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The Church Of Me
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Kissing in the churchyard, I know a righteous woman
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Wednesday, July 31, 2002
THAT'S IT, THAT'S IT!
According to the Mercury panjandrums, Original Pirate Material sums up what it's like to be young and British in 2002. No it doesn't - no more than What's Going On was a Chomsky-esque lecture to the Americans in 1971. It is a depiction of a confused and fucked up individual into whom "society" doesn't quite fit. I do not know whether Mike Skinner is really 42 years old with a DLitt in the Consumptive Poets (1756-1829) from Balliol, and really, would it matter even if he were? I live but a bus ride from where he lives, travel the same routes, know there are more things to consider, know the abyss into which ideals can plunge you.
Despite the Birmingham/Australia pedigree, this is firmly a South London album, a westward reflection of the south-eastern slow decay rendered so well by Roots Manuva on Run Come Save Me. Someone forced into a "third class carriage" where champagne dreams and caviar wishes have to be substituted by "shit in a tray." He is a driven Brummie, just like Kevin Rowland (listen to his "that's it! that's it!" response to the mournful "there's a world out there" on the track "Same Old Thing" - pure Don't Stand Me Down). He wants your vision to mirror his - for "Let's Make This Precious" substitute "Let's Push Things Forward" with its benign but fatal refrain of "you say that everything sounds the same/then you go buy THEM! (the last five notes ascending like a judge's gavel before it is inaudibly hammered)/(and then reproachfully) there's no excuses my friend." An alternative way of expressing the "I hear you..." Greek chorus of the second half of "Losing My Feel." "Geezers Need Excitement" which starts with an atonal chord which could have come straight from Mantler's "Communications # 8" and then proceeds to argue firmly against being a "geezer." Rather like a low-budget Brit answer to Eminem's "Guilty Conscience" except this time Skinner listens to his own "Dr Dre" and advises, more subtly but no less honestly than that former Brummie bishop Cardinal Newman. Then to the consequences of being too much of a geezer and losing love and one's future as a result in "It's Too Late."
Nowhere to go after that except comedy. First "Too Much Brandy," a hilarious tale of inept drunkenness - Charles Bukowski scripted by Eric Sykes. IMPORTANT NOTE: if taping this, omit tracks 9 and 10 (respectively "Don't Mug Yourself" a sort of garage equivalent of Blur's "Bank Holiday" and "Who Got The Funk?" a sequence of somewhat pointless IDs, presumably to give the listener time to boil a kettle) and substitute "All Got Our Runnins" (which is available on the CD single of "Let's Push Things Forward") a fantastic slapstick litany of ways simultaneously in and out of poverty, what happens if you take the Flaming Lips literally and live for all you've got (which is now); can't pay the rent but is wearing £109 trainers. The Terry Hall-esque (it had to come) singsong at the end ("And he said to me wot are you doing you twa-hat?") is the funniest thing I've heard this year, with the possible exception of track 11 "The Irony Of It All" in which Skinner alternates between two characters, Terry the law abiding hooligan (Chingford Tor Ascender if ever there were one) and Tim the morally smug leisured student. Don't know about filing this under garage - this has more to do with Arab Strap than So Solid Crew, what with the endless circular concerns about having no money, getting pissed/stoned, being unable to get a girlfriend. But a damn good track - imagine if Harry Enfield were to write a sketch like this; it would be over-qualified, sarcastic and clumsy.
Then the laughter stops and the man is left alone in the cafe, remembering raving times of five years previously in "Weak Become Heroes." A strangely disjointed recollection, what with its deliberately out-of-step vocal/rhythm/house piano triangle, as if he is recalling it through a much deadlier haze. Was any of it actually real? Hadn't rave already peaked with the geezer contingent a good five years before "five years ago"? The answer is buried deep in the lyric, where Skinner muses on imaging the world leaders on E - "and the next day: don't talk to me I don't know you - but this ain't tomorrow I still love you." So the same conclusion as "Sorted for Es and Whizz" - all a con. With a codicil; awakened from his imagined reverie, he is left to wander grey Stockwell streets in the freezing dark with "no surprises, no treats." Rejected by a society of which he was never really part in the first place.
After that, it's only a short step to the devastating closer "Stay Positive" in which Skinner sounds anything but. The visual resemblance to Ian Curtis has already been noted elsewhere; the musical resemblance to side two of Closer , and specifically "The Eternal," cannot fail to be noted. He tells the listener to keep aiming for their goals and that everyone's climbing their own ladder, but that "if you've got the love of a good girl/your world will be much richer than mine." No way out of the estate, just "stare at the geezers/let them know you're not lightweight" as if that solves anything. "Just try and stay positive" pleads the singing voice, cracked and frail (it could almost be Will Oldham). He tells you to stay alive, but can he? The track finally stutters gently to a halt, the piano loop turning into glitch, the whole thing finally submitting to static - a life system in suspension.
What he sings is an alternative version of "Do You Realise."
Never has "positivity" sounded so negative. Whatever scant meaning there was in the term to begin with has been drained away. It's just a word, put there because it's convenient.
"I am valid," he is saying, "do not kill me while in the act of killing yourself."
. . .
DELICATE CONFECTIONS OF '80s SOUL
I heard "I Wish I Didn't Miss You" being raved over by Tony Blackburn on Capital Gold last night, and it made perfect sense in the context of what he was playing - mainly '80s mainstream pop-soul. It was astonishingly refreshing to hear all this stuff again; because it's now so underexposed, it has retained some unexpected brio. "Feel So Real" by Steve Arrington (euphoric!), "I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much" by Bobby Womack (deliciously pensive - the only song with the words "business trips" in the lyrics to which I can usefully listen), "Weekend Girl" by the SOS Band (dig that gradual escalation to that sudden vocal dissonance in the middle section before settling down again - Jam & Lewis were architectural geniuses) and the apostolic "Hangin' On A String" by Loose Ends, a multilayered labyrinth of punctum.
And, with that genius of trembling on the brink of non-existence, "The Other Side Of The World" by Luther Vandross. Beautiful but beautiful.
. . .
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON "THE PRIVATE PRESS"
Why does DJ Shadow, buried deep within his sleevenotes, have a go (under "Implication" alongside "King" George Bush and journalists who "don't make enough effort") at "losers who bootleg the hard work of others"? Indeed, Mr Davis is sipping tea poured from a pot as black as the originally boiled kettle, no? Or does he mean lazy bods who just, say, layer a vocal over another backing track? Imagine, the laziness, the lack of artistry and craftmanship! DJ Shadow as the Greg Lake of trip hop??!!
Or maybe DJ Shadow is the Charles Mingus of trip hop.
Because then you put the record on and it starts with a "(Letter From Home)" (the brackets are significant). A woman who's missing her son or husband? Down in Richmond, California, with other family members, but one key ingredient missing - Lester (Young?). In the background: "Midnight Sun" by Lionel Hampton (and guess who plays bass on that!).
Remembering how that same recording could be heard in the background about a year ago when I received a frantic, screaming telephone call.
I want to get into "Blood on the Motorway." The race is over, there is a fatality. "And now...eternity." An unhurried piano loops over and OVER
and I remember that 12 months have gone by
Quotes. Intonations. Industrial bangs, a steel door sliding shut. A coffin closing. Silence (the opposite of Dougan's "Pause"). An AOR vocal. "You did not betray your ideals! Your ideals betrayed you!" Like the NHS did. "Your tongue barely moves but I can still FEEL YOU!!!!" he screams. Drum track triples up. Any redemption?
No.
A forgotten 1966 voice and guitar echo back: "It's too late - eternity is here."
"You Can't Go Home Again." A Stockholm Monsters backing track. You can't pretend it's 1982 again.
And yet the "(Letter From Home)" comes back. No tears. Just goodwill and warmth. It ends happily. It ends with a future.
I need to absorb this more.
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON "YOSHIMI VS THE PINK ROBOTS"
The words "Alan", "Parsons" and "Project" leak back for the first half of this record (not to mention the cover). But then I thought the same of 10,000 Hz Legend for six months, so this is subject to radical change. What I do know is that the extraordinary sequence of songs from "Are You A Hypnotist?", "It's Summertime," "Do You Realise?" and "All We Have Is Now" is tinted with that same autumnal, slightly bleached yellow glow which illuminates a lot of my favourite music.
This will certainly be absorbed more.
. . .
Tuesday, July 30, 2002
"Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Not from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam."
(On a Fine Morning by Thomas Hardy)
. . .
WINTERSON IS PASSIONATE AND WOOLF WAS PASSIONATE THEREFORE I AM PASSIONATE
Jeanette Winterson's programme on Orlando (the Woolf novel, not the Romo meisters) in BBC's Art That Shook The World series was exceptional. A display of unalloyed passion, physically and spiritually expressed, surpassed on television this year only by Robert Hughes on Goya. She crucially ENTERED Woolf, embraced her feelings, and behold! fiction usurps history and thus reality.
TOMPKINS IS PASSIONATE AND SHADOW KNOWS PASSIONATE THEREFORE I REMAIN PASSIONATE
Dave Tompkins' review of DJ Shadow's Private Press in this month's Wire is exceptional. Exactly what great writing should do - provoke, make you re-evaluate commonly held beliefs (even if the commonality is in the self), make you go and spend £13.99 on the work of art in question. My thoughts are forthcoming.
. . .
TODAY'S GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE
"The Bottle" by the Tyrrel Corporation (1992)
A weirdly celebratory ode to hangovers, alcoholism and loneliness, sung by a voice halfway between Roland Gift and Edwin Starr against a backdrop of so-elemental-it's-absurd pop house. Note the "Killer" musical quote directly after he sings "Acid raining in my stomach." But it builds, even with Wellerish guitar, even with the dreaded harmonica, even when you realise that this is the NME doing house, even when you realise that the rest of the album from which it comes ("North East of Eden") is drearily worthy in a Kane Gang goes house style, it somehow works. And when the major piano chords enter towards the end against his anguished wailing, and crucially the unchanged minor key bassline continues, it is a miracle.
Should have been a number one.
Tomorrow: "Snobbery and Decay" by Act (1987).
. . .
"Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance" (Walter Benjamin).
. . .
FREEFORM DRUMMING IN POP
When the river breaks (but NOT "When The Levee Breaks") and avant becomes apparent. Some examples:
"New Rose" by the Damned - Rat Scabies' drumming was memorably described by Richard Williams as "the guy from the Stooges meets Sunny Murray" and indeed here it is cymbal dominant and virtually arrhythmical, particularly at the end climax where the odd lightness of his multi-activity plays against the treble of the other members. Nick Lowe produced, so he must have known exactly what to do. Compare the lumpen and overly slow drumming which spoils "Anarchy in the UK."
"Song for Che" by Robert Wyatt, which gets in here on account of Mark Sinker calling it "the greatest tune which never charted." The tune is plaintively stated by the band (George Khan and Gary Windo on saxes, Wyatt on piano, Bill MacCormick on bass) but what makes it bleed is Laurie Allan's phenomenal free drumming, which expresses the rage under the apparent passivity, hammers against the manners.
"Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen - OK, howl of rage misinterpreted as my country 'tis of thee, and the "Boss" is not entirely not to blame for this, but Max Weinberg's drumming explodes at the climax, going out of tempo, screaming blue murder. Even when back in tempo for the fade-out he blasts against the boundaries.
"Stella Maria" by Working Week - the only thing worth keeping off that wretched first album of theirs (and even this was a bonus 12"), performed largely by jazzers/avantists, but Julie Tippetts' most pop-like vocal since her work on Carla Bley's Tropic Appetites. The Linn Drum track is constantly undermined and finally overwhelmed by Louis Moholo's ferocious but always relevant percussion.
More examples to follow if I can think of any.
. . .
Monday, July 29, 2002
BONKERS AND HARDCORE
I suspect that happy hardcore is merely Cream techno with smarter and faster drumming, but it is irresistible, mostly because it has no pretensions towards permanence. As with JA pre-release dub 7-inchers in the '70s, and jungle white labels in the early '90s (and perhaps mp3 now), it arouses and encapsulates the rhythms of the moment and then moves on. Has to be better than the Coral.
The new React triple CD compilation Bonkers - The Rezurrection is, I would venture, pretty much everything you need to know about happy hardcore. All full-length CDs (no 30-minute ripoffs here), each with a different mixer: Hixxy, Sharkey and SY (the latter handily mixing up some "old skool" classics). No essays, no booklets, no balanced assessment of its cultural import in UK/European working class history. Hixxy's sleeve note reads thus: "Thanks and enjoy! - Hixxy." Like Burroughs' Nova Mob, we do our job and go. It's basic, it's functional and my God is it a future.
