels like the Left Behind books. You certainly would never guess that an entire planet would get its rocks off for some 900 page monolith about a little prat who goes to boarding school to learn how to to be a wizard! It's as if, instead of lining up for days to see The Matrix Reloaded, filmgoers were queueing up to see the latest Merchant-Ivory film.

Total Convergence, continued

2003-07-09T01:49:00.000+10:00

OK, it looks like I should have caught up thoroughly on reading my blogs before I posted anything, because it turns out that Jess's comment about Schäffel being a very fast waltz was borrowed from Jon, whose own riff on the subject was inspired by, well, moi, actually. Specifically my comment that Beyoncé's "Hip Hop Star" was "shuffle hip-hop", which to be honest was drawing a long bow (out of my arse, quite possibly)…perhaps the only thing it really has in common with shuffle-tech is the division of the beat into 3, there's not necessarily any actual influence there, but what the hell, latent affinities is what we're all about, eh?

If you'll excuse a spot of self-indulgence, the fact that this blog seems to be attracting more readers and even getting mentioned in other blogs is…well, strange. Gratifying, of course, but also part of me wants to just crawl back into my hole and hide. And part of me thinks, God, maybe I should have thought through that Foucault stuff more, and how can I presume to post about pop music when it's obvious my knowledge about it is paper-thin, and help help help I'm a fraud!!! Kind of like academia, but speeded up.

But mostly I'm enjoying the ride. Oh, and in my new spirit of hobnobbing with celebrities and cognoscenti, I fired off an e-mail to Mathias Schaffhäuser today, so let's wait and see. If you don't hear any more on the subject, you can assume that (a) he didn't write back, or (b) he wrote back and the bloody track was in 4/4. Or maybe he'll write in twenty years' time, once he sifts through his e-mail, like Ringo did to Marge. Do Cologne minimal house producers get much fan mail, do you think?

I've got Schaeffelfieber!

2003-07-09T00:33:00.000+10:00

Jess Harvell (glad he's blogging again) has an interesting discussion of Schäffel, including the suggestion that because it involves dividing each beat into three, it's actually a speeded-up waltz rhythm! La valse à mille temps indeed. I suppose it was inevitable that I'd come across this postulate, given the general theme lately of Convergence of All Aspects of My Life. Or am I just going crazy?

***

Movable Type have chosen me--yes, me!--to be a beta tester for TypePad, their new blog hosting service. I'm not supposed to say anything about it except to point you in the direction of my beta blog, which is here. It will have the same content as this blog, but, I dunno, go and have a look and leave a comment or something.

Controversy!

2003-07-08T15:23:00.000+10:00

OK, so John has heard the CD and he doesn't think Mathias Schaffhäuser's "Some Kind Of" is actually in 3/4 time at all. I'm more than positive that he's wrong, but still, I wouldn't mind someone backing me up. Does anyone out there have the Kompakt Total 1 compilation? Would you mind awfully giving it a spin and counting the beats in that Schaffhäuser track? Mathias, sweetie, are you out there?

***

Talking of celebrity readers (well, sort of), it was nice to get a visit from Mark of k-punk, one of the most consistently interesting music blogs out there. If you're not already reading it, you're probably beyond help, but check it out anyway.

Back

2003-07-08T01:37:00.000+10:00

I'm back from Sydney. As planned I stayed up all night on Saturday and went straight to the airport to catch my 8.00 am flight, so I'm still catching up on sleep. Sydney wasn't very cooperative with my insomniac plans though; most of the chic little bars there are attached to restaurants and have restaurant licences, which means they close at 1 am. You're never going to be as cool as Melbourne until you do something about those licensing laws, guys! I ended up drinking vodka martinis back at Mim's house with Mim, her German friend Maggie, and Steve Davislim, the (very talented) tenor who sang David in Meistersinger. Not only that, but we had to huddle in the cold in Maggie's room because there were people sleeping in both Mim's room and the living room. How Bohemian! (More in the Baz Luhrmann sense than the real sense, perhaps.) After they all decided they'd had enough, I had a quiet coffee on Oxford Street then arrived at the airport in the early morning light. Slept all the way home. A very good trip although I did none of my usual Sydney things. No ferry ride! Didn't even catch a glimpse of the Opera House; the last few trips I've practically lived there. (Meistersinger was at the Capitol Theatre.) No dance parties, no cocaine-fuelled orgies, nothin'. Still, a good time.

***

I should probably ask this at ILM but I'm too shy: when did people start using the formula "X vs Y" to refer to unlikely or eclectic collaborations? As in Leftfield vs John Lydon, Run-DMC vs Aerosmith, Anal Cunt vs The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, that sort of thing. It must have been sometime in the 90s, but what was the first one?

Fun with gerunds

2003-07-05T14:51:00.000+10:00

I'm in a net cafe in Sydney's Chinatown. There's a sign up saying "Dear customer, Please take care of your belonging!!!" This is quite a nice aphorism if you think about it. Take care of your own belonging, because no-one else is going to take care of it for you.

***

It turns out that my brother and I have been cited by another Melbourne blogger as useful vocabulary resources. Glad to help, Suzette! And "panopticon" is really one of those words that's indispensible in everyday life, don't you think?

***

Just had a very nice lunch with John, his wife Thuy and their friend Kat. Off to the opera again this afternoon, then if I can convince anyone to stay out all night with me, I'm planning to do that because I have to be at the airport at 7.00 am. Nessun dorma!

Swedish porn star

2003-07-04T12:50:00.000+10:00

Excellent review of Meistersinger in the Sydney Morning Herald, including a cute photo of Mim in her Swedish porn star outfit. I'm probably going again tomorrow.

***

Apparently one of the Aussie BB housemates is going into the UK house: Joanne, the lawyer/model who left a trail of broken hearts behind her. Hmm, I couldn't stand Jo myself, as you can see from previous posts (if you care to look for them; I can't be bothered to link and I'm on the clock here) but it will be interesting to see what they make of her over there.

Don't ever tell me I don't have my finger on the pulse

2003-07-03T11:35:00.000+10:00

I'm sitting in an Internet cafe and guess what just came on the radio?

[Erm, OK, that permalink's not working for me but it was Guru Josh's "Infinity."]

So vey, vey tahd

2003-07-03T11:28:00.000+10:00

Opera good. Got to bed 5.30 am. Had to check out of hotel by 10.00 am. Need more coffee.

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey...

2003-07-02T14:18:00.000+10:00

Sydney just does not understand the concept of a shower. It's been raining, heavily, continuously since I got here. Glad I remembered my umbrella. Remind me again why Sydneysiders get to tease Melburnians about our weather?

I'm staying in a hotel in Kings Cross, the red light district of Sydney. I've never really explored this area before, but apart from a truly staggering number of sex shops it's quite charming. Maybe all the rain makes it seem more European, I don't know.

Some guy on the plane was wearing a face mask! What a wanker.

Opera tonight. Can't wait. The whole show, including intervals, lasts for six hours! Wagner was not what you would call a terse composer.

Sin city here I come

2003-07-01T17:07:00.000+10:00

I'm off to Sydney until Sunday, to catch up with friends and to see my sister in the opening night of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg…her biggest role yet. I think I'm more nervous than she is.

Anyway, blog updates will be sporadic, or at least there'll be a respite from the frenetic pace of the last few weeks. Probably just as well, it will give you all a chance to reflect on my panopticon entry and pick holes in it!

***

Found another 3/4 song…"Open Up Your Heart," off the album Echoes by The Rapture (which I don't think has even been released yet, that's how cutting-edge I am). It's good too--kind of a neo-post-punk ballad with bleeps. I'll have to decide whether it can displace something off the current comp. or whether it can wait for Volume 2…

2003-06-30T18:16:00.000+10:00

Why the Big Brother house is not a panopticon

Thanks to John for taking the bait and asking me to expand on this! (Clears throat.)

OK, well, from my memories of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which admittedly I haven't read for a few years, the original panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's hypothetical prison in which all the prisoners would be constantly visible from a central surveillance area, but--and this is crucial--they couldn't themselves see whether they were being watched. The idea was that knowing they might be being watched would be enough to make them "behave," whether or not they were actually being watched at any given moment.

Now, I don't think there were ever actually any panopticons built--at least not "pure" Benthamite ones, although there were certainly quasi-panoptic structures in places like boarding school dormitories. (Hmm, I wonder why?) But Foucault takes the panopticon as a metaphor (actually a far from flawless metaphor but it's the one that's stuck) for the way in which the modern subject of "discipline" works--we believe that we are always potentially being "watched" or kept track of by authority figures and institutions, so we internalise this potential surveillance to the point where discipline is something that 99% of the time we end up imposing on ourselves. We keep our papers in order just in case. But it's actually crucial to Foucault's argument that (a) most of the time we actually aren't being watched, and (b) we know this. The vast majority of the time, disciplinary power is exercised "latently", which means that in a sense it's not really exercised at all, it's on autopilot. (As an aside, I've been thinking lately that "latency" might end up being a concept that binds together practically all my intellectual interests...perhaps I'll expand on that at some point.)

This is the bit of Foucault that "undergraduates" tend to miss (I'm using scare quotes because it's not just undergraduates, in fact it's plenty of academics too). The idea of the panopticon conjures up for people the Orwellian idea of Big Brother, and thus it tends to be assumed that "discipline" is something people experience in their everyday lives as oppressive and weighty, whereas in fact it's not just something people take for granted, it's the means by which they understand themselves as subjects. Without my place in the bureaucratic apparatus, I'm nothing. It doesn't (just) imprison me; it enables me to experience this thing we call a self.