The standout track for me has to be track 2, CD 1: You're Shining by Breeze and Styles. Follows the template of pretty much everything else here: frantic rhythm which pounds for a while at 200 bpm then suddenly retracts to admit a ghostly synth and a "passionate" female vocal (Hixxy kills Celine Dion passion!) which has infinitely more resonance here than it would in the racks of Tooting Woolworths. She sings: "I feel alive/Now I can breathe again/I call your name/My friend" against the poignant synth line whose chord progressions echo those of the main theme of Philip Glass' Koyannisqatsi soundtrack. It drags me back, persuades me forward.
Everything else here is essentially more of the same (with more of a Mike Skinner-style post-'80s hangover on Sharkey's mix CD: "Inverted Reality," "Acid Aftermath," etc.) but gradually intensifying towards rhythmic and harmonic crossroads. Listen to MC Storm's "Just Accept It" - the single the Prodigy should have chosen for a comeback. "WHY CAN'T YOU JUST ACCEPT IT?" he roars. "I'm ravin' crazy like a drug addict/Leave me alone, it's my life, I'm sorted." Confidence or desperation? Whatever, it rocks. Feels right for me just now.
. . .
LOVE
When one's life, one's future is at stake, one is tempted to say damn Roland Barthes, damn the image-repertoire, damn Green Gartside and Martin Fry, damn the corner, I just want the intractable. To be illuminated.
There is no alternative. You have to engage fully with life, however unnatural it may seem to you. And I have to stop referring to me as "one" or "you" when actually I'm talking about me. It's a cop out.
So. When I say "I love you" I am not conscious of its many subtextual associations, even though I spent two years studying them and having to write essays about them, and whatever relationship it may or may not have to self-love. When I say "I love you" to someone it is because I love them. I have spent so many years NOT loving myself that it is a habit which I am trying to (re)learn. I am honest when I say that the greatest pleasure available to me is to give pleasure to others. When I say "I love you" it means what you mean - in other words, you mean the world to me, you are the central focus of my life. I can derive no more passionate pleasure from life than being with you or communicating with you - from what you give to me and what I can give back to you in return.
So I have to be open with you. I love you. Your company makes me happy. Your friendship makes my heart tremble with joy and awe. My heart would race to the top of my head if one day you wanted to be my significant other. It would be more than my heart could ever hope for. Even if you did not, my lifelong friendship is yours and my closeness to you permanent. I accept you - I want you to accept me. You are such an important part of me.
And yes this is not a hypothetical example. And yes this is what I am feeling. And yes the "you" is a real "you." And yes I am writing this for one specific person who is now likely to hit me over the head with a Rough Trade carrier bag! But I cannot keep it hidden. It is all part of my soul, my life, as I know in my heart that you are.
. . .
For those who care - and I imagine that's all of you - a new life has, for me, begun.
Yesterday (Sunday) was a GREAT DAY and I feel liberated again, able to face the world with impunity and confidence.
Thus I have been listening to happy, positive music, including Soulwax's 2 Many DJs, to which I've finally got round to getting (no time limit on feelings - sometimes you have to be ready for a piece of music or art, ready to readmit concepts like "fun" into your life), as well as the finesse-laden slapstick of Cassetteboy's The Parker Tapes (Blair, Jamie Oliver and other cut-ups; bit like V/VM without the Wire editorship ambition) and the fantastic Bonkerz - The Rezurrection triple CD which proves that there is life left in happy hardcore (it includes the previously mentioned "You're Shining" by Breeze and Styles). Lengthier comments on these and more will follow, as soon as I've sorted out more abstract concepts like "day jobs" :-)
. . .
Friday, July 26, 2002
A NEW LIFE BEGINS TODAY?
"A windy day
The clouds in slow formation
Not far away
A final destination
One mother's son
His father's distant gaze, regretting
Where they went wrong
He always found it too upsetting
Me and my friend
We lived our lives completely
From start to end
You and your friend, so sweetly
With strength and pride
In spite of everything, and swimming
Against the tide
To obstinately hope of winning
And at the end
Your funny uncle staring
At all your friends
With military bearing
And stopped to stand
To smile and speak of you directly
Goodbye, shake hands
Like you did everything correctly
To wipe away the tears
No more pain, no fear
No sorrow or dying
No waiting or crying
These former things have passed away
Another life begins today"
("Your Funny Uncle" by the Pet Shop Boys)
Don't think I need to say why I posted this (maybe change the gender in the seventh line of the first verse and you'll see).
Yes I do. After today I am leaving my professional life behind. I do not expect to leave all the pain behind but I want to try to come to terms with it better. I can only do that by means of jettisoning everything unnecessary and concentrating on what will make me happy and/or wise.
I want to learn Japanese. I want to try to make a living out of writing. I want to spend as much time as possible with friends, old and new.
You all know what I really want.
"And if I walk these streets long enough/Will you happen to me again?"
(Scott Walker)
I hope so. Fervently and passionately.
. . .
Now playing: Brown Sugar by D'Angelo:
"Feels like heaven when I think about you
sparking that love within my soul
and when I touch U, I can't describe it
sending chills, down my bones
[1ST BRIDGE]
With God as my witness and watching over
We'll write our love in the stone
Please give us strength Lord to fight our battles
and we can walk on the streets of gold
[CHORUS]
Cause you take me higher, than I've ever, ever known
give me good feeling, like a king and queen on a throne
cause you take me higher, further than the sky above
send me in ecstasy baby, with your love
[2ND VERSE]
Tell me what you're thinking of, must thinking of love
put your hands into mine and then we'll take off to the sky above
soft like an angel, like the feathers laying on a dove
touch me with your soul love, till I lose control
[2ND BRIDGE]
Just like an angel watching over me
(U protect me from my fears)
I once was blind, but now I see
(Ever since the day U appeared)
I just wanna say
I want U in my life
till the day I die baby
[Repeat]
Look in my eyes,
tell me right now,
that U and your love
will 4-ever take me higher"
("Higher")
The meaning is between the words. How he breathes, how he sucks air in to emphasise the labials of "look" and "love."
And here's another mirror in which to gaze:
"Girl you are a groove
You're like the planets when you move
See the winter's coming
In a two finned caddy
Gonna walk upon the waters
Go ooh yeah
Girl you gotta cook
You got the chariot by the hook
I'm riding in the rain
Got my blue suede shoes
Gonna give up all my pain
And go ooh yeah
Baby you know who you are
Baby you know who you are
Don't you know who you are
Standing on your porch
You wear your pleasure like a torch
Hiding in the road
Like a Pasolini toad
Gonna give up all my load
And go ooh yeah"
("Chariot Choogie" by Marc Bolan)
. . .
PRESENCE AND CONTRIVANCE ELAPSE: A SECONDARY REALITY IS FELT
One of the most beautiful and surreal things I have ever seen on British television was broadcast last night, even if the beauty and surrealism were unintentioned.
Big Brother, Marcello????
Yes. The tannoy announced that they were going to play two pieces of music for the inmates to enjoy - a waltz and a foxtrot. The inmates were semi-formally dressed. Then the punctum - the soundtrack was turned off (for legal reasons - presumably Channel 4 didn't get clearance from El-P or the estate of Cornelius Cardew) and replaced by (possibly synthesised?) birdsong. So the couples danced without audible music. They looked sometimes hesitant but more often ecstatic. All that could be absorbed by the casual viewer was this unplaceable happiness, this total rejection of imposed structures and conceits. They looked as though they had crossed over to the other side.
Cocteau-like. It could have come straight out of Orphée. It was magical and unrepeatable.
. . .
Thursday, July 25, 2002
PM DAWN AND BLUE NILE: LEADING IRRESISTIBLY TO MY MOMENT IN LOVE
Last night, played back to back the first PM Dawn album Of The Heart etc....The Utopian Experience and Hats by the Blue Nile. Equally sumptuous sounding, like an unbereaved Charles Foster Kane walking through his land of multiple mirrors ("In The Presence Of Mirrors") and seeing the smiling Barthes handing him his pen back.
The PM Dawn sonics prove just how much a use there is for jazz-funk in the hands of the right alchemists. Sensuous and strangely yearning chord changes, electric piano harmonics, all go to frame Prince Bee's querying of what in life to call his own, and if so, how he should love it. "Think! Todd Terry" he exclaims (if he could ever be said to exclaim anything) over a Royal House backing track - thereby the record anticipates both cLOUDDEAD and Missy Elliott's house peccadilloes by a decade.
(For smoother sensuality there is of course Midnite Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest, with wonderful melodies and harmonics opening up a gateway to the rays of hope)
The shimmer in Prince Bee's mirrors is reflected in Paul Buchanan's footlights. What a record Hats is. Hear, FEEL how he is yearning. He wants to live again ("From A Late Night Train" says goodbye to the past without letting go of it, because no one should, as long as they are not imprisoned by it) but is afraid. Afraid to tell the woman he loves her and that he is capable of being love. But "Downtown Lights" and above all "Saturday Night" keep building, the reservoir of passion filled to overflow until the high string synthesiser lines can only release what he has wanted to say, what he wants to keep saying.
At the end of "Saturday Night" after six minutes of soul searching, Buchanan trembles, almost in a whisper, but with an ecstatic sob - "She loves me!" He can't believe it. His prayers have been answered. He takes the first step into a new life. He is crying with happiness. It is a transcendent moment - a moment in love.
And if this weblog is anything - and thank Spencer and Barthes that it is not a consumer guide! - it is a doorway through which you can access my mind, read my soul. I will receive your soul and reciprocate it with equal passion.
Above and beyond anything else it is a love letter, a long, unending, blissful love letter - the resurrection of me, the ascension of passion to illuminate the healthy commonplace, the pavements of the highway which lead me towards a new life, which entice me with subtle perspectives and heartfelt closeness, inevitably and WILLINGLY towards the golden husk of humanity, which I will open to find the silk, smooth you. You who I love and I hope loves me.
"I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man."
(Wordsworth)
And Dylan Thomas says what I want to say far better than I could say it:
"But why, if you fall in love again - and you are bound to at some time or another - will you not give again all that you gave before, not necessarily That Which Is Dearer etc. but all the energy of your youngness (youth, here is the wrong word), your sweetness etc. (I evade saying everything, you know), your brightness and sulkiness and every other bloody mood and feeling you possess. I said your failing was the failing of loving too much. It is, and it always will be. So fasten your affections on some immaculately profiled young man, and love the swine to death. Love among the angels is a permanent distemper."
. . .
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
" hasten on your childhood to the hour when white in memory blue borders white in its eyes very white and piece of indigo of silver the glances white cross cobalt the white paper that blue ink tears bluish away ultramarine descends that white may rest troubled blue in dark green wall green that writes its pleasure rain green clear that swims green yellow in the clear oblivion at the edge of its green foot the sand earth song sand of the earth afternoon sand earth in the comer a violet jug the bells the folds of paper a metal sheep life stretching out the paper a rifle shot the paper rings the canaries in the shade white almost pink a river in the -white space in the clear blue shade of colours lilac a hand at the edge of the shade makes of the shade in the hand a very rose-coloured grasshopper a root lifts its head a nail the block of the trees with nothing else a fish a nest the heat in full light looks at a sunshade light the fingers in the light the white of the paper the sun light in the white cuts out a sparkling eyeshade the sun's light the very white sun the intensely white sun."
(Untitled poem by Pablo Picasso)
. . .
NICK DRAKE READS MY MIND
"When I was younger, younger than before
I never saw the truth hanging from the door
And now I'm older see it face to face
And now I'm older gotta get up clean the place.
And I was green, greener than the hill
Where the flowers grew and the sun shone still
Now I'm darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be.
And I was strong, strong in the sun
I thought I'd see when day is done
Now I'm weaker than the palest blue
Oh, so weak in this need for you."
("Place To Be" from Pink Moon)
. . .
And, from the same album:
"Is it my turn to wish you were lying here.
I tend to dream you when I'm not sleeping.
Is it my turn to fictionalise my world.
Or even imagine your emotions to tell myself anything...
Is it my turn to hold your hands.
Tell you I love you and you not hear me...
Is it my turn to totally understand.
To watch you walk out of my life and not do a damn thing...
If I have to give away...
The feeling that I feel.
If I have to sacrifice...
Oh, whatever babe, whatever baby.
If I have to take apart...
All that I am...
Is there anything that I would not do,
'Cause inside I'd die without you...
Oh, I apologise for all the things I've done.
But now I'm underwater and I'm drowning...
Is it my turn to be the one to cry.
Isn't it amazing how some things just completely turn around...
So take every little piece of my heart...
So take every little piece of my soul...
So take every little piece of my mind...
'Cause if you're gone... inside...
I'd die without you..."
("I'd Die Without You" by PM Dawn)
. . .
"Whatever is whatever, it calculates the karma.
And tries to adjust as it inquires whats shaking.
But through no eyes, I could see the entity....crying.
I cry, when midnight sighs, I cry, when midnight sighs."
(from "When Midnight Sighs" by PM Dawn)
I will never fall out of love.
. . .
Now playing: "The Meaning of the Blues" by Gil Evans (from the album There Comes A Time). 20 minutes of unalloyed grief. George Adams weeping and screaming on tenor. Electronica, kotos and brass hover in the midground like Cezanne's rooftops, as repainted by Ennio Morricone and Hector Villa-Lobos.
. . .
THE BOOK OF ANUBIS
Liber 369: The Grimoire of Axis
Author unknown
"... the mandala of Anubis, actually exists on at least four dimensions at once. Progression of complexity from simplicity is geometrically accelerated and ramified. As all maps of Self are ultimately false, nevertheless, some are useful to elucidate certain truths, and so are Holy. The Book of Anubis, though Holy, is subject to these limitations."
In the beginning was the Self. Like a circle whose bound is never known; ecstatic and super-abundant is its "feeling." Whose center is ever fed by its boundless aura. Like unto no other, super-abundant, self-nourishing, procreating only onto itself, everbecoming more itself. By the immensity of its unknown bound, this formlessness is the archetype of form. This Holy formlessness is the fuel of its center, its freedom, its infinitude. And, verily, this center is the primal belief of the formless, the desire of the Self. And verily, this formlessness is the primal belief of center, the Vision of Self.
Time and motion and evolution are the perceived effects of the super-abundance of Self, the Ever-Becoming One.
No thought or conception can reach this Self for it precedes conception and forms. Nothing is outside this Self in its primal oneness; as empty belief, as ecstatic Self-love.
Therefore, are all selves, entities, beings, and things its ramifications, its multitude of beliefs and forms.
In its primal ecstasy of Self-love, Self has conceived of itself its duality. "For I am divided for love's sake." Yes, it has conceived of itself its force and form, its Will and Imagination, its primal duality for "love's sake." For the primal unity is the essence of ecstatic love as the experience, the emotion.
And the primal duality is the original means of its expression.
Beliefs are "forms" of Self, containing and expressing desire. Desire or Will is bound in belief.
As Self conceives it creates dual beliefs of greater complexity, and of necessity, greater intelligence to unify the components of belief. Intelligence is the ability for components of a belief to intereact.
As conception creates dual beliefs of greater and greater complexity, first structure, then life, then intelligent life is built up. But the component beliefs of the sphere (or system) of living, intelligent beliefs are small and many in their capacity to believe.
The first belief is division, producing duality (Will and Imagination). The second belief is synthesis, expressed duality, producing tetragrammaton. By this process complexity and intelligence are built up from Self.
Eventually beliefs reach a sphere of organic "life" and intelligence. What we usually call "ourselves" (Identity) is a complex and intelligent belief.
Yea, and here is a great mystery. For in its ever newness, Itself's ever-becomingness, It has accumulated its past forms of belief, it has stored these in Itself. For memory is the essence of Soul, its order intelligence and continuity. And in the multitude of beliefs that is self's manifold expression of desire, what we call "ourselves" and other selves, and these past beliefs and incarnations of Self exist in the memory of Self called Soul.
Memory is the essence of what we call the "subconscious" and is one and the same with desire energizing a belief and becoming accessible to intelligence.
Memory and the subconscious exist in the successive spheres of belief that start just outside "yourself" and extend concentrically out and back.
Self's force is the energy of its desire, self-desire ever leaping into form. Ever energy is encoded, containing information, ever desire becoming belief. Ever is belief surrounding self as its ever-changing body, and this multitude of beliefs and forms all have Self for their center, yea, they all have the same Self for center. But the multitude of diverse and reacting forms/beliefs give the impression of multitudinous self and myriad entity to intelligent beliefs.
Simple beliefs are of large capacity to believe though relatively unintelligent. Complex beliefs are of small capacity to believe though intelligent.
Capacity is "sacrificed" to intelligence and vice-versa. The primal dualities are the parents of all, while "we" build machines in a small corner of the universe.
Vital Beliefs are all those forms of belief (being forms of Self) that are not perceived by "ourselves" (a complex, intelligent belief) as being Self.
Therefore what we usually call "ourselves" is a complex, intelligent belief, capable to some degree of believing in turn. But we can only truly believe one thing at a time, for thoughts (being the name that we, having been believed give the beliefs that we in turn believe), are dual and conception has occurred.
We are only free to believe before conception has occurred. This is in relation to the sphere of complexity we are in at the time of conception. In each unity of belief there is only enough energy to awaken (make real or vital) one of the dually arising beliefs at the moment of conception. Even though in time they may alternate, they cannot exist simultaneously.
Ask yourself, "is it raining outside?" In the moment before you look you are free to think that either is or it is not. Once you look you are free to believe only one or the other. In quantum physics this is known as the collapse of the state vector.
This is the relationship of a complex, intelligent belief to a less complex and vital belief of encoded energy in physical forces. This less complex belief is considered objective phenomena while "ourselves" seem subjective in respect.
Suppose, then, that as we look at the rain we think, "I wish it were not raining." That is we desire from a complex, subjective belief to affect a change in a simpler, vital belief.
Experience has shown us that we cannot, in the normal state, believe effectively in opposition to a simpler, vital belief. For though the simpler, vital belief has less intelligence, it has more capacity to believe than a complex belief. We might be able to use our "power" or "medicine" which is intelligence to stop the rain, but as yet intelligence has not developed the means. We might persist, desire being strong enough, and attempt to develop the means, but in all probability it would have stopped raining of itself long before we had developed the means, or, we would have ceased to desire the change.
"Ourselves," as a complex belief actually exists on all the spheres of complexity/simplicity at once. As belief progresses from sphere to sphere, as complexity increases, more and more energy is bound up to maintain the complexity of the belief. This energy bound to complexity is what we call intelligence. Therefore, complex beliefs are less and less aware (immediately) of other beliefs as Self. For energy must be available to belief for it to become "real," that is, Self.
The formula of Magick is that energy must reach the sphere of a belief preconceptual to the belief desired. This requires that complex beliefs become simple. Degrees of simplicity equals availability of energy and capacity to believe. In fact, they are the same!
To try to energise a belief without reaching the required simplicity is either totally unsuccessful or exhaustive of the belief that is trying to affect the change. This exhaustion is a desired state as it frees the energy necessary to charge the new belief, but the new belief must be coded in terms not immediately intelligible or much or all of the energy will be re-focused to maintain the rational structure in which the desire is formulated, and will again tie up the energy (desire). Symbols are better than intelligent thought. Sigils are more potent yet for this purpose.
Care should be taken in the means of exhaustion so that the complex is not permanently damaged but simply exhausted.
Sigils may be made in a variety of ways. Unfamiliar languages, coded music, enumerations, special geometrics, mudras (provided they are not too "intelligible"), and many others. (Use your living imaginations).
By these means we may acquire the capacity to believe "it is not raining" (or whatever) or better yet "the sun is shining" or "the air is dry." It is not wise to use a negative of the belief we wish to change as energy may affect the positive rather than the negative, i.e. the "raining" rather than the "not".
Symbols are useful to make accessible to our belief knowledge, information and/or experience of other beliefs as we may desire. Symbols are forms either pictorial and accessible to intelligence or arbitrary and intelligent by constant use in intelligent systems. Energy made available through exhaustion and linked to a symbol reformulates in intelligence (within a complex belief) and is experienced "subjectively." Subjective beliefs are components of complex beliefs. Complex beliefs are preconceptive in relation to subjective beliefs. Therefore, subjective beliefs can be affected by "thought" i.e. the energy bound by intelligence.
What are called affirmations are used to energise (through exhaustion) one subjective belief as opposed to another, as beliefs always exist as dual. To constantly repeat to ourselves "I am happy" will bring about the desired happiness provided that one is capable of focusing though effectively and energetically and that there is no hidden conflict with a more vital or simple belief.
Some affirmations of a complex belief are usually undetected. These include such things as moral codes, aesthetics, of an intelligent belief conglomerate/system, i.e. "culture." Be not ruled by a hidden belief.
To affect the "objective" world of vital, simple beliefs requires total exhaustion of the intelligent belief "ourselves" - a kind of total oblivion, ecstasy or "death" of ourself and the released energy informing an unintelligible symbol or sigil.
"You will perform great works, though they not be known. By being the true self all things come of their own momentum.
"Verily, I am where you put your pen, and I am in the setting sun. When you look and search for me, you look only for yourself - your self free from the association you make.
"When you look for me I am the Empty Places. When you be, I am there, ever-becoming, ever taking fresh forms.
"You divide yourself by a process of reflection from me and are ever empty, searching, desiring. Revert, then, to a time before divisions - a time of wholeness and joy.
"Wind yourself like the serpent coiled to spring. But when you strike, let go. Let go of all. Let go of self and then shall your will no longer suffer from opposition. For what is there to oppose?
"In the silence that is death new life is born, and those embracing death are free.
"New tools I make from the crucible of your soul. Let light come from darkness, ever fresh, let it take form and serve its purpose, then let its death be its reward.
"Ever onward winds the serpent of life, ever devouring what was, ever growing new skins, ever sloughing off old."
. . .
C T ASCENDER - CYBERROCKER, FOUNDER OF SUNDRY CAB RANKS AND THE SPIRIT OF RONNIE AND REGGIE FESTIVAL IN TESCOS CAR PARK: POEMS, SONGS, LOVE AND BEAUTY RETURN!
It was 5000 years ago when rock and roll began with the ecstatic chants of mantric-tantric shamana-songs all over this planet. Oracle-priestesses, sages, medicine women, vedic rishis high on fusing left-right-hemisphere brainpower for full-life-expression of the sensual and suprasensual. Unity of consciousness everywhere: Atlantean cosmology, the vibratory songs of the stars of druids, Native-American, Australian, Maya and Egyptian cultures preserving the link to superearth in the subtle physical, immortal origin of man, origin of music and wordenergy. Power of paradise-consciousness sweeping over the Pacific and Mediterranean worlds with happines and beauty-laughter of the naked body joined by song and dance of the Eurasian-Arabic delight-bliss and the deep pounding blood of the African continent.
20th Century: after a frustrating period of left-hemisphere brain-domination and its feardriven control-hysteria, culminating in sexdeprived fascism, totalitarism and brainwash-spirituality the adventurers of consciousness and joy, the poets, artists and anarchists of sound thirst again for the sap of erotic right-brain-hemisphere mother-female universal experience, unfathomable, life-giving, nonlinear, all-creating and aim at the rebirth of the holistic left-right fusion of man's brainpower for liberation of his cosmic and evolutionary soulpotential.
The poet and mystic Sri Aurobindo together with the artist and consciousness-liberation-fighter Mira Alfassa enters the arena along with the comrads and stars of the conquest like Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Elliot, Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, The Beat Poets, painter-movie-artists like Picasso, Dalì, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, singer-poets like Robert Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmie Rodgers, Woody Guthrie, Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell, all of them driving with electronical mediapower on the holistic stream of new Drums 'n' Bass with lightspeed opening the doors to unprecedented ranges of consciousness and perception.
20th Century Final Round: writer-poets-psychic-scientist-visionaries like Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, C. G. Jung, Tagore, Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary, Paolo Soleri, Charles M. Schulz and Allen Ginsberg together with rock-singer-actor-artists-statesmen like Françoise Hardy, James Murphy, Major Lance, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Albert Ayler, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Clint Eastwood, David Lynch, Abel Ferrara, Gilbert Shelton and Marshall Mathers define the new and challenging breakthrough-perspectives of planetary rockculture.
21st Century Quantum-Jump: CyberRocker C T Ascender extends it all into the cosmic love-freedom worlds of the new millennium, crossing all borders, a futuristic Prometheus bringing the cellular high-energy brainexpansion-fire-beat from the immortals. He makes new fusions, new powers effective expressing themselves in the corresponding global focal point vibrant with the new millennium awareness: Sundry Cab Ranks - the City of Peace and Futureman where he lives and works with his band Them Diamond Geezers and where every year the Spirit of Ronnie and Reggie Festival takes place.
C T ASCENDER – CYBERSINGER-POET-DIGITALARTIST AND VOICE FOR RAPIDLY CHANGING TIMES CREATED THE NEW STYLE CYBERROCK, INCLUDING BOTH: SONG- AND MEDITATIVE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC. HE IS THE DRIVING FORCE FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW. HE BRINGS MUSIC FOR THE WHOLE WORLD: FUTURISTIC, COMMITTED, CONCERNED, UNIQUE, CLOSE TO THE HUMAN CONDITION. C T ASCENDER, WORLD-CITIZEN AND WORLD-TRAVELLER IS THE RARE EXAMPLE OF A MOST AUTHENTIC, CREATIVE AND COMMUNICATIVE SONGWRITER. THE GENIUS OF HIS INDOMITABLE SPIRIT IS CONSTANTLY ACTIVE, LOOKING INTO THE FACE OF THINGS WITH THE HEART OF AN INDEPENDENT MAN. HE CREATED 1800 SONGS AND INSTRUMENTALS. C T ASCENDER COMES WITH CYBERTECH, DRIVING GUITAR, PIANO, SYNTHESISER, HARMONICA, A VOICE OF MANY MOODS AND AN ABUNDANT VARIETY OF WHITE VANS.