This is also why Foucault, despite superficial affinities, has no truck with conspiracy-theory paranoia, which is the belief not just that you may be being watched, but that you are at every moment being watched. From a Foucauldian point of view there's a certain conceitedness about this kind of paranoia, since to believe that you're being watched you have to believe that you're "special," that you have somehow made the powers that be break out in a sweat. (Cf. all those sixties student radicals who were pleased or disappointed to discover that they were or weren't the subjects of ASIO or FBI or MI5 dossiers. Cf. also The Matrix, which turns paranoia into a condition of heroic action--you are being watched, therefore you are "The One.")

So, what about Big Brother then? Well, for one thing, the Big Brother house isn't a panopticon because the housemates don't just know that they may be being watched, they know that they are in fact being watched at every moment. (They are like justified paranoiacs in that sense.) This entirely modifies, and arguably even negates, the intended effect of panoptic surveillance, which is to make the subject internalise disciplinary norms; instead, the housemates' relationship to "Big Brother" becomes in effect a parody of the ancien régime, in which the primary mode was not discipline but exemplary and public punishment (in this case the "three strikes" rule).

The other reason why the BB house is not a panopticon is of course that it's not a prison, not even the kind of quasi-prison that (according to the more depressing versions of Foucauldian thought) we inhabit in our everyday lives. In this context it is actually important that this is a TV show, it's not everyday life, the normal rules of disciplinary subjecthood are suspended. The housemates aren't expected to be "useful" or to "improve" themselves in any way; apart from the odd rudimentary and half-serious "task" they can do whatever they like. And they've all taken time off work to go into the house, it's scandalous! Hardly the sort of thing an obedient bureaucratic subject would do.

I'm afraid, then, that Big Brother has absolutely nothing to teach us about the operation of modern discipline and surveillance, about people's relationships to institutions. What is has a lot to teach us about is people's relationships to each other, which are not rendered meaningless--if anything, the reverse--by the apparatus of being part of a TV show, any more than they would be rendered meaningless by occurring in (for example) a highjacked plane or a submarine or any other atypical or highly stressful situation. The notion that people on Big Brother spend all their time "playing up to the cameras," even if it were true, does not make their actions uninteresting from a psychological point of view. Just ask a psychologist.

What is really frustrating is the consistency with which people get this the wrong way round; on the one hand they really believe that Big Brother is genuinely symptomatic of some Orwellian/Foucauldian/Benthamite trend in contemporary society, but on the other hand they reject absolutely the idea that there is any genuine human interaction going on at all! Thus what is most unreal about the show is taken for real, and vice versa. It's curious.

2003-06-30T01:11:00.000+10:00

Big Brother in Crossover Shocker!

OK, first things first, Jamie evicted…um, why? I mean, granted, he was a bit of a twat at times this week, but people, you left Vincent there! You were supposed to evict him last week but he survived by, like two SMS votes or something (courtesy of his extended family no doubt)…why weren't you shocked into action? We're now left with a ratio of two boring useless bland game-players to three delightful interesting human beings, which is certainly not the worst BB has ever had, but still, what might have been…

In other, er, "exciting" news, there's going to be an Aussie/UK Big Brother crossover! Ex-UK housemate Anushka (sp?) is going into the Aussie BB house, I gather just for an evening. Now, I'm certainly curious about this because I've talked so much about BB with my UK friends, but I wonder if this won't just be a big yawn for the vast majority of Aussies who don't actually care about the UK show? We'll see. I'm also wondering if there's going to be a reciprocal intrusion on the UK show. Who could we possibly send them? Irena? Nah, too boring. Ben? Would certainly stir things up, but he's an ugly fat bloke as well as a bastard, and we can't have that. Carlo??? The mind boggles. (Actually, the perfect choice would be Leah.)

***

Ian Penman usefully invokes Foucault's History of Sexuality a propos BB (obvious innit? and not just because diary room = confession box--they know it does, of course--but on a less self-conscious level the incitement to discourse is everywhere. On the other hand, no, the BB house is not a panopticon, ask me why.) Penman (and for that matter Foucault) would get a kick out of the Aussie "BB Uncut" show (there's no British equivalent, if I'm not mistaken)…talk about "transforming your desire, your every desire, into discourse"…discourse is in fact is the only outlet for desire that's available to the poor dears! (Wanking aside, but apparently they don't even do that, although I find that hard to comprehend or imagine.)

***

Talking of Penman, I love him, but he's not half an old grump sometimes. Does it not occur to him that the reason he's so depressed about pop music is that he's looking for "the underground" in all the wrong places? And as for his rant about Nu-Blogger, does he really think Blogger was OK the way it was?

(Do remind me, though, never to compose an entire lengthy post in the Blogger posting window ever, ever again! I just lost the majority of this one and had to rewrite it. Idiot! The first version was much better, too, there was this elaborate metaphor about undergraduates adding the word "panopticon" to their spell-check dictionaries which I couldn't quite be bothered to repeat.)

2003-06-29T17:21:00.000+10:00

Deep!

Went clubbing last night for the first time in ages, to Deep Chord, a monthly minimal house night. I met Plasmo and Helen there; I think they were surprised to see me, since I had been making "maybe-I-will-maybe-I-won't" noises, which in my case almost always means I actually won't. But I'm really glad I did go…they were playing the kind of music I've been endlessly enthusing over here lately, and I've been curious to hear how it would sound in a club environment. I was slightly doubtful, to tell you the truth; I thought the effect might be rather wimpy, but as it turns out, every beautifully textured minimal groove contains a monster bassline just waiting to be liberated by a decent PA! What struck me, too, was the sheer variety of sounds that come under this broad heading, especially in Damien Laird's set, which took in everything from Trapez-style high-sheen tech-house to Kompakt "shuffle" (of which more later) to Metro Area-ish stripped down disco-funk to the unmistakable sound of Perlon (at once the weirdest and the funkiest music of the night). "Minimal" house is really a misnomer; perhaps "intimate" house would be more appropriate, and it certainly is music for an intimate venue…upstairs at Pony was perfect, a really comfortable space, no more than 50 or so people (possibly would have been more if the official website hadn't got the address of the bar wrong! some sort of underground litmus test? fortunately I was clued in), very laid-back crowd, and a small, actually fairly half-hearted dancefloor, which took some getting used to (although it almost filled up once or twice, especially for Michael Mayer's extraordinary shuffle version of "Love is Stronger than Pride"…OK, that's enough trainspotting for one post). All in all, the best clubbing night I've had for ages. I'll be back.

***

OK, that Beyoncé record then. I've now heard about 2/3 of it, and as a result the wow factor of the first four tracks has been slightly diluted by some rather ordinary ballads--including, as Jon of the excellent Astronaut's Notepad points out, a truly excruciating Luther Vandross collaboration, the only good thing about which is that it serves as a salutary reminder of how rubbish R&B used to be. (One of the ballads is in 3/4, incidentally! But it's not good enough to displace Aaliyah. Best of the ballads so far is the bizarre, glitched-up "Yes.") Still, it's like Justin's similarly front-loaded Justified; anything would seem banal after those first four tracks, so let's just take a minute to appreciate them…

We begin with the Jay-Z collaboration "Crazy in Love," which is currently duking it out in my brain with P!nk's "Feel Good Time" for the title of, er, feel good single of the year so far. Pure, horn-drenched joy; but what this really brings home to me is the extent to which, in post-Timbaland R&B (did Timba actually produce this album? I really should check), the human voice (whether rapping or singing) is so integrated with the beat that it almost becomes a percussion instrument. (The beatboxing revival is the most obvious example of this. Is there a beatboxing revival or am I just inventing one based on Justin's work on "Rock Your Body"? Let's ask the audience.)

We then move on to the Bhangrified "Naughty Girl." I know Bollywood sounds are everywhere at the moment, but…well, just stop and think about that for a minute! What kind of bizarre pop moment are we living through when sitars and tablas are actually a cliché? And people say pop music is boring these days, honestly I dunno. Anyway, the great thing about this track is that it shows off what the ultra-crisp-n-shiny Destiny's Child hits often disguised, that is, the fact that Beyoncé simply has a brilliant voice. That breathy but perfectly controlled upper register is pure sex; quite reminiscent in fact of Donna Summer, which is why when Beyoncé extrudes the hookline of "Love to Love You, Baby" at the start of this it doesn't seem like sacrilege.

Then, "Baby Boy" with Sean Paul (yep, it's a duet-intensive record, like all other R&B records I guess)…a bhangra dancehall track! It doesn't get any more zeitgeisty than this. Bloody good, though.

Then "Hip Hop Star" comes on, featuring two guest rappers I haven't heard of, and…oh my God it's shuffle-beat!. Let me explain. Shuffle (or Schäffel) is an obscure sub-genre of minimal techno, pioneered by Cologne label Kompakt, the defining feature of which is that each beat is divided into three rather than the usual two (or four or six); in other words, it's a triplet rhythm, the most unexpected thing you could possibly hear in dance music, as witnessed by the fact that people actually laugh out loud when one of these tracks comes on (it's true, I saw it happen last night), and take a few minutes working out exactly how they're supposed to dance to it. It has a strangely gauche, almost oom-pah sound to it, like techno for the Oktoberfest set, but somehow when it's done right it works. Anyway, this is what I can only describe as shuffle hip-hop! And it's terrific.

Sigh…if only R&B artists made EPs.

2003-06-28T15:53:00.000+10:00

Let's Waltz!