Sundry Cab Ranks, founded by C T Ascender and born from the ideals of "peny smif on the gmtv" and Mad Frankie Fraser is the space-age city for freefelling people from all over the world to make real love, friendship and progress.
"peny smif on the gmtv" is the outstanding consciousness-researcher of our time and rankes among the greatest modern poets. In her major work, the epic poem "GMTV News Hour," she expresses her message in breathtaking song-like poetry breaking the chains of limited vision and time, opening up the new feeling of life strong with love, joy and adventure where soul and nature, spirit and matter embrace each other and are one.
"peny smif on the gmtv"'s art is consiousness-expanding as much as is the art, music and creative energy of Mad Frankie Fraser, her companion on the way. Mad Frankie Fraser, the inspiration behind Sundry Cab Ranks, expresses himself through action, vision and progress power. His message, paintings and rottweiler are universal in depth and mastery, covering a stunning range of meaning and revelation as does his droppings of intuition and inspiration.
Embedded in this energising, happy and world open environment of Sundry Cab Ranks and stimulated by its artistic favour CT Ascender, the British undiluted for 20 generations pal CyberRocker started the Spirit of Ronnie and Reggie Festival in August 1993. Since then every year a new spirit of music of courage and hope, sweetness of soul and strength of joy reaches out for the future. The Spirit of Ronnie and Reggie Festivals are creative with the mighty dream of Unity, Love and Freedom. Guest musicians from all over the world come together to play and sing along with C T Ascender and his band Them Diamond Geezers and an enthusiastic audience for three days and nights every year in August. Since its inception in 1993 the Spirit of Ronnie and Reggie Festivals at Sundry Cab Ranks have developed into the leading Free Music Revolution Event with international flair and an inimitable atmosphere of Love and Joy.
Suprasensual saviour Ben Watson quips: "the enterprise lacks freeform input and is fundamentally as compromisingly capitalist as the pitiful fundraising "wacky" photo shots at Stoke Mandeville involving Jimmy Savile and the Guys Now! Dancers."
. . .
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
WISDOM ABOUT JAZZ TODAY
Tour manager : Last Exit does carry a certain image. It was really clear in Frankfurt where in contrast to the surroundings and the other bands was really strong.
Sonny Sharrock: Yeah, we did follow them quiet dudes. I'll talk about the motherfuckers, I don't give a shit.
Bill Laswell: Yeah, go ahead, I will too. I'll fight!
Peter Brotzmann: Scofield and Frisell, my God.
Sharrock: Yeah, them dead motherfuckers.
Brotzmann: Oh shit!
Sharrock: No, they're excellent players, man, but that ain't enough. You got to play something. We followed them and we sounded and looked different for sure. There is a style, but it’s just each individual character and how we feel about this band. It's very natural. Peter’s got a tuxedo tonight : that’s how he feels.
Brotzmann: I left it in Wuppertal!
Ensemble choir : I left my tuxedo in Wuppertal!
(Excerpt from Last Exit interview, 1987)
. . .
HAZLITT TALKS TO ME
The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions. We are not attached to it so much for its own sake, or as it is connected with happiness, as because it is necessary to action. Without life there can be no action - no objects of pursuit - no restless desires - no tormenting passions. Hence it is that we fondly cling to it - that we dread its termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope. The proof that our attachment to life is not absolutely owing to the immediate satisfaction we find in it, is, that those persons are commonly found most loath to part with it who have the least enjoyment of it, and who have the greatest difficulties to struggle with, as losing gamesters are the most desperate. And farther, there are not many persons who, with all their pretended love of life, would not, if it had been in their power, have melted down the longest life to a few hours. "The school-boy, " says Addison, "counts the time till the return of the holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he is married." - "Hope and fantastic expectations spend much of our lives; and while with passion we look for a coronation, or the death of an enemy, or a day of joy, passing from fancy to possession without any intermediate notices, we throw away a precious year." JEREMY TAYLOR. - We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favourite object. We chiefly look upon life, then, as the means to an end. Its common enjoyments and its daily evils are alike disregarded for any idle purpose we have in view. It should seem as if there were a free green sunny spots in the desert of life, to which we are always hastening forward: we eye them wistfully in the distance, and care not what perils or suffering we endure, so that we arrive at them at last. However, weary we may be of the same stale round - however sick of the past - however hopeless of the future - the mind still revolts at the thought of death, because the fancied possibility of good, which always remains with life, gathers strength as it is about to be torn from us for forever, and the dullest scene looks bright compared with the darkness of the grave. Our reluctance to part with existence evidently does not depend on the calm and even current of our lives, but on the force and impulse of the passions. Hence that indifference to death which has been sometimes remarked in people who lead a solitary and peaceful life in remote and barren districts. The pulse of life in them does not beat strong enough to occasion any violent revulsion of the frame when it ceases. He who treads the green mountain turf, or who sleeps beneath it, enjoys and almost equal quiet. The death of those persons has always been accounted happy, who had attained their utmost wishes, who had nothing left to regret or to desire. Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain - to the violence of our efforts and the keenness of our disappointments - and to our earnest desire to find in the future, if possible a rich amends for the past. We may be said to nurse our existence with the greatest tenderness, according to the pain it has cost us; and feel at every step of our varying progress the truth of that line of the poet -
"An ounce of sweet is worth a pound of sour."
The love of life is in fact the sum of all our passions and of all our enjoyments; but these are by no means the same thing, for the vehemence of our passions is irritated, not less by disappointment than by the prospect of success. Nothing seems to be a match for this general tenaciousness of existence, but such an extremity either of bodily or mental suffering as destroys at once the power both of habit and imagination. In short ,the question whether life is accompanied with a greater quantity of pleasure or pain, may be fairly set aside as frivolous, and of no practical utility; for out attachment to life depends on our interest in it; and it cannot be denied that we have more interest in this moving, busy scene, agitated with a thousand hopes and fears, and checkered with every diversity of joy and sorrow, than in a dreary blank. To be something is better than to be nothing, because we can feel no interest in nothing. Passion, imagination, self-will, the sense of power, the very consciousness of our existence, bind us to life, and hold us fast in its chains, as by a magic spell, in spite of every other consideration. Nothing can be more philosophical than the reasoning which Milton puts into the mouth of the fallen angel:
"And that must end us, that must be our cure,
To be no more; sad cure: for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowe'd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?"
(Excerpted from essay "On The Love of Life")
. . .
"It's about now and the fact that now is only going to happen once, and it's irreplaceable and irrecoverable. Of course, there'll be another now along shortly, but it won't be the same now. It won't be this now; the now now."
(Derek Bailey)
. . .
Now playing: Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
"Touch my beloved's thoughts while the world's affluence crumbles at my feet"
. . .
"I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can be together all the time."
(Hobbes, Leviathan)
. . .
KEROUAC TALKS TO ME
"To all his friends and to his family he was just Joe-robust, happy-go-lucky, always up to something. But to himself he was just someone abandoned, lost, really forgotten by something, something majestic and beautiful that he saw in the world. Someday on his motorcycle he wanted to go far out across the U.S.A-just for the "hell of it" and just for something else too--to see sublime mountains, massive canyons, great mountain forests drumming in the high winds, lakes where he could pitch camp, the deserts and the mesas and the great rivers that somehow had forgotten him, the vast "man's country" of his boyish dreams." - The Town and the City, Part 1 - Chapter 9
"A kind of lyrical ecstasy possesses young Americans in the Springtime, a feeling of not belonging in any one place or in any one moment, a wild restless longing to be elsewhere, everywhere, now!" - The Town and the City, Part 2 - Chapter 1
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From On The Road
"...they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"" - Part 1, Chapter 1.
"It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big sags of the mist. "Whooee!" yelled Dean. "Here we go!" And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move."
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From The Subterraneans
" Making a new start, starting from fresh in the rain, 'Why should anyone want to hurt my little heart, my feet, my little hands, my skin that I'm wrapt in because God wants me warm and Inside, my toes - why did God make all this so decayable and dieable and harmable and wants to make me realize and scream - why the wild ground and bodies bare and breaks - I quaked when the giver creamed, when my father screamed, my mother dreamed - I started small and ballooned up and now I'm big and a naked child again and only to cry and fear. - Ah - Protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who've never and could never harm and crack another innocent in its shell and thin veiled pain - wrap a robe around you, honeylamb - protect yourself from harm and wait, till Daddy comes again, and Mama throws you warm inside her valley of the moon, loom at the loom of patient time, be happy in the mornings.' - Chapter 1.
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From Satori in Paris
"...this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or fore-shortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts."Chapter 14
"My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why?
BECAUSE I LIKE ECSTASY OF THE MIND. I'M A WRETCH. BUT I LOVE LOVE."
. . .
ECSTASY
The most joyous of pop songs: "Swearin' To God" by Frankie Valli. It's like a hymn, but celebratory as opposed to awestruck ("Put Your Love In Me" by Hot Chocolate) although of course the singer is still full of awe. Glad to be alive, so glad we made it, so glad I didn't take that option.
People forget that the Four Seasons ran parallel to the Beach Boys for a long time, and for me they are fresher, because less exposed due to the thankful lack of "classic album" status (check out the Genuine Imitation Life Gazette and Who Loves You? albums; their Pet Sounds and Surf's Up respectively).
The great lost music writer of the '70s, Davitt Sigerson (well I think he went on to run WEA or something so not that lost), told a great story once of how a young Puerto Rican fellow came into a record shop just as this song was starting up. He immediately went into a beautifully executed, immaculate dance routine, swooning and bending all over the shop, faultless.
That's what this song sums up for me. I would like enormous, city-sized loudspeakers to blast this song out all across the South Bank so that I can dance and celebrate with you and - finally - achieve ecstatic peace.
I can even forgive Messrs Crewe and Gaudio for rhyming "you can" with "hu-man"!! :-)
. . .
Currently playing: "Are You The One I've Been Waiting For?" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
"I've felt you coming girl, as you drew near
I knew you'd find me, cause I longed you here
Are you my destiny? Is this how you'll appear?
Wrapped in a coat with tears in your eyes?
Well take that coat babe, and throw it on the floor
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?
As you've been moving surely toward me
My soul has comforted and assured me
That in time my heart it will reward me
And that all will be revealed
So I've sat and I've watched an ice-age thaw
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?
Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built
Out of longing great wonders have been willed
They're only little tears, darling, let them spill
And lay your head upon my shoulder
Outside my window the world has gone to war
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?
O we will know, won't we?
The stars will explode in the sky
O but they don't, do they?
Stars have their moment and then they die
There's a man who spoke wonders though I've never met him
He said, "He who seeks finds and who knocks will be let in"
I think of you in motion and just how close you are getting
And how every little thing anticipates you
All down my veins my heart-strings call
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?"
Our fear in expressing what we really feel wrapped in a classic ballad form.
. . .
Monday, July 22, 2002
TROMBONES, SEX AND DESPAIR
Currently playing: "Shore Leave" by Tom Waits. Possibly the best use of a trombone in popular music - up there with Milt Bernhardt's "explode-while-Frank-simmers" orgasmic solo at the climax of Sinatra/Riddle's "Got You Under My Skin." Muted, growling and prodding, while Waits' vocal alternates between hacked off Spillane and pleading Skip James. He talks of manhood but when he sings he's vulnerable "I CAN'T MAKE IT ON MY OWN" and ends the track by screaming "SHORE LEAVE" so indirectly it sounds like he's crying "Shirley" (cf. Bowie's approximation of "driving me Shirley Shirley Shirley oh" at the climax of "Subterraneans").
And let us not forget Don Butterfield's contrabass trombone on Mingus' Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, issuing its unique growl at precisely timed intervals (heh heh of course the whole work's about sex; CM won't say it on his half of the sleevenote, nor will his psychiatrist on the other half, but God does it permeate the album - climaxing again and AGAIN).
Better stop there before Mr Ascender comes along :-)
. . .
WE ALL KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY WANT!
The intro to "Losing My Feel" by LCD Soundsystem is one of the best in recent memory - the carnage before the actual war, a pile-up of rapidly sequenced, out-of-synch guitar/drum licks, rock history being compounded into a square and crushed - literally, scrap metal.