As promised, here's the provisional tracklisting for my compilation CD, "La valse à mille temps: 21 songs in 3/4 time." Credits for suggestions/contributions in square brackets:

The Avalanches - Two Hearts in 3/4 Time
Dusty Springfield - Sunny
John Coltrane - My Favorite Things, Part 1 [John]*
The Smiths - Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want [John]
Japan - Night Porter
Mathias Schaffhäuser - Some Kind Of
Pizzicato Five - Sweet Thursday [Erin]
Aimee Mann - Amateur [Fiona]
Serge Gainsbourg - Valse de Melody
Aaliyah - I Care 4 U
John Barry - The Persuaders theme [John]
Natalie Imbruglia - That Day [Dan]
Crowded House - Pineapple Head [Fiona]
Jimi Hendrix - Manic Depression [John]
Tom Jones - What's New, Pussycat?
Elvis Costello - New Amsterdam [John]
Dave Brubeck - It's a Raggy Waltz [Hec]
Tom Waits - In the Neighborhood [John]
Elliott Smith - Waltz #1 [Lyra Jane]**
kd lang - Outside Myself
Jacques Brel - La Valse à mille temps

* Not, sadly, the full fourteen-minute version, but a three-minute chunk which I believe was released as a 7" single. Still, better than nothing.

**Actually, Lyra Jane suggested the same artist's "Waltz #2," but #1 is even better!

As I said, I'll wait a while before sending this one out; in the meantime, suggestions are still welcome. I could afford to lose a jangly guitar pop number or two. (I'll have to make a copy to take up to Sydney for John next week, though, given the truly heroic nature of his contribution! I've only used about a third of his suggestions, too…). Oh, and you know I hate to brag, but that Brel number is the best closing song of any compilation ever.

***

Weird thing: I got unsolicited e-mail from a drug company yesterday, advertising a new drug for Crohn's disease. Which means that somehow, they've managed to get hold of (1) my e-mail address, and (2) the fact that I have Crohn's. I'm pretty sure I've never signed up for any Crohn's stuff on-line; how on Earth do they know about me? Has some "helpful" person submitted my details to them? It's all a bit creepy.

2003-06-27T23:15:00.000+10:00

Dead metaphor alert

Heard tonight on a commercial: "Unfortunately, in real life we can't turn back the clock." Er, correct me if I'm wrong, but surely in real life we can turn back the clock? Quite easily, in fact. We do it every year when daylight savings ends!

***

Thanks to those who've contributed suggestions for songs in 3/4. I've now got more than enough to make a compilation CD, and have had a lot of fun devising a playlist, which I'll post in the next day or so (although I'll probably wait a while before offering the CD to the general public, since I've only just sent one out)...in the meantime, suggestions are still welcome. I can say with confidence, though, that this will be the indie-est compilation I ever make!

(I haven't got a single double bass suggestion, so I suspect that idea is dead in the water. May at some point put together a more limited compilation of electronic music with double bass though.)

2003-06-27T17:51:00.000+10:00

Then again...

...even repeating one's own jokes puts one fairly firmly in Brent territory, doesn't it?

2003-06-27T02:19:00.000+10:00

O strange new blog

I didn't have to change the template, but Nu-Blogger fucked up the way my old template handled block quotes (which I was never terribly happy with anyway), so what the hell, in for a penny. Richard has already alerted me to a problem with the fonts, which I think I've fixed by switching to our old friend, Verdana, but please let me know if it looks crappy on your browser for any reason. (Especially if you're an expert at tweaking Blogger templates, which is a bit of a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey exercise for me.)

My favourite thing about Nu-Blogger: not only do the archives seem to actually work, but you can change the date format to an Unamerican one, hurrah!

***

I seem to have created a meme with my comment on the US Supreme Court's decision that the Texas anti-sodomy law is unconstitutional. My offhand reply on Buffistas was: "WOO-HOO! Just to celebrate, I feel like going to Texas and fucking some cowboy up the ass." So far, one (straight) guy says he's been repeating this all over his workplace; I've seen it appear on one of my friends' LiveJournals; and apparently a friend of this friend wants to use it as a .sig file! So I want it on the record that I invented the anal sex with cowboy joke, OK?

(Not to go all David Brent and analyse my own humour, but "cowboy," which was an afterthought, really is the crucial word there isn't it?)

2003-06-26T23:31:00.000+10:00

My LiveJournal Hell

Thanks to prodding from Shawn, I've finally taken the plunge and got a LiveJournal account. Don't worry, I haven't switched teams; I'll still be doing all my blogging here, especially since I've finally been upgraded to Nu-Blogger and it actually seems to work! (Unlike some of the horror stories I've read.) Although perhaps I'll use my LiveJournal if I'm ever inspired to post about my pets' diseases, or my results in the "What Hobbit Are You?" quiz, or the Friday Five...

No, I really must stop, I have lots of wonderful friends who write perfectly interesting LiveJournals, and in fact that's why I've joined, so that I can keep track of them all more easily and leave comments for them without being rudely classified as "anonymous," as LJ does to any non-LJ person. (Not to mention the fact that LJers can ban non-LJers from posting comments altogether.)

But whatever your feelings about LiveJournal, you have to admit that the Friends page, where you can catch up on everyone's updates at once, is pretty handy, even if it removes the flexibility of a blog proper, as well as the feeling of being open to the rest of the world, which is what I really want. Now I just have to get my "friend of" quota up, since it's looking pretty sparse at the moment...oh, I see DXMachina has just added me, bless him! (It must be really making a statement on LJ when you remove someone from your friends list, huh?)

2003-06-26T02:05:00.000+10:00

My Definition of House (and Techno and Trance and…) Music

Some unsuspecting person on Buffistas asked for a definition of the different types of dance music, which naturally I couldn't resist, so that's what I've been doing for the past hour! I think I'll just post it here (who knows, someone might find it helpful) instead of my planned post on the new Beyoncé record (which I've only heard four tracks from, but what a four tracks…anyway, I'll save my superlatives for another day). Apologies for any crass generalisations. (Any prog. house fans reading will hunt me down after this):

OK, dance music genres: the most basic and easy-to-hear division is between genres that use a 4/4 beat (which doesn't actually refer to the time signature--since almost all dance music is in 4/4 time--but the nature of the beat which is "four on the floor", ie every beat in the bar is heavily accented with a kickdrum beat, ie the "doof doof doof doof" beat of stereotype; any syncopation that happens is internal to the beat) or a breakbeat (ie a syncopated beat as in hip-hop, which is usually sampled from a classic soul or funk track). Of the 4/4 genres, the most common are house, techno and trance (each of which has about a thousand subgenres); of the breakbeat genres (other than hip-hop which I presume you know about) the most common are jungle (aka drum'n'bass) and the genre usually just called "breaks" (or sometimes "nu-school breaks"). Then there are genres which kind of fall in between 4/4 and breakbeat, namely electro and UK garage. Now, some definitions (bear in mind that these are debatable):

House began in Chicago in the late 80s (at a club called the Warehouse, hence the name) and it's essentially the direct descendant of disco. The earliest house tracks were very simple and stripped down, looped vocals over a 4/4 beat, but house has diversified so much over the years that it's really impossible to pin down…what separates it from techno is, notionally, that it's more "human" and "soulful" (and often a bit slower), its themes can be summed up as (1) love will save the day, and (2) dancing is a lot of fun; it's less self-consciously futuristic than techno, but there's a lot of crossover.

Techno--in the sense of a specific genre rather than an umbrella term for dance music (a usage which most techno lovers, including me, dislike!)--was born in Detroit around the same time as house, but as well as disco the music of people like Kraftwerk and 80s synth pop was an enormous influence, so the sound is much more synth-driven, often "harder" (especially in its later incarnations in places like Belgium), the rhetoric is all about technology and the future and science fictiony stuff, there are hardly any vocals, and to a newcomer it can sound very alienating and (famously) repetitive. Actually, for a history of techno you could do a lot worse than look at the site Plasmo helped set up: Sounds Like Techno.

Trance This started as an offshoot of techno in the early 90s in Europe, but has become very much its own genre, known for big, emotive, often rather cheesy "melodic" synths, and breakdowns (ie the bits where you stand around on the dance floor wondering what to do) that go on for ever (particularly accelerating snare rolls). The word "uplifting" gets thrown around a lot. The 4/4 beat is usually very basic, just a kickdrum thud alternating with a hi-hat. "Progressive house"--an example of which is that dreary Paul Oakenfold track they use for the after-church social in The Matrix Reloaded--is quite similar to trance (only a bit slower and less "euphoric"). In Europe trance is the default mode for pop-dance at the moment, esp. for cover versions (eg DJ Sammy's version of, gulp, Bryan Adams' "Heaven"), but I don't know whether you would ever hear this "pop-trance" stuff in the US.

Jungle/drum'n'bass Grew out of early-90s rave culture in the UK ("rave music" began as essentially techno but mutated into a number of different things, the most important of which was jungle). Once you've heard jungle, it's instantly recognisible: extremely fast breakbeats, so fast that at first you can't imagine anyone actually being able to dance to them, and usually very big, speaker-shaking basslines. There are also lots of reggae and hip-hop influences in jungle. It's usually thought to be past its prime as a genre nowadays, although some would disagree.

"Breaks" Plasmo is the one to ask about this! It's breakbeat music, slower than jungle but still retaining its influence, other than that I don't really know how to describe it and it doesn't really exist as a scene in the US anyway so it's probably not important. What does exist in the US is the slightly different genre known as "big beat"--ie breakbeats with rock samples, a la Chemical Brothers and Fat Boy Slim. This is probably the music that most people thing of as "techno"! (Sadly.)

Electro Electro was a genre from the 80s that has been having a revival lately--in its pure form it's a kind of techno characterised by more complex beats and particular kinds of analog-like synth sounds, but to a lay person it's probably completely indistinguishable from techno. But it shades over into poppier territory with the likes of Fischerspooner and that dreaded word "electroclash", which is basically anything that sounds like it might come from the 80s, with lyrics about taking cocaine and having sex with robots.