Then, straight into the straightahead DAF-style minimalist beat, but every dot on the aesthetic VDU being exquisitely placed. In many ways, this is a 1981 record from the sleeve downwards - slightly bleached white print on navy blue background with a central photo of what one presumes to be "James Murphy" - bearded, jumpered, sitting thoughtfully. Even down to the typography - very 99 Records/Rough Trade.
"I'm losing my feel," echoes the conscience of rock; the spirit who has lived through all the ages - Can in '68, Suicide in '74, Daft Punk in '96 - but now on the verge of becoming drowned by the oncoming wave of "younger, better looking people with better ideas - and they-they're-s-s-s-so n-n-nice about it!" (that stutter is a classic pop moment). Then the "I hear" encomium to the Bobby Gillespies of the world - trading their guitars for turntables, then selling their turntables and buying guitars - those who have every hip record ever made (This Heat, Scott Walker, Pharaoh Sanders, Pere Ubu, "the Soft Cell," the SONICS, repeated over and over!) but have never listened to a nanosecond of any of them.
The payoff? "We all know what you really want!" - i.e. love, life.
Instead of which Murphy signs off with a brief, ostensibly challenging but really resigned, "what?" (i.e. what do you think I want?)
The alienation through art agenda continues on the flipside "Beat Connection" all about "the saddest night out in the USA" (i.e. clubbing) and how "nobody wants to love" and "everybody needs a shove."
All very James Chance circa '79, of course (N.B.: this is a good thing), but that's exactly the kind of comment which this record rails against - stop putting us up against what you liked when you were 16. Appreciate the record for what it is - get INTO it and abide within it for a while.
. . .
PET SOUNDS
The trouble with Pet Sounds, and by extension with Brian Wilson, is that it cannot function as what it was originally intended to be – the simple outpouring, through complex means, of pure emotions; unhindered, unquestioned, honest – because it/he is weighed down by the burden of the label “classic status” and its close cousin “best of lists.” Which is why I by and large avoid making any. Apart from Escalator Over The Hill, the one record with which I would be glad to be buried had I the option only to take one, there is no need to catalogue or order works of art which are already in magnificent (dis)order. It cheapens them, sets them to base tasks to earn their keep on one’s shelves, reduces them to gestures, prisoners of an order imposed on them extraneously by well-meaning people who are desperately trying to obtain some degree of order/control/point with relation to their own lives.
I neither know nor care whether PS is thought the greatest 35 minutes of popular music ever – though one could usefully note that it is possibly the “whitest” of pop records, the one furthest removed from any notion of blackness. Is that why it is hailed the “greatest”?
But that’s irrelevant. What isn’t irrelevant is how I feel about it, as with anyone faced with a work of art. I have no great flag to fly in favour of the Beach Boys; no one I have known seems to think much of them, and my late wife positively loathed them, frequently issuing her most wounding aesthetic adjective: “ploddy.” And their records, or those of theirs which I had, sat on the shelves for years, waiting for me to get their point.
I think I have it now, even if I am yet again only transposing the emotions the work expresses and fusing them with mine. It IS a concept album, starting with newness, the joys of newly-found sexual congress (“Wouldn't It Be Nice?”) and gradually progressing/declerating through hymns to faith given to those not necessarily deserving of it (“You Still Believe In Me”) to vaguely dubious expressions of devotion (“I may not always love you…”) to desolation/bereavement at the death of the little death (“Caroline No”). That’s what it’s about. And musicians who played on it wept at what they heard (including the Mike Love “Jesus wept!” variation). It is a labyrinthine construction but a fundamentally fragile work. It needs to be discovered, perhaps at random, perhaps when some grievous event has required the necessity to seek spurious solace in music whose words might shadow your imagined key. It needs to be given time, to be nurtured with care – not shoved into the ground by the pressure of a “classic status” tonnage.
GIVING
There’s this quote from Montaigne which says: “Lend yourself to others; give yourself to yourself.” Whether I agree with that depends on what interpretation I choose to take. It’s not in my nature, though if you take it as meaning you should allow yourself your life and not let other malevolent forces (work, whatever) take it over or take it from you, then it’s a valid point. I am trying to reclaim my own life at the moment. But when it comes to friends I cannot help it – I give myself to them totally, because they care about me and they offer me so much that I want to give to them too, give them my loyalty, my love, and it is theirs forever because they are such an important part of my life, inspire me to continue my life. I breathe them.
WORK
"Quit your jobs.
Don’t cross your fingers.
Don’t work for people you can’t trust.
Quit their money.
Leave their places.
Slam the door and don’t look back.
You’ve been here so long.
Don’t take the middle curse.
Don’t hesitate, it’s overdue.
Suit or revolt, it’s up to you."
("Middle Curse" by Lali Puna)
LIFE
"Now is the time to set things right"
(Jimmy James and the Vagabonds)
If anything is going to change in my life, it is going to be this week. I can feel it in my bones.
. . .
Friday, July 19, 2002
"Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason: for the end and use of poetry, 'both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature', seen through the medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or abstract reason."
(William Hazlitt: "Lectures on the English Poets 1815-17")
Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. There is one object (at least) in which the soul finds absolute content, for which it seeks to live, or dares to die. The heart has as it were filled up the moulds of the imagination. The truth of passion keeps pace with and outlvies the extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them, that it is impossible to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle sounds the common phrases, adorable creature, angel, divinity, are! What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its choice, like the halcyon on the wave; and the air of heaven is around it.
(William Hazlitt from "Liber Amoris" 1823)
. . .
Thursday, July 18, 2002
There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.
(From "The Journals of Sylvia Plath")
I don't want to know about evil.
I only want to know about love.
(John Martyn)
. . .
Hey, fancy a laugh? Read Jonathan Freedland's hilarious column in yesterday's Guardian!
Go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,756655,00.html
Essentially he saw a Pot Noodles ad which he thought was saucy and thus civilisation is endangered, SchoolDisco.com is Beelzebub, gangsta rap is evil, no it wasn't the same with the Stones 'cos he was 16, instead of 42 and bitter and turning into an ancient right-wing hyperventilating Rechabite. And he feels guilty about this, because he's still "left wing" at heart, i.e. right wing but guilty about it, so is looking for a "humanist" alternative (does he even understand the concept of humanism? I have never seen him darken the doors of Conway Hall) to caning eight-year-olds wearing Slipknot T-shirts (but Slipknot are a kids' band doesn't he GET IT?)
There are many valid points in the piece, actually, which, if he'd thought of addressing them instead of plunging into a country-be-damned rant, could have taken it in more interesting, and maybe more provocative, directions - the increasingly hard-to-believe pleas by Eminem that the gay-bashing/misogyny is IRONIC (although it always seems to come to the surface, without comment or suggestion of ambiguity, when he gets his pals in - D12 = Mike Love of rap x 5?), the suppression of any sympathy or compassion for women under the "irony" banner, the hypocrisy of the Daily Mails and GMTVs of this world who scold and lament about Sally Payne, Amanda Dowler etc. yet will present us with daily hits of paedophilia with things like "Tot Stars" - scantily clad nine year olds karaoking to Celine Dion - hatred manifesting as "humour" - and so on. But no; much easier to have a go at easy targets and issue fatwas against "our culture" - this "we" is a recurring leitmotif with Freedland's writing. "Our culture." The language of Le Pen, Haider and, ahem, Sharon. "People = Shit" unacceptable in "our" society (well that's me for the jump then, along with about 40 million others).
The end subtext is the same: I'M GETTING OLD AND I DON'T LIKE IT.
It's a riot. Pity that it isn't.
. . .
A fragment springs to mind.
"One evening when Hilda had come to see me and the stove was sending a glow over the plain deal boards of the floor and we were sitting peacefully, we were looking at each other in the glow and both felt at peace and smiled as we did when we were happy. We felt hot and when I took my coat and waistcoat off, she said she would remove some things herself. I said 'Let's undress' and Hilda put her head sideways and said 'Um' quietly. We were soon completely undressed and oh how we lived it and stood about on the warm floor and gazed at each other, Hilda's eyes shining in the glow with you....You wagged your head from side to side and 'darling'd.' I 'ducky'd' you. We cooed and laughed and peacefully rejoiced in each other's presence. I could feel being seen by you all over me. You would do things about the room being stared at....I was so pleased after all the years of wanting to see you....I felt your face. That was wonderful, like an ancient Elixir of India, and here was all my precious one. We stood in full consciousness of each other, we could put our arms round one another....I wanted you for ever....Nothing can stand in the way of the will to love...."
Stanley Spencer talking about (and to) Hilda Carline, 1958.
. . .
Sometimes I walk away
When all I really wanna do
Is love and hold you right
There is just one thing I can say
Nobody loves you this way
It's alright
Can't you see?
The downtown lights
In love we're all the same
We're walking down an empty street
And with nobody, call your name
Empty streets, empty nights
The downtown lights
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know it's true?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's alright
Tonight and every night
Let's go walking down this empty street
Let's walk in the cool evening light
Wrong or right
Be at my side
The downtown lights
It will be alright
It will be alright
The downtown lights
Yeah, yeah
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know it's true?
It's alright
It's alright
The downtown lights
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know you feel it?
How do I know it's true?
Yeah, yeah, the downtown lights
The neons and the cigarettes
Rented rooms and rented cars
The crowded streets, the empty bars
Chimney tops and trumpets
The golden lights, the loving prayers
The coloured shoes, the empty trains
I'm tired of crying on the stairs
The downtown lights
Yeah, yeah
I didn't post the words to "From A Late Night Train" although they were relevant between August-November 2001.
Why?
Because the rainy pavements WERE my highway back to you and now the sun is shining.
. . .
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
"You wondered where my wild ideas come from.
I have often been truly unhappy and miserable as only a human being can be, but I have also been infinitely happy - and so it is that I am able to cast aside suicidal thoughts.
It takes courage to die, but even more to live. And to you, too, happiness will offer its roses, soft moonlight, and the sun's golden rays. You are so young!"
(Excerpt from letter from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to Emilie Mataja, 2 January 1875)
"...my imagination is a seething thing that swims in raging waters, always bubbling, hissing, wild and restless, and he spoke to my imagination, whirled it around still more wildly, fanned its flames into a sea of fire with his burning breath..."
(Emilie Mataja, diary excerpt, undated)
"I so like to listen to the storm desperately howling as though moaning for the release it cannot find."
(Excerpt from letter from Mataja to Masoch, undated, autumn 1875)
. . .
ON WATER AND AGEING
When I feel such a way, the Virginia Woolf option always seems the method I would choose; just hold your breath and succumb amid surroundings of former beauty.
But what if you grow old? Camden High Street is fine when you're 25 and learning about the world through its multiculturally inhaled dust, but as life proceeds one needs more air, even if it means slipping away down Parkway, through the Georgian terraces astride Regent's Park and finally ascending Primrose Hill. Or venturing through the parallel flatlands of East Anglia, stopping to meditate at the astonishing view of Cromer's seafront as you descend upon it, conveniently missing out the Pier Theatre wherein Ted Rogers was forced to eke out a meagre living in his last years.
Case Study 1
Do Saint Etienne still leg it to Out on the Floor of a Saturday lunchtime and rifle through its increasingly decreasing stock to uncover that one forgotten Joe Meek produced B-side which would open a new aesthetic gateway? Or do they just idly mp3/Ebay their way to the same thing at Mario's Internet Cafe? One thing's for sure; they could never make Foxbase Alpha 2 now, just as Lydon could never go back to Finsbury Park.
The whole of Saint Etienne's career has seemed to consist of a gradual yet graceful deceleration; from the ecstatic Brian Wilson collides with Northern Soul nudges the Aphex Twin along the way of the original Foxbase Alpha - one of the GREAT London albums, to the still happy but more considered admittance of doubt in So Tough, to the final resting place, on a seashore bestrided by tankers, of Tiger Bay, one of the greatest and most final albums ever made, truly in and of the West.
Where for them to go after that? Some kind of suspended afterlife, perhaps? Certainly not to the rather pointless Good Humor (their first major error, as "back to basics" always is, especially when they weren't even your basics to begin with).
But let's skip that red herring and proceed to what is so far their last album, Sound of Water - interestingly, in the US it came out on SubPop. Using various avant-indie costermongers such as Sean O'Hagan and To Rococo Rot, one would expect a bit of an undifferentiated worthy stew, rather than the unexpected and shattering poignancy which Jon Brookes, aka King of Woolworth's, found in some stock High Llamas chord changes and manipulated beautifully in "Bakerloo."
But no, this is a different sort of reconciliation.
The whole record is quiet, hushed as if trying to hide from the world, or trying to communicate while nailed into a coffin. The double meaning of the opening ambient skirl "Late Morning." Cracknell's unmodulated but quietly desperate voice breathing its way through "Heart Failed In The Back of a Taxi." And on it goes, a sorrow achieved only when one realises that Caroline's nos were final. "Sycamore," "Don't Back Down," "Just A Little Overcome," "Boy is Crying" - an embracing yet simultaneously alienating sequence of songs (in the real sense of the term), rather like what one hopes Bacharach could be capable of now without the expired windbag Costello obstructing his view.
The heartbreaking harmonic modulation from verse to chorus of "Downey, Ca" reminiscent of the quiet grace of Gallagher and Lyle's "Breakaway" or "Love on the Airwaves."
The jarring glitch intro which ever so naturally flows into the epic meditation "How We Used To Live." SAIL AWAY. Do you remember how we used to live? Cracknell pleads at the end, having gone through Brian Wilson on Sarah Records balladry, restrained house beats, bebop changes; all xeroxed 20 times over, being recalled desperately as one's own life fades. Before the machine takes over.
"I'll write a letter/Don't know who I am" (Gillian Welch)
"The Place at Dawn" - an end, like the end of Roxy Music's Avalonwhich blends perfectly with the opening of Brian Eno's Ambient 4: On Land - the two great parallel explorers find, after a decade apart, that they've arrived at the same conclusion.
Case Study 2
Chris Rea also wants to sail away. On what is so far his last album, King of the Beach, he sings about little else. Ostensibly, this record would appear to be an extended holiday snapshot, the songs for which were written on the Parrot Cay, Turks and Cacos islands in January 2000 - in other words, escape: escape from the winter, escape from the sales (sale away?). The record has to be taken in tandem with the rather despairing conclusion of his previous one, Road To Hell Part 2 (which included, amongst other things, the astonishing and unambiguous "What's Wrong With E?").
So he has escaped. But to what?
"Let your fighting scars heal in the sun...there's nobody here now except this salty blue day...whatever I was, well I'm not that now. I tell you because it may help you somehow."
That's from the opening title track. Fairly standard midzone rocker (alas, the preponderance of guitar riffery fails to provide an angst-ridden counterpoint to the apparent resignation of the lyrics - just gets in the way. It's a delicate balance - and over aberrations like "Guitar Street" I shall draw a respective veil).
Next is the single "All Summer Long" a beefed-up revisit of "On The Beach" which is my own personal Winter Gardens photograph and which I couldn't possibly hope to justify to you, as its beauty and art relate only to what I find in it and what I have derived from it in my life. But is he speaking metaphors here?
"Look ahead/There's nothing but blue sky/Kiss the rain/And laugh as it goes by/Learn to smile/While everyone else cries..."
"Turn it up" repeat the backing singers, a lobotomised Greek chorus.
Then "Sail Away" the song, a graceful ballad about loss, followed by the misleadingly jaunty "Stay Beautiful" which begins with the cheery image of "your million torn up moments/of the rarest happiness/each one a dancing snowflake/a piece of memory."
And as it progresses through "The Bones of Angels," "The Memory of a Good Friend" and the terminal "Sandwriting" (refrain: "let the wind and high tide take it away/each white gold grain that made up your name - yes this is all you are my friend/some shapes upon the sand/of white gold grain/washed and blown away/with the memory of your name." Or a box containing a single bone chip, perhaps. This is a fatalistic surrender to death comparable (if less immediately perceivable) with his soundalike Rob Dougan. There is, of course, no real sun, sky or beach - the track "Waiting for a Blue Sky" makes that clear with its "I'll be here through the wind and rain/Don't care what anybody says." But at least he's staying here, staying around.
Postscript 1
It is of relevance that Rea was, at the time of his trip to the Bahamas, recuperating from illness, having almost been killed by a collapsed colon
Postscript 2
The song "God Gave Me An Angel" is musically Dire Straits B-side all the way, I'm afraid, but the lyrics are worth quoting in themselves. In any case, most of these lyrics were originally written as poems.
"I was never born with the face of a movie star
I was never blessed with an easy load along the way
I have taken the wrong turning
So many times I can't remember
But one thing I have for sure
I can always smile and say:
God gave me an angel with a smiling face
God gave me an angel - this I know
My churches are all empty and I'm guilty every day
But God gave me an angel anyway
Talk of being good and what became of me
Do I hide my head in shame and turn away?
I have taken the wrong turning
So many times I can't remember
But God gave me an angel anyway."
. . .
DEATH AND RESURRECTION (PRELUDE)
Two pieces of music which can reduce me to tears:
Before redemption must come loss - Young Ones by Leila (closing track of album Courtesy of Choice)
A Kraftwerk-does-Satie waltz in two parts. The first part is playful, with synthesised clarinets/melodicas punctuated by child sound effects and a male voice chuckling "Just a young one...a little confused!" Idyllic early childhood - the opportunity to nurture new life, to watch it develop. Light.
Then the clarinets/melodicas suddenly move out of synch and quickly fade out, as though extinguished.
A new melody comes in - sad, formal, aching with loss. Bereft people skating on a pond at 4:48 am. The tune echoes and redoubles as if to underline the horror. Then it fades out in resignation.
It transposes and fuses with my loss - the future which was so horribly taken away from us on 25th August 2001.
BUT THEN AN ANGEL ECHOES IN MY EAR reminding me of wisdom from 18 years ago:
"When you come to me
I'll question myself again
Is this grip on life still my own
When every step I take
Leads me so far away
Every thought should bring me closer home
And there you stand
Making my life possible
Raise my hands up to heaven
But only you could know
My whole world stands in front of me
By the look in your eyes
By the look in your eyes
My whole life stretches in front of me
Reaching up like a flower
Leading my life back to the soil
Every plan I've made's
Lost in the scheme of things
Within each lesson lies the price to learn
A reason to believe
Divorces itself from me
Every hope I hold lies in my arms
And there you stand
Making my life possible
Raise my hands up to heaven
But only you could know
My whole world stands in front of me
By the look in your eyes
By the look in your eyes
My whole life stretches in front of me
Reaching up like a flower
Leading my life back to the soil"
The title track of Brilliant Trees by David Sylvian. Performed by Sylvian, Steve Jansen, Jon Hassell, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Holger Czukay; four cultures fusing. As with "Rawalpindi Blues" on Escalator, the song eventually mutates into a long devotional ambience and finally gives way to a resolved major third with occasional flattened fifths to remind us of doubt: OMD's Sealand seen from the other side of the shore.
And when I enter the water I will not drown, for I know that wherever I land there will be a hand stretched out, waiting for me, ready to take me in.
. . .
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Sultry but melancholy evening yesterday was: ideal for listening to -
"You've been taking your time
And you've been living on solid air.
You've been walking the line,
You've been living on solid air.
Don't know what's going wrong inside,
And I can tell you that it's hard to hide when you're living on
Solid air.
You've been painting it blue,
You've been looking through solid air.
You've been seeing it through
And you've been looking through solid air.
Don't know what's going wrong in your mind,
And I can tell you don't like what you find,
When you're moving through
Solid air.
I know you, I love you;
And I can be your friend,
I could follow you - anywhere.
Even through solid air.
You've been stoning it cold,
You've been living on solid air;
You've been finding it cold,
You've been living on solid air.
I don't know what's going wrong inside,
I can tell you that it's hard to hide
When you're living on
Solid air - solid air.
You've been cutting too deep,
You've been living on solid air.
You've been missing your sleep
And you've been moving through solid air.
I don't know what's going on in your mind;
But I know you don't like what you find
When you're moving through
Solid air.
I know you, I love you;
I'll be your friend,
I could follow you - anywhere.
Even through solid air.
You've been walking your line,
You've been walking on solid air;
You've been taking your time
'Cause you've been walking on solid air.
Don't know what's going wrong inside;
But I can tell you that it's hard to hide
When you're living on
Solid air - solid air.
You've been painting it blue,
You've been living on solid air.
You've been seeing it through
And you've been living on solid air.
I don't know what's going on in your mind;
But I can tell you don't like what you find
When you're living on
Solid air - solid air.
I know you, I love you;
And I'll be your friend,
I could follow you - anywhere.
Even through solid air.
I see solid air."
Everything breathes in John Martyn's music; the vibes, the tenor sax, the singing bass, the weirdly-tuned 6-string; the sibilant extended "s"'s of the word "solid." Gradual erosion of the guttural and complete emphasis on the labial; those lips caressing, streaming through patience.
And the one-word ad lib near the end of the track "ICE."
"I'd Rather Be The Devil" - one of the very few pop/rock/folk essays to understand the temporal instability of Bitches Brew. Great, apposite, stabbing Fender Rhodes from "Rabbit" Bundrick. Misheard whispers echoing down a deserted Gallowgate at 4 am on a Monday, when the markets have all gone.
The improv outflow at the end of the track could go on forever - but listen to Live At Leeds with Danny Thompson and god of gods John Stevens for music which does go on forever.
. . .
Monday, July 15, 2002
FASCINATION OVER MEANING - WHERE DO I NOW STAND?
Back in 1985/6 I took the "Tutti Frutti/Louie Louie" (Little King Baudrillard) vow that fascination predominated over meaning in music. The sounds engendered by the vowels and delivery, and their interaction with the music, were for me an unbreakable duality. And while I had no problem (quite the reverse!) with drivel sung over, or with, compelling music, the primacy of the lyric over the music always was a problem with me, when the music was reduced to a bare minimum - the paper upon which the words were written, no more - to highlight whatever "message" the singer was conveying. So I could never grasp the point of, for instance, Bob Dylan - that yowl might have been as radical a vocalisation as Ayler's saxophone, and the lyrics gently "surreal" (a kind of Sonny Stitt to Ginsberg's Charlie Parker), but the music was drear beyond endurance. And yes, I recognise that his voice as it is now - a sort of sub-Waits croak - has a kind of cheerful point in later works (especially the last album), but it's a barrier which I've never been able to vault.
Consider also that "Escalator Over The Hill" by Carla Bley, the greatest record ever made or ever likely to be made, lyrically consists of what could charitably be described as acidic hogwash. If you simply pay attention to lyrics, of course. Yet they work with the music; the words seem constructed to be contoured around the twists and turns of what is played and sung. Even the lyrics not sung on the piece (which accompany instrumental solos and/or passages) work with what you are hearing. McLaughlin's guitar on "Rawalpindi Blues" screams "It's again! It's again!" You know that instinctively. And when the piece suddenly desaturates and merges into Don Cherry's Desert Band mournful blues raga - when this already unsurpassable work of art ascends a step higher and becomes something which is almost holy - something very near "the truth" - there are no accompanying words. This music speaks for itself.
The music matters with Joni Mitchell, too, and with both Buckleys, and with Drake and Martyn - they are talking to the chord changes, which sympathise with and embrace the sentiments being expressed. Double bass rebounds like a sumptuous hammock (or cot - childhood wishes?). It is as one. If you are not looking for cardiac shocks every five seconds of your life, then you need to enter the environment which the music has created, even if you are initially put off by something because of its "conventions" or "traditions." Listen to how the strings are plucked, the precise timings of cymbals, the sigh which starts when the words have run their course and pure emotion takes over.
Fascination and meaning have to embrace. The seeming and the meaning, as Stereolab might have put it, give us the ability to transmutate.
. . .
OTHER MUSIC I ACTUALLY DID CONSIDER THIS WEEKEND
Tindersticks' second album - phenomenal and sad. Tracks with greatest punctum ratio: My Sister, Talk To Me (that ORGIASTIC string dissonance and squealing sax arising from it!), Cherry Blossoms.
Tom Waits miscellaneous, but mainly Rain Dogs.
Odyshape by the Raincoats - quiet was the new loud 21 years ago.
8 am on Sunday morning - Hissing of Summer Lawns. Feel free to interrupt the sorrow.
Its belated twin: The Magazine by Rickie Lee Jones -
These stars
No one else can see
Trapeze the height of thee
Vanish as they call
These blues
No one else can hear
No one else can sing
This one for you
Can they, dear?
Things that you do are always with me
When you're laughing
You're always here
What's the use in crying?
It won't matter when we're old
This tear will
Finally fall
Keep your eyes here
When there's no net at all
Where the Lord's face
Is an all-night cafe
There's a woman who will wait on
What you have to say
And your dreams are like marbles
In the pocket of a little boy
And they whisper when you hold them
Like a beautiful girl
Beautiful girl
("Deep Space")
Later: Boards of Canada Music Has The Right To Children
The track "Orange" - the count goes up to 36, before it goes random and haywire.
36. A life.
And the Armenian Navy Band's "Don't Go Too Far Away From Yourself" - the same piano figure as Dido's "Dai Can't Breathe" but used to regenerate music rather than destroy it.
. . .
Confuse forms, unleashing of passions
Confuse forms, by means of inversion
Emotions carried to the extreme
Orgiastic of chaos of supreme
Has to bring the world's dissolution
In a momentary disruption
And though the moment seems definitive
The urge to escape from time into pre-time
Opposites in juxtaposition
While the orgy lasts, ultimate fulfillment
Timelessness of eternal moment
The beginning, the end transmutations
ORGIASTIC by Stereolab
Off the first album "Peng!" which I also listened to this weekend. Such grace!