UK garage I'm really unqualified to talk about this, but what jungle was to the mid-90s, UK garage (or "UKG") is to the late 90s/early 00s. Garage was originally a term for a particular style of vocal house, but UK garage has little in common with house any more. Like jungle, it grew out of the London pirate radio scene. In its early form it was associated with "2-step" beats (ie fast, skittering breakbeats) and vocals that recalled R&B. The only UKG acts to really break in the US have been Craig David (but only his earlier stuff like "Rewind" and "Fill me in" is strictly UKG, he's more or less R&B now) and The Streets (Mike Skinner is really a genre of his own, but the beats he uses are basically UK garage beats). The latest thing in UK garage, however, has been the emergence of a harder, more rap-based style known as "garage rap" or "gutter garage"--the most hyped exponent of which is the brilliant 17-year-old MC/producer Dizzee Rascal; quick, jump on the bandwagon while there's still time!

Bloody hell, I don't know if that's helpful at all (and I haven't even got around to IDM, nu-jazz, psy-trance, broken beat, glitchtronica, drill'n'bass, happy hardcore…) the most important thing is that genres don't just refer to a sound, they also refer to a particular scene and culture (like rock genres, of course)…also, although I'm not a genre-phobe, you shouldn't really worry too much about them, because no two people will agree on the genre of a given track anyway! I'd just be happy if people stopped referring to Fatboy Slim as "techno"…

Oh, and a useful site is Groovetech, a dance music store which meticulously classifies its records by genre and has sound files so you can actually listen to what stuff sounds like!

2003-06-24T23:07:00.000+10:00

Better stand back, here's an age attack! Peace out!

I know this has been linked absolutely everywhere, but I can't resist: Andrew Motion's poems for Wills' 21st. Not only is further comment unnecessary, it's also, in this case, quite impossible. I'm lost for words.

***

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like there's a bit of a Renaissance going on over at B.org at the moment. A few weeks ago I was seriously wondering whether it was worth the effort; I would read page after page just thinking to myself "Oh shut up you bunch of idiots!" But lately I've had lots of great conversations there, even in the Natter thread. True, I did get into a heated argument about Narnia (with specific reference to the Platonic eschatology of The Last Battle and the fate of Susan) that I've not only had before but had with the same people before, but I guess that's the price you pay.

***

I do like that Marcello Carlin piece on Dizzee Rascal I referred to yesterday, but as several people on other blogs and forums have pointed out, he makes one claim that is so bizarrely counterfactual that it makes you wonder if he's actually listened to the record at all: "this album demonstrates no humour whatsoever or wheresoever." Huh???

2003-06-24T00:35:00.000+10:00

"Hulk skin tone look atrocious!"

Funniest thing I've read for--oh, days: on excellent-blog-despite-being-named-after-a-Leonard-Cohen-lyric, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, a review of the new Hulk movie by the Hulk himself.

(Being a Movable Type blog, that permalink actually works, too! What is this, a conspiracy to make me change platforms?)

2003-06-23T23:35:00.000+10:00

More Canadian-bashing; I'll stop soon, I promise

Sorry to harp on the Violent Femmes, but over the past few years a surefire sign of terminal musical naffness has appeared: you really know you're crap when one of your songs gets picked up for one of those toe-curling Mitsubishi singalong commercials. I mean, so far we've had The New Radicals' "You Get What You Give" (which used to be a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, I admit, a breath of neo-Supertrampish fresh air among all the glum indie and metal videos on Rage--ah, Rage programming, that's a rant for another day--anyway, it turns out not to be one of those songs that sounds just as fresh the 1,395th time you hear it); The Barenaked Ladies' "One Day" (God this is excruciating; they're Canadian too, enough said); Deni Hines's "That Word Love" (or whatever it's called, it's like the winner of a competition to write the blandest nu-soul song possible, the idea that anyone would sing along with it is frankly terrifying); and finally, on the special four wheel drive, leaning out of the window as you're driving along the beach and singing along edition, the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun" (and isn't that song really about nuclear war anyway?...or drug addiction?...actually I don't have a clue what it's about but songs usually turn out to be about one of those two things). Those have been the songs in Australia anyway, and a sorry lineup it is…I believe the same idea has been used in other countries with different songs, can anyone confirm?

Meanwhile, things could so easily have been different. If only they had chosen a certain other Violent Femmes song as the twenty-first century anthem for four wheel drive owners everywhere, then not only would this have been the best ad campaign of all time, the Violent Femmes would have been the coolest band of all time merely by association. I think you know the song I'm talking about. (All together now, children…)

***

It's not often I have a kind word for John Howard, but I really must congratulate him on the choice of Major-General Michael Jeffery as our next Governor General.

After the Hollingworth affair, the most important thing was of course to select someone who could by no possible stretch of the imagination turn out to have concealed a sexual scandal that occurred under his leadership. In retrospect, the Prime Minister's mistake the first time around was choosing a candidate who came from an institution renowned for resistance to change, sweeping things under the carpet, and egregiously outdated attitudes to sexuality and gender relations. This time, in a complete about-face, he has selected a high-ranking member of the defence forces. It's good to see he's learnt his lesson.

***

3/4 update: John, via e-mail, helpfully provides that list of Smiths songs in 3/4: "That Joke Isn't Funny Any More", "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me", "Back To The Old House", "I Know It's Over", and "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want". He also made an intriguing but terse remark about musicians from Manchester and Liverpool really being "Irish" (hence the preponderance of 3/4 time). I'd love him to expand on that, either in my comments or in his own blog. How about it, John?

More obvious candidates: "What the World Needs Now," "You Light Up My Life," "What's New, Pussycat?", "Delilah." I'm also convinced that there must be at least one Prince song in 3/4.

2003-06-23T13:57:00.000+10:00

I Luv Pooh

Indeed, much of this record could be considered as poignant a lament for expired childhood as the staggering final chapter of The House At Pooh Corner.

You've just gotta love Marcello Carlin. Who else would find a latent affinity between Dizzee Rascal and A. A. Milne? (Meanwhile, the anticipation for the album just grows and grows...)

***

My comments are down at the moment, so in reply to John, no, it's definitely not just dance music in 3/4 I'm looking for! It's anything in 3/4 (anything non-folk that is...and non-classical, and non-music theatre while we're at it; I want "pop music", but I might just stretch the category to include that one Miles Davis track--is it "All Blues"?--to make up for my egregious snubbing of jazz in the double bass category...because pop people are supposed to love Miles, it's a rule). And yes, saying 3/4 was "vanishingly rare" was an exaggeration, but it's still unusual enough to be interesting (to me). John tantalisingly comments that The Smiths "often" used 3/4...when? Tell me! Remember, I know nothing!

2003-06-23T00:36:00.000+10:00

Outrage

Kim and Saxon evicted! I'm sorry, but this is just the worst possible result. We now have two people out of six in the house who are absolute dead weight (Vincent and Patrick), and two of the people who have been most consistently entertaining, intriguing and--ultimately--endearing are now gone. I'm not surprised about Kim, but Saxon! Evidently he just nudged out the next candidate, presumably Vincent. Well, this is proof, if it were ever needed, that the votes aren't rigged. Thank God there has been such an unusually interesting group of people overall this year; we do still have Chrissie, Reggie and Dan, and Jamie has the potential to get interesting. But just let me take this opportunity, in the immortal words of Comic Book Guy, to register my disgust throughout the world.

***

Now, I know what you're all thinking: surely there's a song out there somewhere that is in 3/4 time and has a double bass. Well, wonder no more, because I've found it: "Once Around the Block" by Badly Drawn Boy.

In fact, there's also "Sweet Thursday" by Pizzicato Five, but I've finally decided to refine my criteria so that as well as no jazz, only songs with at least one non-acoustic element will qualify, so the Pizzicatos are out. (They'll still go in the 3/4 list though.) So there must be an electric guitar (as in BDB's case), a synth, a drum machine, sampling, whatever. (Songs with Fender Rhodes keyboards will be judged on a case-by-case basis.) That way, you see, I get to leave out the Femmes! As for the jazz exclusion, though, I may abandon the idea of excluding tracks that aren't jazz but "bring jazz to mind," because in reality those electronic tracks I'm listing are no doubt sampling their basslines from old jazz tracks, so it's a bit wishful to claim they don't bring jazz to mind!

Incidentally, the above tracks come from two compilation CDs sent to me by Erinaceous (of Buffista and lexicographic fame), which also contain two more 3/4 tracks! ("Dream of Wednesday" by The Flavor Channel and "Long, Long Day" by Paul Simon--one of the compilations has a theme, guess what it is! Is that Paul Simon track folk though?) Either Erin really has a thing for 3/4 time or there is a lot more of it around than I realised.

I'm coming to realise, meanwhile, that listing double bass songs is going to involve listing the entire output of several bands who just happen to have a double bassist in their lineup. You'll have to forgive a person whose view of pop music is so producer-centric that he forgets that there are these entities called "rock bands" that essentially consist of a fixed group of people who limit themselves to playing, more or less, the same instruments for each song, rather than just picking up or sampling whichever instrument or synth preset happens to be appropriate for the soundworld of the song in question. Quaint, isn't it? Anyway, in the case of such charmingly anachronistic collectives, I'll just pick the song in which the double bass is heard to its best advantage, OK?

***

Funny/interesting current thread titles from ILM. My interpolations in square brackets:

I DEMAND AUSSIE RAP [be careful what you wish for!]
Is it gimmicky to name your blog after a song title? [uh-oh]
Am I allowed to record a funk version of Liz Phair's "Supernova" with me vocodering the lyrics?
are there any hiphopheads who don't really listen to the words?
DOES ANYONE IN THIS BITCH LIKE FORMALISM?
"Real Music" is a Myth [too right]
Say something charitable about the Eagles
Who's afraid to rock? Who's only too keen to rock? And who can't rock in spite of wanting to?
Why In The Name Of All That Is Holy Does Anyone Like The La's?
Who Would Win 'World Pop Idol'?
defending the indefensible 6: the housemartins

2003-06-22T02:37:00.000+10:00

Pre-emptive strike

Re: double bass. Yes, yes, I know, I know, the Violent Femmes. Damn, I can't stand them either. I don't want them on my list. Maybe I need to stipulate another exclusion: irritating Canadian ex-buskers.

(Is it just me, or is Canada second only to Ireland in its track record of producing pop music that makes you want to slap people?)

2003-06-22T00:30:00.000+10:00

Hints for drug-dealing morons in uniform

Tonight on The Bill there was a plot development that struck me as totally implausible, but one I've seen in one form or another at least three times on TV in the past year, including once previously on The Bill itself. I'm referring to a scenario whereby prescription drugs seized by police from a dealer are traced back to the original prescribee (or prescribing doctor) because they're still in their original packaging, with the little sticker from the chemist on it.

Now, my life experience of the drug trade is more limited than you might think, but just speaking logically, don't you think that if you were supplying prescription drugs to a dealer, you might take the precaution of removing them from the bottle they came in, or at least peeling off the label with your name on it? Especially if, as was the case tonight, you are yourself a serving member of the Metropolitan Police. Am I wrong?

***

I'm serious about compiling that list of songs with funky acoustic basslines, so any suggestions from readers are more than welcome. I'm really interested in pop music (in the widest sense) that uses double bass ("live" or sampled) but isn't jazz, and doesn't bring jazz immediately to mind. Not, of course, because I have any objection to jazz double bass (hi Dan!), but because if I didn't make that exclusion the exercise would consist of "list every jazz song ever." What I've come up with so far is all house/minimal electronic stuff, namely:

A few 8 Doogymoto tracks
A few Farben/Jan Jelinek tracks (these are the same person of course)
A fantastic house track called "On the Run" by Stuttgart-based duo Inverse Cinematics (obscure enough for ya?)

Hmm, just had a thought, there's also the entire genre of "swing house," ie house that samples old big band music. (It's not as dodgy as it sounds, honest!) No, on second thoughts that had better fall under the "jazz" exclusion.

So how about it? Break me out of my dance music ghetto!

Oh, and I'm also compiling a list of pop songs in 3/4 time…just because I can! This time, the exclusion will have to be "folk," because the very first three folk songs I could think of off the top of my head are all in 3/4 (that "alive, alive-oh" one, "The Times They Are a Changin'," "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda"--obviously! although have you ever noticed that "Waltzing Matilda" itself is not in 3/4 time?--oh, and I've just thought of another one, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"), whereas in every other kind of pop, anything non-4/4 is vanishingly rare. The list so far:

Aaliyah - I Care 4 U
Dusty Springfield - Sunny (I've actually heard versions of this in 4/4, but Dusty's is in a very quick 3/4…in fact I've always thought it would make a fantastic bridal waltz if the couple was nimble enough)
Jacques Brel - La Valse à mille temps (of course!)
INXS - The Loved One
I've also heard quite a number of minimal techno tracks in 3/4 but I'll have to hunt them down to get the details

So, there you go, a little project!

***

Everyone's doing it! Check out my Dad's new blog. "Family ridicule" indeed…where on earth would he get an idea like that?

2003-06-21T15:01:00.000+10:00

Double bass alert

Little things that songs can do to make me like them, #1: have a funky, swaggering bassline played on (or sampled from) an actual acoustic double bass. Current example: "Tupperware" by weird-ass experimental dance-pop outfit 8 Doogymoto (from their album Minimalistico on Matthew Herbert's Soundslike label for the benefit of any trainspotters). Actually, it sounds like they use double bass on several of the tracks. I may have to start keeping a list; I feel a themed compilation coming on.

***

This week's Canonical Movie I Shamefully Hadn't Seen Before was Taxi Driver. I was struck by the very different "look" of the climactic shooting spree compared to the rest of the film: it looked somehow grainier or lighter, almost overexposed. I was quite impressed with this little expressionistic touch, reflecting (or so I thought) the dreamlike mental state of the protagonist. Then I watched the making-of documentary (almost as long as the film itself!) and found out that, far from being an aesthetic choice, it was actually something the censors had stipulated; the colour had to be "desaturated" because the sight of all that crimson was supposedly just too disturbing. The cinematographer is bitter to this day. So, two interesting things: (1) How far will I go to attribute an aesthetic motive, even for things that look wrong or strange, to a director I admire? Would I still think Gangs of New York was underappreciated, for example, if it wasn't a Scorsese film? (2) I've never heard of censoring the colour palette of a film before! Is this actually a common practice?

2003-06-21T01:17:00.000+10:00

Buddy me up

Feeling singularly uninspired today, so I'll just report that I've finally got around to installing AIM, so please add my username (angusgmelb) to your Buddy List (vile Americanism! We Australians should have a Mates List), and engage me in pointless chit-chat any time you feel so moved. Both functions can also be performed using the gizmo in the right hand column. (Which will probably make this page take even longer to load, but that's life.)

2003-06-20T01:02:00.000+10:00

Nobody deserves haiku, Buffy

Thanks to Richard for alerting me to the existence of D-Squared Digest. (Although since Richard has repeatedly refused to start his own blog, it's really the least he can do to act as a conduit to the best of other people's.) I wouldn't have wanted to miss this priceless (and spot-on) piece of haiku rage. (NB: that link, like all Blogger permalinks, doesn't actually work. Just go to the main page and scroll down if necessary.)

2003-06-19T23:37:00.000+10:00

Frequent flyer farrago

I feel a bit like John giving travellers' tips here, but as a service to my readers, can I issue the following plea: if you are checking the availability of Frequent Flyer award flights on the Qantas website, and you see a flight that you want, snap the fucker up! Don't wait a few hours, don't even wait a few minutes. Hit "add this flight to your itinerary" and then don't even breathe until you have the confirmation code in your sweaty hand.

Life teaches us lessons sometimes, and this lesson was brought home by trying this evening to book a ticket for my sister Miriam, who is using her points to bring our friend Keturah from Adelaide up to Sydney for a holiday and to see her perform (I was doing the booking for her because her own computer/internet access isn't working). We ended up having to book (a) business class tickets--that is, costing more points--with (b) a two-hour stopover in Melbourne on the return flight, on (c) completely different days than we wanted. One flight we wanted actually vanished before our eyes in the space of two minutes, while we were vainly checking if there were better flights on other days! (Yeah, as if. Another hint: there are never better flights on other days.) And yet, apparently there was a perfect set of flights available earlier in the afternoon.

***

I should put on record that I have totally changed my position on Kim. She's great! She's exactly what the house needed, and she does make the others (minus Reggie) look like a pack of childish, neurotic private school snobs at times. Unfortunately, she'll probably be evicted on Sunday. (We're having a double eviction, with all housemates nominated.) If only people could be sensible and just evict the two most boring housemates, namely Patrick and Vincent. Fat chance.

2003-06-19T15:28:00.000+10:00

Oh. My. GOD.

Single of the year so far (apart perhaps from the epoch-making "I Luv U" by Dizzee Rascal): "Feel-Good Time" by P!nk, from the Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle soundtrack. This is just inexpressibly brilliant. The template (impossibly catchy power-pop riffs combined with 80s-ish dance beats) is perhaps not a million miles from "Get this Party Started" or whatever it was called, but in terms of pure invention and joy this is in a totally different league. Just listen to that totally strange, almost mediaeval-sounding a capella intro! And the video game sounds! (Secret affinity with Dizzee.) I defy anyone not to love this.

2003-06-19T01:20:00.000+10:00

How academic is this shit?

Semi-interesting article in The Australian today about academic bloggers. (Not available online, and anyway it was syndicated from the Chronicle of Higher Education which is subscription-only access...bloody Old Media!) It made me wonder whether I consider this an "academic" blog...or rather, why I don't consider this an academic blog. (Apart from the obvious, ie posts about the likes of "Chrissie and Janice: separated at birth?")

I do consider myself an academic, albeit an unemployed one; I certainly feel more comfortable with that rather bureaucratic identity than the more romantic "intellectual." And although this has become more or less a blog about my own tastes, which isn't really an academic topic as such, it's fairly obvious that at the axiomatic level my tastes have been deeply informed by the academic contexts I've been part of, namely literary studies and cultural studies. Literary studies these days is of course notorious for having ditched the traditional functions of evaluation and canon formation, and that has been precisely its most profound influence on me: it's taught me that "is this good or bad?" is sometimes the least interesting thing you can ask about something. And along similar lines, cultural studies has taught me to be suspicious of ways of thinking that put entire areas of daily life beyond the pale of intellectual discourse; that there's no reason to think a priori that Big Brother (to pick the most obvious example) is not a potential source of interest, insight, and complexity, as well as pleasure.

But an academic blog? Nah, the thought makes me cringe actually. Although I quite like the idea of this stuff being published after my death in a volume of Occasional Writings by some university press--perhaps, for poetry's sake, one of the two that rejected my first book. That's Duke and California if you're keeping score. (Suggested blurb quote: "A rare glimpse of one of our most important thinkers at work and play"--Gayatri Spivak.)

2003-06-18T02:08:00.000+10:00

DCC

Congratulations to John Horner, who has just notched up Post No 700 at his bespoke hand-coded Blog. (John is the kind of person who keeps track of such things.) 700 posts, that's really quite remarkable when you think about it, isn't it? And no filler, either. Well, very little. (I think I did catch him doing the Friday Five once, but he did it...reflectively, or something. No, scratch that, there's no excuse for doing the Friday Five. Anyway, mostly no filler!)

Amazingly, I didn't even realise John had a blog until about a month ago, even though I can quite clearly recall conversations we've had about blogging in the past. Anyway, I'm now a devoted reader, and you should be too.