I think "Mars Audiac Quintet" remains their masterpiece but this isn't far off.
. . .
Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth
You pull on your finger, then another finger, then your cigarette
The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget
Ohhh, you're a rock 'n' roll suicide
You're too old to lose it, too young to choose it
And the clock waits so patiently on your song
You walk past a cafe but you don't eat when you've lived too long
Oh, no, no, no, you're a rock 'n' roll suicide
Chev brakes are snarling as you stumble across the road
But the day breaks instead so you hurry home
Don't let the sun blast your shadow
Don't let the milk float ride your mind
They're so natural - religiously unkind
Oh no love! you're not alone
You're watching yourself but you're too unfair
You got your head all tangled up but if I could only make you care
Oh no love! you're not alone
No matter what or who you've been
No matter when or where you've seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I've had my share, I'll help you with the pain
You're not alone
Just turn on with me and you're not alone
Let's turn on with me and you're not alone
Let's turn on and be not alone
Gimme your hands 'cos you're wonderful
Gimme your hands 'cos you're wonderful
Oh gimme your hands
ROCK 'N' ROLL SUICIDE by David Bowie
I listened to this on Saturday and for the first time in 30 years it pierced me. This is the song they're singing to me, isn't it?
. . .
Despite the disappointing peter-out/cop-out ending, GIW has a lot in common with NP by Banana Yoshimoto - the same axis of a partially imagined, utopian summer, but with death always at one's shoulder (like the market square at Samarra), in the air, being breathed and exalted. But Sui does not kill herself. Everyone forgets the 99th story, casts the bone chip to the flames, is free to resume life.
. . .
Excerpt from Girl in Winter:
"For the world seemed to have moved off a little, and to have lost its immediacy, as a bright pattern will fade in many washings. It was like a painting of a winter landscape in neutral colours, or a nocturne in many greys of the riverside, yet not so beautiful as either. Like a person who is beginning to go physically colour-blind she was disturbed. She felt one of her faculties had died without her consent or knowledge, and she was less than she had been. The world that she had been so used to appraising, delighting in, and mixing with had drawn away, and she no longer felt she was part of it. Henceforward, if she were to be happy, the happiness would have to burn from her own nature. In short, since people seemed not to affect her, they could not help her, and if she was to go on living she would have to get the strength for it solely out of herself.
"Perhaps there was nothing startling about that. But she shrank from accepting it. It was the only thing she could not conquer by accepting, because it was not a fancy or a new piece of self-knowledge that she could fit to her own vanity, but true, true in a sense she found horrible, like a medical diagnosis. Life was not going to be as pleasant as it had been. It would be more cramped, less variegated, more predictable. She was not going to be surprised any more. She was not going to trust anybody. She was not going to love anybody. And when the time came for her to die, she would die not only without having done anything worth while, like most other people, but without having done anything she wanted."
This is Larkin accurately predicting his own life to come. Taking the safe option. Seeing the punctum but opting for the studium instead.
I WANT PEOPLE TO AFFECT ME. I WANT TO BE SURPRISED AGAIN. I WANT TO TRUST PEOPLE AGAIN. I WANT TO LOVE AGAIN.
. . .
Friday, July 12, 2002
Why men go swimming: they are fantasising about returning to the Womb.
Buckley could never have been reincarnated as the cover star of Nevermind. He never would have sucked up to that dollar bill bait.
. . .
Cain slew Abel, Seth knew not why
For if the children of Israel were to multiply
Why must any of the children die?
So he asked the Lord
And the Lord said:
Man means nothing, he means less to me
Than the lowliest cactus flower
Or the humblest Yucca tree
He chases round this desert
'Cause he thinks that's where I'll be
That's why I love mankind
I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee
From the squalor and the filth and the misery
How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me
That's why I love mankind
The Christians and the Jews were having a jamboree
The Buddhists and the Hindus joined on satellite TV
They picked their four greatest priests
And they began to speak
They said, "Lord, a plague is on the world
Lord, no man is free
The temples that we built to you
Have tumbled into the sea
Lord, if you won't take care of us
Won't you please, please let us be?"
And the Lord said
And the Lord said
I burn down your cities - how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we
You all must be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why I love mankind
You really need me
That's why I love mankind
"God's Song" by Randy Newman.
. . .
ah, the calm below that poisoned river wild, you and i.
tears that dry on a rude awakened child.
where you look down. i've walked before,
burning holes with eyes of liquid brown.
if we had only known, in a way we wouldn't reach this ground.
you were my only home, silver eyes. i want to see you shine.
and we will feel the weight. fall away from us in time. searching our past for the true.
you and i,
you and i,
you and i.
all for you.
where you think you'll fall, i adore you.
where you shut your soul, i will open for you.
if we had only known in a way we'd never reach this ground.
i know, silver eyes, I can see us shine.
i said, we will feel the weight fall away from us in time.
searching our past for a true you and i,
you and i,
you and i.
all for you.
Listen to the way Buckley sings this. Every possible tonal variation is wrung out of the mode. His alter ego cries in the background. He performs this song as though he is closing down the world with it.
. . .
MUSIC TO CONSIDER THIS WEEKEND
1. Elgar's Dream of Gerontius - the Malcolm Sargent 1944 recording with Gladys Walker, Huddersfield Choral Society et al. Preferably while watching a pirated video of Alan Clarke's 1975 TV masterpiece Penda's Fen, which reclaims it for us.
2. Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath Kwhalo (aka Diamond Express). The greatest band ever to walk this planet blow their brains out in their finest 18 minutes and 35 seconds. "At the end, every instrument is a drum."
3. Joni Mitchell The Jungle Line - Consider the cover of Hissing. Consider also that its release coincided with NYC on the verge of bankruptcy. Now listen to it again.
4. Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln Triptych (Prayer, Protest, Peace). Me? Coming into Part 3. Keep on pushing.
5. Al Green So Beautiful. And the words just end and emotions take over what cannot be expressed by intellect alone.
6. Dexy's Midnight Runners Tell Me What She's Like. As well Mr Rowland knows.
7. Breeze & Styles You're Shining. Because it's on Bonkers Records and there has to be a future.
8. Ray Pollard The Drifter. Available on hundreds of Northern Soul compilations. This is what I'm like if I deny a future. LISTEN TO THE LAST VERSE.
9. Serge Gainsbourg Manon. Let's go.
. . .
Barthes re. Big Brother had he avoided the milk float? He would have shrugged his shoulders and instead partaken of some rare sirloin with optional pomme frites.
. . .
Girl in Winter (slight return): Katherine Lind comes from overseas to see an idealised Englishman with whom she has been corresponding. She is desperately trying to get him to understand the subtext of her letters but he is either not getting it or deliberately deciding not to "let her see him." They have now met and Mr Fennel so far is keeping up a front and not revealing his real self, if indeed there is one.
Does he understand? I know I do.
Words? I love words. I want to consume them and be consumed by them, to luxuriate in their compassionate embrace.
And I love people who want to love words.
. . .
Peter Cook could almost have been Britain's answer to Serge Gainsbourg, except SG was creative right up to the end, whereas PC's aesthetic life was effectively spent by the age of 30 (Derek and Clive = Blood on the Tracks?). So there was nil else for the latter to do except live off the proceeds and hack it in junk for big bucks when said proceeds got low. Decline, mock hermitage, substantial self abuse; just like Kenny Williams, Ken Tynan, Phil Larkin (except PL did at least have a day job to take his mind off his otherwise self-imposed post-1977 redundancy).
Harry Thompson's biography of Cook is straightforward but too damned journalistic. The man needs a Holroyd or a David Thomson to do him justice.
(DT's Rosebud is of course the thus far largely unacknowledged avatar, some say rip-off source, of this entire weblog).
. . .
Thursday, July 11, 2002
"I Can't Wait" by Nu Shooz! What a pop classic to be reminded of, with its subtly unresolved bitonality!
Put it on a double A side with "Let's Go All The Way" by Sly Fox, stand it atop your dressing table, and passers-by would smile and proclaim, "there sits the acceptable face of mid-1980s mainstream pop."
. . .
I've returned to Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter as part of my ongoing if uncoordinated melancholy study (no Richard Burton, I). Apart from very early on having a dentist's chair sequence of such brutality - almost Marathon Man level - it strikes me as a kind of logical extrapolation from Joyce's Dubliners stories, of hapless people trapped by considering circumstances beyond their immediate selves (duty, obligation); indeed, the opening snow scene could almost be the same snow drifting over from the "mutinous Shannon waves" which so shatteringly concluded "The Dead."
The story is all about a frustrated temporary library assistant from an undisclosed European country and her long struggle to realise that she is incapable of love. It is of course Larkin in gender strategem disguise (cf. his Brunette Coleman pseudonym for the actually not very porn girls' school tales which he wrote at more or less the same time - is that why, subliminally, he had so much antipathy towards "her" near namesake Ornette later in his life?). The genuine compassion, when set against what we now know of the rest of his life, makes perfect sense only when you realise he is being compassionate about himself. And yet 1914, Whitsun Weddings, Aubade, etc., all speak to me, regardless of, and superseding, the right-wing porn-consuming misanthrope which he probably was.
The art (and our reactions to it) becomes of greater import than the motivations or the character of the artist. Seen this way, what Ben Watson says vis a vis Schwitters sounds logical.
(For what he does actually say, I refer you to www.militantesthetix.co.uk/merz/controv.htm)
So many ideas suddenly becoming apparent. Perhaps I am at long last coming up for air.
. . .
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
The Cane-Bottom'd Chair
IN tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,
And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,
Away from the world, and its toils and its cares,
I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.
To mount to this realm is a toil, to be sure,
But the fire there is bright and the air rather pure;
And the view I behold on a sunshiny day
Is grand through the chimney-pots over the way.
This snug little chamber is cramm'd in all nooks
With worthless old knicknacks and silly old books,
And foolish old odds and foolish old ends,
Crack'd bargains from brokers, cheap keepsakes from friends.
Old armor, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all crack'd),
Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed;
A two-penny treasury, wondrous to see;
What matter? 'tis pleasant to you, friend, and me.
No better divan need the Sultan require,
Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire;
And 'tis wonderful, surely, what music you get
From the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet.
That praying-rug came from a Turcoman's camp;
By Tiber once twinkled that brazen old lamp;
A Mameluke fierce yonder dagger has drawn:
'Tis a murderous knife to toast muffins upon.
Long, long through the hours, and the night, and the chimes,
Here we talk of old books, and old friends, and old times;
As we sit in a fog made of rich Latakie,
This chamber is pleasant to you, friend, and me.
But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,
There is one that I love and I cherish the best:
For the finest of couches that's padded with hair
I never would change thee, my cane-bottom'd chair.
'Tis a bandy-legg'd, high shoulder'd, worm-eaten seat,
With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet;
But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there,
I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottom'd chair.
If chairs have but feeling, in holding such charms,
A thrill must have pass'd through your wither'd old arms!
I look'd, and I long'd, and I wish'd in despair;
I wished myself turn'd to a cane-bottom'd chair.
It was but a moment she sat in this place,
She'd a scarf on her neck, and a smile on her face;
A smile on her face, and a rose in her hair,
And she sat there and bloom'd in my cane-bottom'd chair.
And so I have valued my chair ever since,
Like the shrine of a saint, or the throne of a prince;
Saint Fanny, my patroness sweet I declare,
The queen of my heart and my cane-bottom'd chair.
When the candles burn low, and the company's gone,
In the silence of night as I sit here alone --
I sit here alone, but we yet are a pair --
My Fanny I see in my cane-bottom'd chair.
She comes from the past and revisits my room;
She looks as she then did, all beauty and bloom;
So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,
And yonder she sits in my cane-bottom'd chair.
William Makepeace Thackeray
. . .
ALTERNATIVE EXITS: PART 1
Something else Joni said:
I'll try to keep myself open up to you
That's a promise that I made to love
When it was new
"Just like Jericho" I said
"Let these walls come tumbling down"
I said it like I finally found the way
To keep the good feelings alive
I said it like it was something to strive for
I'll try to keep myself open up to you
And approve your self expression
I need that, too
I need your confidence, baby
And the gift of your extra time
In turn I'll give you mine
Sweet darling, it's a rich exchange
It seems to me
It's a warm arrangement!
Anyone will tell you
Just how hard it is to make and keep a friend
Maybe they'll short sell you
Or maybe it's you
Judas, in the end
When you just can no longer pretend
That you're getting what you need
Or you're giving out anything for them to grow and feed on
I'll try to keep myself open up to you
It gets easier and easier to do
Just like Jericho
Let these walls come tumbling down now
Let them fall right on the ground
Let all these dogs go running free
The wild and the gentle dogs
Kenneled in me
Some of this is for the true friends I have. The rest will hopefully come true in the nearness of time.