2003-06-17T18:00:00.000+10:00

Keep an eye on that one: the minute your back is turned she'll steal your false leg

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore Chrissie. Of all the Big Brother housemates, she's the most like someone I would have as a friend in real life. She's funny, thoughtful, empathetic and strong, and if it weren't for Reggie I'd put money on her winning the whole thing.

BUT. Am I the only person who has noticed an uncanny resemblance between our Chrissie and Janice Soprano? It was particularly disturbing last night to switch from The Sopranos, in which Janice has lately been offering conspicuous comfort to the recently bereaved Bobby "Bacala" Baccilieri, to the Big Brother live feed, in which Chrissie was to be seen offering conspicuous comfort to the, er, recently bereaved Saxon. (Not that Saxon and Bobby Bacala superficially have much in common, admittedly.)

Not only that, but Chrissie was having a conversation with Dan about Christian rock! (Which, you'll recall, is also a recent career move of Janice's.) It's all a bit worrying.

2003-06-16T18:18:00.000+10:00

We'll take Manhattan

For instance, when you meet me, you will only see the Prada and the whitened teeth and the celebrity friends. What you won't see is my past. You won't ever know that when I was very poor and young and new in New York City that, and let me put this delicately, I once was paid $150.00 to insert a very large glass bottle in a Vietnam vet while dressed in a hockey mask and a toga. Don't ever forget that you don't know that, Paul. That 150 bucks lasted me two weeks. Now I take more than that out of the ATM every day. I lose that much at poker every other week. I think there's surely a lesson in that, don't you?

If there's a funnier blogger out there than Choire Sicha, I'll eat my toga. Check him out.

2003-06-16T01:44:00.000+10:00

No comment necessary

The Observer interviews Bernard-Henry Lévy:

But, I ask, would he say he was interested in fashion? He sighs. 'I was interested once, 15 years ago, in one designer, about whom I wrote one or two pages, and whose name was Yves Saint Laurent. But what interested me about him was the semiology of his draughtsmanship.'

2003-06-16T00:10:00.000+10:00

Pacey in a coma

Went to see Rose Troche's film The Safety of Objects (2001, according to IMDB! only just released here though) with my friend Jonathan. (Who might look me up, so if so, hi Jono!) Very nice little film, some clunky moments, but generally its kind-of Carveresque, or Carver-via-Altmanesque narrative of four interlocking suburban melodramas worked well I thought. It's nice to keep up with the films from that Christine Vachon/Todd Haynes/Rose Troche nexus; it's particularly interesting to see what they do with heterosexual (or rather, family-oriented) stories, and nice to see that neither Haynes nor Troche has taken up the safe queer option of "Familles! je vous haïs!" Joshua Jackson spent most of the film in a coma, but we also got him to see him in flashback, getting it together with an older woman (which seems to be a speciality of his). And Jessica Campbell (who played the bolshie lesbian schoolgirl with braces in Election) was magnificent (sans braces) as his sister. Good performances all round in fact, perhaps the best being Mary Kay Place as a...well, a sexually frustrated housewife actually, but more interesting than that makes it sound. The most intriguing story in the film, though, was about a young boy who has a Barbie-like doll he talks to (the doll actually moved and talked and stuff--homage to Haynes's Superstar?). It was a beautiful little illustration of the slipperiness of the desire/identification threshold--would have liked to have worked it retrospectively into my thesis! (Of course I could still work it into the book but I think I need a moratorium on new stuff.)

***

Joanne evicted by 86%! Is there an expression for retrospective guilt at having been part of a lynch mob? Because I think that's what I'm feeling. (Not that I voted, but I did barrack.)

2003-06-15T02:29:00.000+10:00

Knock me down with a feather

I just went to a party where this American guy who I've met a couple of times before was talking about his teenage clubbing days. It took me a few minutes to realise that he was talking about going clubbing in Chicago, and that the particular club he was talking about was a little joint known as The Warehouse. As in The Warehouse! As in The 'House! As in House Music! As in "Frankie Knuckles is in the House!" If you can imagine Billy Graham finding out that a casual acquaintance was a guest at the Last Supper, you might have some inkling of my reaction to this news.

At the some party I found out that some real life friends of mine have found this blog and are regular readers. Which is a tiny bit of a shock but, hey, everyone's welcome. So, er, hi, regular readers! I know who you are! Don't be shy, leave a comment!

2003-06-14T15:00:00.000+10:00

Funny thing

I'm not normally a fan of geek humour, but this is hilarious: The Gettysburg address as a Powerpoint presentation. (Link courtesy of Gar at Buffistas.)

2003-06-14T01:56:00.000+10:00

Julian, draw a bath for this young man

Finally saw A Clockwork Orange on DVD this evening. Somehow, after having made it through three decades without ever having seen a Kubrick film, I've seen three in the last few months (2001 and Spartacus being the others.) Kubrick really is a director people know for his set-pieces isn't he; everyone knows about the HAL scenes or the "I am Spartacus" scene, and everyone knows about the aversion therapy scenes in Clockwork; it actually comes as a surprise when you watch the films to find that these moments do actually fit into a (more or less) coherent narrative. As for the film, well yes, shocking, provocative, makes you think dunnit etc etc, but is it wrong of me to just intensely covet the furniture? (I want the furniture in 2001 as well. If I could live in an apartment decorated like one of those spacecraft, I would be a happy man.)

***

Amazing stuff from the EG section in The Age today: they actually reviewed the new Moodymann album and the Audio Bullys album! That's two house records in one week! Almost makes up for them calling Radiohead "the most inventive rock band in the world" or some such preposterous rubbish.

***

Oh, and I've decided what music they should have had for the after-church social in The Matrix Reheated, instead of that boring piece of bog-prog shite, which unsurprisingly turns out to be the work of Paul Oakenfold. It should have been the Phylyps Trak, on the astonishing and legendary Berlin dub techno label Basic Channel, because it really is music that sounds like it comes pulsating out of the very depths of the earth.

2003-06-13T01:27:00.000+10:00

Ride like the wind

I was daydreaming today, trying to imagine the most boring and pointless cultural studies project imaginable, and I settled on A Cultural History of Windsurfing. I mean, there can hardly be a more aesthetically bankrupt and socially hollow cultural practice than windsurfing, right? (Chillout music comes a distant second.)

But then I got to thinking, well, windsurfing is after all a hybrid form of activity, and maybe it therefore generates interestingly hybrid forms of social being. Isn't there perhaps a fundamental ambivalence about the fact that it draws (however distantly and deratively) on two apparently opposed cultural locations: surfing (youth-focused, "rebellious," hedonistic, countercultural) and sailing (adult-focused, establishment, careerist, conservative)? My father, for instance, who was a sailor, always referred to the "sport" as "boardsailing," and the thing itself as a "sailboard," during the brief fling with it that he (and as a result the rest of us) had during the eighties. Is that nicety of usage relevant? Is there a case for "windsurfing" vs "boardsailing" as a micro-struggle between the revolutionary and the reactionary in the arena of self-representation?

Any analysis along these lines would of course involve a detailed consideration of the character played by Tom Burlinson in the film Windrider (1986), an example of the extremely shortlived and unlucrative genre, the windsurfing flick (windsploitation?). As you may remember, Tom is a successful businessman whose real passion is windsurfing. The resulting internal class conflict can be seen most vividly in Tom's adoption of the powder blue suit as his everyday business wear: pastels may have been standard dress for Miami detectives in the 1980s, but only the most daring and creative Australian businessmen (advertising guys, essentially) would have risked them. I can't actually remember anything else about the film except that it also starred a young Nicole Kidman, but I imagine the struggle between the plutocratic and the hedonistic elements of Tom's weltanshauung is a rich source of insight into the commerce/counterculture dialectic, especially in the context of a decade when the very idea of a counterculture seemed to be played out and arguably could only make these kinds of sporadic, hybridised, commodified reappearances. You get the feeling that if windsurfing hadn't existed, the eighties would have invented it anyway. (For that matter, does anyone windsurf anymore?)

Ah, cultural studies, it's like riding a bike isn't it.

***

Speaking of which, here's how you do it properly: Slavoj Zizek, brilliant as ever, on The Matrix Reloaded. (Thanks to Misha for the link.)

2003-06-11T23:05:00.000+10:00

Frankenkasey

I had a revelation today...someone needs to do a pop-trance cover of Kasey Chambers' "Not Pretty Enough." Imagine those heartfelt country yelps replaced by teflon-coated Cher-tastic autotune magic! No boring old guitars, just keyboards doing that DJ Sammy-style "daa daa da-da-daa, da-da-daa, da-da-daa, da-da-daa" thing...the uplifting chord changes are already there! Add an accelerating snare roll or two and bob's your uncle! [Cackles malevolently.]

Actually, the chances are about three in four that someone's already done this and it's playing in gay clubs the length and breadth of the land.

***

Marcello Carlin likes !!! too, it turns out. Well, "likes" is an understatement. You know why I could never be a pop critic? Because I tend to forget that songs have lyrics, and that the lyrics might actually be about things. A post-9/11 record, who knew? Those lyrics he quotes are great. I'll have to try to listen to them next time.

2003-06-11T01:32:00.000+10:00

Hungry hungry hippo

One of the effects of being on quite a high dose of steroids is that you always, always feel hungry. No matter how much you eat, you feel like you could fit more in. I'd actually be quite curious, in a way, to see how far this goes, how much food I can stuff in before I hit satiety point. Anyone care to sponsor me? $5 per 100 calories consumed, perhaps?

2003-06-10T01:43:00.000+10:00

OK, I know we're meant to be in the midst of an old-skool revival but this is getting ridiculous

I'm probably the only person who'll find this funny, but I just noticed this in the Juno Records new releases mailout:

GURU JOSH: Infinity (reissue) (S12)
12": Infinity ("1990's Time For The Guru" mix, "Sane" mix) (S12DJ 086)
[6.50]

Brace yourselves, that saxophone riff will soon be everywhere!

2003-06-10T01:01:00.000+10:00

!!!...??? (Second thoughts)

OK, I gave that b-side, which rejoices in the name of "Intensifieder Sunracapellectroshit Mix 03," a proper listen, and, um, no, it's not "even better." It is in fact quite appalling, or at least it starts off that way, with some of the crappiest vocals you will ever hear mewling "Can you feel it…INTENSIFY!" over and over again, and of course there's no more tragic lyric than "can you feel it" when you're really not feeling it, is there? (Crappy vocals are naturally part of the whole dance-punk project, as they are of any respectable enterprise containing the word "punk", but there are good crappy vocals--The Rapture, Electric Six--and then there's this…) But after a few minutes (this is another nine-minute job…brevity is one aspect of punk that !!! have left behind) it does get really good, promise! The vocals settle down, some wonderful, euphoric acidy synth washes kick in, and it just builds and builds, and then we get a cheekily devastating instance of the oldest and cheesiest production effect in the book--namely, the sound cuts completely out and in again in razor-fast rhythmic stutters. Really, this hardly deserves to be called a "production effect" at all, does it, I mean the most unskilled DJ can do it…scrub that, you can do it on your home stereo, and you probably have done it; I know I have. Well, that's what makes it charming! Anyway, this track would work wonderfully as a change-up track in a house/electro set, but I'm willing to bet any DJ who played it would start halfway through! (And "Giuliani" is still great, all the way through.)

***

In other news of world-historical moment, I coloured my hair last night, unbelievably the first time I've tried doing this at home. My God, it's really easy! And it looks great! I think I'd always assumed that hair colouring was some arcane art best left to professionals, which was why I'd been shelling out $60 every couple of months to have it done by my hairdresser. Well, it's the $15 pack of Feria from now on, I can tell you (that is, assuming my hair doesn't turn green at some point in the next week). Also, the Feria doesn't burn my scalp like the stuff my hairdresser uses does…I thought that was supposed to happen!

***

So, the new housemates were immune from nomination tonight! That means we have to endure Kim for another two weeks! Shit! I actually heard the notorious "joke" she told which got broadcast on the live feed…it really was extremely dodgy and unfunny; she is skating on very thin ice. (Although it is interesting to see class as a overt factor in Aussie Big Brother, possibly for the first time.)

Classic Stockholm Sydrome moment from Saxon in tonight's live feed: "Beebs [ie Big Brother], is like our father while we're in here, and fathers don't hurt their children." Woah!

***
Saw Igby Goes Down today. I loved it, but then, I have a thing for leftfield black comedies about fucked-up rich people: The Royal Tenenbaums, Metropolitan, La Règle du jeu, I lap 'em up. Because rich people deserve to be miserable, and we deserve to look at nice things!

2003-06-08T01:25:00.000+10:00

Detritus

Am I the only person whose mnemonic for remembering which one is the pestle and which one is the mortar is "penis" and, er, "minge" respectively? [Lengthy pause.] All right, just me then.

And doesn't this just sum up the sad state of contemporary "literary" culture: the Guardian Saturday Review has a fucking weekly column about fucking cooking by fucking Julian Barnes! Mind you, it's quite a good column, actually one of the few bits I read, but still, you know what I'm getting at, don't you?

Current listening: the 2002 album Cardiology by Detroit producer Recloose, a gorgeous and ever-surprising mixture of house, techno, hip-hop and jazz grooves, all thrown into a blender to produce eleven immaculate little cocktails of weirdness. It gives you what the kids nowadays call a "context of abundance": so many little pleasures that you almost wonder whether one day you might listen to it and it might all just seem a bit fussy. (Cf. Der Rosenkavalier.) You know what, though, it would really help the cause of all those people who are trying to demythologise Detroit if people from Detroit stopped releasing dance music that was so much better than everyone else's, huh?

2003-06-07T01:35:00.000+10:00

Today or tomorrow (but not today)

It's the dying moments of the first act of Der Rosenkavalier, and the middle-aged Marschallin has just finished telling her young lover, Octavian, that one day soon--"today or tomorrow"--he will fall in love with someone younger and leave her. Brushing aside his protests, she sings the following words, accompanied by the most heartbreaking music in the whole opera:

You must go now, Quinquin, you must leave me.
I am going to church now and later I shall drive to Uncle Greifenklau, who is old and crippled, and dine with him; that pleases the old man.
And in the afternoon I shall send a messenger to you, Quinquin, to tell you whether I am going to the Prater.
And if I go and you so wish, you may come to the Prater too and ride by my carriage…
Now be good and do as I say.

I must admit that I've often failed to see what the big deal is about librettists. I mean, the words in opera are mostly fairly ordinary and functional, aren't they? A mere coathanger for the music, workmanlike expository dramatic dialogue with the occasional purple lyric outburst. Certainly a libretto by Da Ponte or Boito or Hofmannsthal may accomplish this better, more tidily, less lugubriously than one by a lesser writer, but the rest of it, the fact that these three are talked of in the same breath as the composers they wrote for, I mostly don't get. It's not, after all, as if they're virtuousos with words in the same way a popular lyricist might be--a Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart or Ira Gershwin, the adulation of which I totally understand, even if my own taste in popular lyrics tends more towards the anonymous (or, even better, the absent).

But watching Rosenkavalier on DVD over the past couple of days, and listening to what Strauss and Hofmannsthal accomplish together in this scene, for a moment I get it. The genius of the words, of course, is what they don't say; the retreat from the lyrical to the blankly expository is a verbal parallel to the Marschallin's preparation for her own retreat from love. But she's not yet ready to make that retreat complete, so, in the desperate request hidden behind layers of courtly "if"s, she makes the familiar bargain with imminence: the catastrophe will come soon, "today or tomorrow," but surely our clearsightedness in recognising that earns us a temporary reprieve. Today or tomorrow: in other words, not today, please not today. Of course, the Marschallin doesn't know that fate will cruelly take her at her word and will literally bring the catastrophe tomorrow. We know this, of course; at least, we do if we've seen the opera before or read the synopsis or have the slightest clue about the way opera narrative works. But, and this is a rare thing in opera, our foreknowledge doesn't rob the Marschallin of the dignity of her renunciation--and maybe this is why her eventual, improbable Act Three entry seems like a kind of triumph.

2003-06-06T01:40:00.000+10:00

A Paranoid Android With a View

Critical coup de théatre of the year: Sasha Frere-Jones calls Radiohead "the Merchant Ivory of rock". A bit unfair, perhaps, but I laughed.

2003-06-05T02:02:00.000+10:00

Big up to the Oxford Massive! (That's young people's lingo, grandma)

Nice to see that Jim has finally started a blog. Here's hoping he keeps it up, although I'm not quite sure about the nakedly acquisitive spirit he's shown so far. Posting his birthday list indeed! (I want that Dizzee Rascal record too though.)

Jim's also anticipated me by posting about Marcello Carlin's lengthy and often brilliant disquisition on UK Big Brother. I still have an entry coming up about this, I think, but maybe not today. One of the themes, though, will be the interesting differences that seem to be discernible between the UK and Australian shows, and the difficulty of knowing how much the differences are down to, respectively, the format, the participants and the viewers. Difficult because I've never seen UK BB, most British people I know haven't seen ours, and even those who have seen both aren't necessarily reliable witnesses. (Namely Ben Elton, who wrote a book allegedly drawing on both, which I've read, and hey I was sick at the time and a friend brought it to me in hospital, so lay off, OK?)

Anyway, let's see if I'm still capable of writing about something other than BB...It may be the most precious song title ever, and it may be by the most archly named band on the most pretentious record label in the world, but I've downloaded "Me and Giuliani Down By the Schoolyard (A True Story)" by !!! (on Warp Records, if you need to ask), and it's absolutely brilliant! A nine minute disco-punk epic, everything great about the early eighties squeezed into one song...very New York and very Now. The B-side is even better! This must be the most purely fun record Warp have released for...well, I'm no expert on the Warp back catalogue, but surely ever!

2003-06-04T00:58:00.000+10:00

On the other hand

None of the previous post's chastisements, of course, apply to Sarah and Mark's wonderful Eastenders updates, which have several qualities sadly lacking in Certain Other Websites...namely, they are (1) brief, (2) unpretentious, (3) actually funny, and (4) devoid of naff buzzwords. (1) in particular shouldn't be underestimated; have you seen those TWoP recaps, they take longer to read than actually watching the bloody programme!

Anyway, BB update: two new housemates! I actually caught a glimpse of them last night on the live feed before they were "officially" introduced tonight, which felt a bit illicit somehow. Anyway, Jamie, gay, from Melbourne, totally gorgeous and he knows it, works in a men's boutique on Little Collins St which means he's probably served me at some time in the past (that's served me you dirty-minded scoundrels!), is also a law student, seems all right if a bit obsessed with fitness (yawn, but I guess it's something to bond with Saxon over); and Kim, from Armidale (country NSW), haidresser (another one!), total bogan, might have hidden depths, but we already have a Reggie (and what a magnificent Reggie she is) so she may turn out to be surplus to requirements.

Didn't get a chance to mention this at the time, but Gretel's grilling of Ben on the eviction show last Sunday was some of the best television ever. If anyone has ever been less than certain that Gretel is a total star and an inspiration, surely this would have laid all doubts to rest. "When you say 'stir things up,' you really mean 'hurt people,' don't you?" Classic!

2003-06-03T00:50:00.000+10:00

Love is stronger than snark

So, a new name. Partly because I've decided that including your name in the name of your blog is a bit naff, partly because "Angus's Way" was starting to set my teeth on edge. I don't tolerate facile Proustianisms in others, so why should I have different standards for myself? (Of course, it was supposed to be an arch parody of a facile Proustianism, but that particular nuance loses something when you've been staring at the bloody thing for months on end.)