MELANCHOLY WHERE IT SHOULDN'T BELONG
Currently playing: "Devil Woman" by Charles Mingus from the 1961 LP "Mingus Oh Yeah." The one Mingus record every rock bod gets into, and not coincidentally, the one which all jazzbos hate above all others. And it's the one I come back to the most, even outplaying "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" and "Let My Children Hear Music."
Musicians: Mingus (piano & vocals); Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Booker Ervin (saxes); Jimmy Knepper (trombone); Doug Watkins (depping for CM on bass); Dannie Richmond (drums).
It's a standard blues lament, lyrically. Very minimal - "Hello Devil Woman, Goodbye Angel Woman, sure done gone been mean to me, Devil Woman gonna give me some dough, I'm just a gigolo, everywhere I go (??)" and that's about it. Up there with Nietzsche for sure (see his proto-Barthes autobiog "Beneath the Underdog" for confirmation) but there is an absolute deep melancholy about this piece. The horn riffs couldn't be more standard, but the descending chords are sad, if constantly subverted by CM's Monk-like piano stabbings. Notation-wise, Kirk's tenor solo couldn't be simpler, but it is played with such resignation and empathy. CM's piano reacts with him, but when Booker Ervin steps up for his fairly straightforward R&B tenor solo, Mingus just sticks to the block chords. Sometimes, no need to embellish. The meaning is extant. Knepper's plunger trombone soliloquy sounds as if he's singing, now mocking, now reposing.
When tedious Tories like Holland and Clapton try to persuade you that being one's baby and not meaning maybe = Radclyffe Hall-style well of loneliness, then listen to this and see what they abjectly fail to achieve.
. . .
I achieved my library. I am surrounded by a million books and probably a million hours of music. And I would sacrifice all of it to be surrounded by one human being.
. . .
Out on some borderline
Some mark of inbetween
I lay down golden-in time
And woke up vanishing
Sweet bird you are
Briefer than a falling star
All these vain promises on beauty jars
Somewhere with your wings on time
You must be laughing
Behind our eyes
Calendars of our lives
Circled with compromise
Sweet bird of time and change
You must be laughing
Up on your feathers laughing
Golden in time
Cities under the sand
Power, ideals and beauty
Fading in everyone's hand
Give me some time
I feel like I'm losing mine
Out here on this horizon line
With the earth spinning
And the sky forever rushing
No one knows
They can never get that close
Guesses at most
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
Guesses based on what each set of time and change is touching
. . .
I see I am not the only one with limited tolerance for trivia, not to mention music, following tragedy. Some wisdom from David Toop.
Having problems linking, so go to www.medientum.at/mt/stories/storyReader$118
. . .
Things could be better. One hopes.
I don't know about the "Secret Life of the Office" but I certainly feel on a par with the poor call centre manager who was unsubtly edged out of the organisation. My in-tray is practically empty. There is very little to do in the "working day" now except to drear through routines. But then again the job I came to do has to all intents and purposes been done, and soon I will be too.
At least at QMH I have my own office and can shut myself away, but on the other hand it now averages two hours to travel a distance which, as the crow files, cannot be more than five or six miles. All caused by the arrogance of others who mistakenly believe that they are deserving of special treatment - arrogantly jaywalking, butting into bus lanes - whereas if they really were special, they wouldn't be crawling around the Wandsworth Bridge roundabout at 8 in the morning. They are just eating from the same plate of shit from which I am obliged to dine.
SGH is by contrast a breeze to get to, but one has to share an office there, and the days are made intolerable by having to listen to endless trivial prattle from others 'til my head is ready to explode.
I don't have much interest in anything at the moment. ILx increasingly to me is like a Pollock's toy theatre set which one has grown out of - it just does not appeal.
Longing to be out of it all. Like a beast of the field which has performed its biological duties, or has been involuntarily stripped of them due to circumstances, there comes a time when one just has to lie down and die. It can't be that far away now.
Then again, there are one or two kind souls dotted around the globe who have this crazy idea about wanting to keep me alive! :-)
. . .
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
SONGS BY WHICH TO RECONSIDER THE NATURE AND MANIFESTATIONS OF MELANCHOLY
1. Tom Jobim Chronicle of the Assassinated House
Such liquid, sensuous music; such pain in the words. The strings are weeping too.
2. Gil Evans Where Flamingoes Fly
Max Harrison rightly labels the melancholy of this piece more authentically "modernist" than much of what was being touted as avant-garde at the time (Schuller, stand up at the back).
3. Tim Buckley Love From Room 109 At The Islander
Because everybody wants you, too.
4. Archie Shepp with Jeanne Lee and Lester Bowie There Is A Balm In Gilead
Especially coming after the track "Blase." Venus or Severin? Thomas Tallis more like.
5. Milton Nascimiento Cais
The way the Nymanesque piano/vocal fadeout bleeds solely into the right channel; life fading, diluting.
6. George Crumb Music For A Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III): Music Of The Starry Night
I feel her in the graceful aura.
7. Armenian Navy Band Don't Go Too Far Away From Yourself
Proof of how the same Incredible Hulk closing sequence-style piano motif (cf. Dido "Dai Can't Breathe") can either demolish or rebuild popular music. Armenia is of course entirely surrounded by land and has no navy.
Because Patrick McGoohan said that seven was the ideal number. Beyond that one repeats oneself.
. . .
Monday, July 08, 2002
DREAM YOUR OWN HUBRIS, THEN OPEN UP FOR NEMESIS
The trouble is - it would be headline news. Worthy at least of page 15 of the Daily Mail. Cue another unthinking thinkpiece (probably penned by Raj Persaud) about the failure of child prodigies to survive as adults. It would stir no cause. Blah Blah Frankie Lymon Nyuk Nyuk Boy Wonder Who Had It All And Lost It Yak Yak Inconsiderate.
ILx is a gated community from which I have wilfully locked myself out. It is doing me no good, even pseudonymously - it always ends up at the same terminal.
It's like Peter Cook's life without the first 30 years.
At present there are no gates available for me to open up.
TEN SONGS
1. Damon Albarn/Mali Music Sunset Coming On
What we secretly wanted Heathen Chemistry to sound like.
2. Streets All Got Our Runnin's
Chekhov's garage in reverse. Conversely I am not wearing £109 trainers.
3. Be Good Tanyas The Littlest Birds
The subtlest Syd Barrett paraphrase ever?
4. Cibo Matto Sugar Water
A children's sunset. We will not see the sunrise again. Buffy usage nails the point.
5. Kid Creole & the Coconuts Off The Coast Of Me
The drowner resurfaces. Sung from a different core, at warp speed.
6. Raincoats Dancing In Our Head
What they secretly wanted Heathen Chemistry to sound like.
7. Patti Smith Piss Factory
OK so it's proto-Jools Holland piano. But, as with everything (cf. Ayler) the extraordinary voice instrument cuts through the most banal of backings.
8. TLC Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg
And look where it got HER!
9. Elliott Smith Can't Make A Sound
What you secretly altered Heathen Chemistry to sound like.
10. Rob Dougan Speed Me Towards Death
Just because the prelude's not so hot doesn't make the book crap. Far be it from me to talk.
. . .
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
Suicide is about caring about other people. It's about pride. Suicide is about caring what other people think. Only the "non-carers" go on living. So Doyle does not get run over by that big bus, splash squash. Lucky bastard. I did. He will continue to proceed and will go nowhere near the D to the S to the fucking S in Spindlehowe Road of old, some say Mount Pleasant.
Be like Ofili. Parcel up and meticulously wrap the dung. Exterminate the odour - it's the Borough of Shoreditch, right behind Texaco, no one will notice.
But those lights upstairs - Willow Walk for Me. More stained glass imposition than G&G with their 1977 should still be 1957 really Dirty Words - looking inside Kenneth Williams' hollow heart. They didn't want it to update. The Nat West Tower still half built. No weekend cops looking at dodgy wallahs taking pix on the Saturday prior to May Day. Leadenhall Market/Museum of London/Holborn Viaduct - an imagined trail which never existed, culminating in the proud corpsed gunner athwart the Prudential building, above Chancery Lane - there for chancers, Archer's Federation of Physical Culture.
Hegel did not plan Sophie Ellis-Bextor. But he allowed for her.
. . .
ROB DOUGAN
Look, I wanted art to dissuade me from doing it, not to encourage me.
OK, so you're in your dream now, and on the highway - but back to where? Or, like Mr Rob Dougan's alter ego in his song "I'm Not Driving Anymore," track 5 on this astonishing debut album of his called "Furious Angels," puts it, are you simply "a blind man driving my car into oblivion"?
There's no getting around it, this is a concept album about that temptation, and that temptation it is aye suicide. An album about terminating yourself. An album about asking others to terminate you, be terminated with you, terminate others on your behalf, the links between the big death and the little deaths. Love and death. Sex and Lucia.
In 1995 he did, and was, "Clubbed to Death," chilling out Elgar to the extent that Gerontius was reheated as foretold in "Penda's Fen." In 1998 he released the single "Furious Angels," the Clubbed to Death mix of which is the most flattening, demonic pop record of the '90s. It was not a hit, largely ignored due to the mistaken belief that the singer was a pseudonymous Chris Rea (and why should that be a minus point? See my upcoming "ageing and water" article for further exploration). The original mix appears on this similarly titled debut album; not quite as overpowering, but still an uncompromising beginning to what may be the bleakest and most sonorously expansive record since Walker's "Tilt."
Dougan's voice has more to it than Rea-heavy, however; an odd growling chanson of a voice, arriving at some interesting equations (Rea + an octave x Jacques Brel = Tom Waits).
And the orchestration! Involving up to 120 players at a time, and decorously handled by Nick Ingman and Wil Malone, this has to be the most ebulliently-ornamented record since Horn's heyday; the icing almost obliterating the intent (Macarthur Park!). I am reminded of what I hoped ACT would sound like (that great dying breath of the original ZTT "Snobbery and Decay" - go and dig it out NOW).
After the "End in a Line" atonal string sliding climax of "Furious Angels" comes "Will You Follow Me?" inspired openly by Lawrence of Arabia. The vast desert of love? And full of potential traitors, as evoked by the next vocal track "Left Me For Dead" where Dougan growls vengeance on someone who, er, left him to die. Brutal and bathetic. Then there's "I'm Not Driving Anymore" a plea to be left alone to get on and end his life, with the implicit thread that anyone who helps him will also perish ("I can't swerve to save your life 'cos then I'll lose control," "you keep keeping me alive to face another day" he screams). A "Kurayamino variation" of the original Clubbed to Death track follows, like a giant question mark. Then "There's Only Me" where he has designs on his potential beloved once her inconvenient current partner is out of the way, the orchestra leaping over hurdles, almost trying to keep up with him.
And if the two of them were left alone, what would there be? "Nothing At All" he explains in the next track, the backing sinking around him like a lung-filled Celine Dion exposed to Cathy Berberian. By the time of "Born Yesterday" he faces her with pure contempt. Why can't I just exist? Why do I have to say anything? Everything is free now -
"Speed Me Towards Death" is a suicide note set to music. No cop out. "I've decided it's life/That I don't like." "I'd die for some company." "I've realised that this world/At its best/Is just a prelude to the next/And it's not one I want to read/It's not one I want to hear." The orchestra howls in his ear, lycanthropically, about to choke the last bit of life out of him.
And then?
We're in a bar. The Elite Cafe in Unthank, perhaps? Duncan Thaw out the other end? "Drinking Song" a Tom Waits-style ballad which is essentially about how he, the musician, wants to hook you, the listener, with the perfect song so that he can "kiss you and weep" having bowed out.
Then track 13 "Pause." A minute's silence.
What is he thinking?
Second thoughts? Surely not?
But no, there's a coda "One And The Same." Over the greenest orchard of orchestration on the album, Dougan elects not to go. Heaven is just a step away, but for now we'll keep persevering, see out the next day. Perhaps a necessary ending - compare with the Streets' "Stay Positive"! - but significantly this is the only song whose lyrics are not printed in the 28-page booklet, filled otherwise with images of Mr Dougan's sculpture melting, burning and exploding, and the man himself in various stages of apprehension (looking almost like the young Welles on the cover! Is he winking?)
No doubt they will try to market Dougan as a male existentialist Dido. Will this sell in midsummer? Nothing here which Eminem could sample (even though his own worldview is equally as bleak, if not more so, in the song "Kim" turning thoughts into action - the logical conclusion of the train of thought "Furious Angels" starts?).
Album of the year, of course.
And where does all this leave me?
Wouldn't you like to know?
. . .
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