Anyway, it's "I Feel Love" not only in honour of my favourite song ever (at least according to the Desert Island Discs list I drew up on Buffistas a while ago) but also because at the moment I'm all about feeling the love, culturally speaking. Having dinner with John and Plasmo the other night I made the not entirely unhypocritical statement that I was sick of seeing people go on and on about television shows on the internet. I think what I was awkwardly trying to say was that I'm tiring of the tyranny of snark, the MBTV-isation of telly talk on the web, the way people with really quite mediocre senses of humour think that they're cutting wits because they've mastered a certain line in deprecation, or that they're perceptive media critics because they can throw around completely dumb words or "anvil" or "exposition bunny" or whatever. So from now on, it's all love, no snark!

(Disclaimer: love is not entirely incompatible with the gentle or even vigorous articulation of faults in the loved object. Just for the record!)

(Oh, and sorry to all those hundreds of you who will have to update your links lists. C'est la vie...)

(Unsurprisingly, there's already at least one other blog called "I Feel Love." But since it's in Portuguese and hasn't been updated since February 2002, I don't suppose there's too much danger of people getting us confused. But respect to those that came first!)

2003-06-01T16:28:00.000+10:00

Pills, thrills and bellyaches

As you know, I don't like to get too personal here, but I know that this is the main way some of you catch up on what's going on in my life, so I'll just mention that, since I've yet again been having abdominal symptoms that seem to be caused by my Crohn's Disease, I've been put yet again on steroids, which will hopefully make me feel better, but will also almost certainly have the fun extra benefits of mood swings and weight gain, and might not work properly in the long term anyway. As you can imagine this makes me very happy indeed.

2003-05-31T02:16:00.000+10:00

Love makes you do the wacky

Wow, just stayed up to catch a few minutes of the live overnight feed of Big Brother, and it was so riveting I watched for almost the full two hours! Saxon, it turns out, is madly smitten with Joanne, and spent most of the time using elaborate rhetorical devices to convey same without declaring it ("if only I could say what I really what to say," etc., and it only got more involuted than that). Joanne's other puppy, Vincent, was elsewhere for most of this but he walked in near the end and...well, one senses tension on the horizon, let's put it that way. Meanwhile Ben is hovering around like Endora on Bewitched, lapping up the mayhem. All of which is of course so much more exciting when you catch it live.

Sigh, yes, my life is rather empty at the moment, why do you ask?

2003-05-30T13:42:00.000+10:00

Luciano Berio RIP

ILM is possibly the only music forum in the world where you will find threads devoted to serious contemplation of the work of both Britney Spears and Luciano Berio, one of my favourite contemporary composers, who I'm sad to learn has just died.

2003-05-29T00:09:00.000+10:00

Aptest typo ever!

The Webflicks entry for Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion calls it The Curse of the Jaded Scorpion, which is not only a pretty appropriate name for this (almost unwatchable) movie, but a rather choice metaphor for Woody's career at this point, don't you think?

2003-05-28T23:26:00.000+10:00

Old-timey

Watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? on DVD. I'm always frightfully disdainful of Americans who say they find Northern English, Scottish etc. accents impossible to understand, but damn me if I didn't find this film's version of a depression-era Mississippi accent, coupled with the Coen Brothers' rapid-fire witticisms, so near impenetrable that I turned the subtitles on. The shame!

2003-05-28T00:51:00.000+10:00

Meltdown

Massive, earth-shattering developments on Big Brother. Firstly, Ben seems to be engaged on a campaign to become the most hated housemate of all time. He'll be evicted on Sunday by a record margin, mark my words. Meanwhile, though, I've just caught a few minutes of the overnight feed and Belinda has walked out of the house! Amazing stuff.

But on a more contemplative note, something Leah said on Sunday has stuck with me. (She's become one of those people I warm to after they've been evicted.) She said that she'd managed to convince herself (with substantial goading from Ben, of course) that she "saw through" the other housemates, that she was wise to their deceptions and dissimulations, that she knew they were "playing the game." But she ultimately decided that she was wrong, that it was her confidence that nobody was fooling her that was actually naïve.

This strikes me as, on the one hand, a fairly profound realisation for an eighteen-year-old to make (I know eighteen-year-olds, I've taught lots of them, and while they have lots of good qualities, an awareness of the limitations of their own imperviousness to spin is not, as a rule, one of them). But it also seems to me to be a fairly apt metaphor for the attitude of people who consider themselves "above" Big Brother, who claim--loudly and volubly--that its pleasures are fraudulent and the people who watch it are the dupes of late-capitalist ideology. As Lacan once punned, Les non-dupes errent, the non-duped err. You think you've tunnelled through to the surface of ideology, only to find yourself clinging for dear life to its slippery carapace. Or, to put it differently from that rather unpleasant metaphor, here's Ian Penman recently on the subject of both Big Brother and that other recent combination of cultural spectacle and philosophical heuristic:

Thus, the matrix spreads - and, just like its hick cousin Big Brother, its success primarily consists in making us think that even ignoring it is a priori a form of 'coming to terms' with its omnipresence.

You are already playing the game.

2003-05-25T23:19:00.000+10:00

Ring, ring, why don't you give me a call?

Saw Phone Booth today in what has been a bit of a Big Hollywood Binge for me lately. Well, the arthouse/Unamerican fare has been pretty uninspiring--I still should see Whale Rider some time which has been recommended by Plasmo among others, but the trouble is uplifting films tend to annoy me when I'm in a sour mood myself.

So, anyway, Phone Booth. Loads of fun. A delightful if obvious little fable about the inverse relationship between communication and the technologies that are supposed to enable it. The many implausibilities are entirely beside the point. How nice for once to see a Hollywood film that doesn't think it's better or bigger than it is. (I'm looking at you, Matrix Regurgitated.)

2003-05-24T23:35:00.000+10:00

Small victories [warning: this post contains intellectual snobbery]

The Saturday Review section in The Guardian used to introduce John Mullan's "Book Club" column with the rubric "John Mullan deconstructs [insert standard book club fodder of choice]," thereby setting on edge the teeth of those of us who, while perhaps we're not the greatest fans of Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man, don't like to see their vocabulary taken in vain. Lately, I notice, they've changed it to "John Mullan analyses...". Perhaps he'd gotten one too many disapproving looks from his UCL colleagues. Perhaps John Sutherland had a quiet word. In any case, although I realise that on the scale of current world events this is a rather trivial matter, it's still nice to know that sometimes the forces of good can carry the day.

2003-05-24T01:40:00.000+10:00

Girls

One of the most consistently funny bits in Private Eye is the "Polly Filler" column, which captures the inanity of chick-lit pseudo-feminism with almost frightening accuracy:

The pictures on the television of the battered and looted city of Baghdad tell the tragic story of a nation on the brink. With law and order collapsing, typhoid breaking out and religious fundamentalism on the rise, how on earth can sanity prevail? Well, to anyone looking at the scenes of all those men behaving badly(!), the solution is glaringly obvious. Put a woman in charge! And not just any woman, but the sort of busy career woman who is already juggling her work and her home life, her job and her family. Any woman who can organise a football birthday cake for the toddler, whilst paying off the Barclaycard bill and taking a conference call from the boss can easily handle something as simple as restoring normality to Iraq.
As the heroine of my best-selling novel Mummy For Old Rope, Jilly Fuller, puts it, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth getting a woman to do it properly.”

I haven't seen Down with Love, which just opened in the US, but one point the reviews I've read don't seem to be making is that the Doris Day/Rock Hudson films of the 1950s are a relevant thing to satirise precisely because their rhetoric (the reactionary masked as the unthreateningly progressive) has had such a notable revival in the recent popular discourse about gender. I wonder if that means the movie is actually more interesting than the critics seem to think?

2003-05-22T23:15:00.000+10:00

At-ten-tion! Ré-sis-tez et vous ser-ez ex-ter-min-és!

That, in case you're wondering, is a French dalek. Amazing what you pick up from watching the special features on Doctor Who DVDs. Do you know what else, though? Working on Doctor Who must have been quite simply the most fun ever, tight budgets, shaky sets and everything. Everyone they dig up to interview or commentate has such unforced affection for the show. (Of course, maybe they've just passed over the "My Doctor Who Hell" people, but I doubt it.)

2003-05-22T00:56:00.000+10:00

She saved the world a lot (and then she saved it a bit more)

So it's official...Buffy the Vampire Slayer is over. The Americans have now seen the final episode, and we'll be getting it in a couple of months' time. Now, Buffy is unquestionably my favourite television show ever, so at this point I should be feeling at least some anticipatory mourning...but really, if I'm honest, I'm not. Why? Well, for one thing I'm just grateful that the show finished before it went into terminal decline (I refuse to use that other phrase, you know the one). At the basest level, Buffy is perfectly amenable to the kind of formulaic automation that could have seen season after season being churned out well after it had lost any vestige of its soul, like the now absolutely unwatchable Simpsons. (Talking of losing your soul, I'm all for bringing back Angelus, but shouldn't he be a bit...scarier?) Of course, some people would say Buffy lost its way long ago, but although my memories are always going to be fondest about the second half of Season 2, all of Season 3 and the odd episode of Season 4, good Lord the writers are still capable of pulling one out of the bag. Loved last night's twist in which it was revealed that Principal Wood was the son of the infamous Spike-victim subway slayer! (Complete with cute reference to the last scene of "Hush," one for the fans.)

Anyway, I think I've decided over the last year or so that I just don't have the energy to be a really, really proper fan, the kind that would be donning the sackcloth and ashes about now.

But maybe you should ask me again in a couple of months' time.