Tuesday, September 30, 2003
...
9/30/2003 11:43:00 pm
...
9/30/2003 11:21:00 pm
I shall write what I want, when I want, and where I want. I suggest you don't pick scabs, but rather let them heal. I can't keep quiet forever.
9/30/2003 11:15:00 pm
I'm contemplating stopping AusPishFish, or at least having a sabbatical. Hmmm...
9/30/2003 04:23:00 pm
Catholic girl.
9/30/2003 09:09:00 am
Monday, September 29, 2003
Goodbye, Marcello, at least from this written incarnation. And good luck too, though I don't think it's much needed.
9/29/2003 11:22:00 pm
Jewish girl, I want to kiss you.
9/29/2003 10:57:00 pm
Sunday, September 28, 2003
Maybe normal service won't ever resume.
9/28/2003 11:37:00 am
Saturday, September 27, 2003
From someone, via Ian...
"Back in lifeguard training they told us a drowning person will hold a potential rescuer underwater to keep afloat. You cannot love and need someone at the same time."
9/27/2003 09:27:00 pm
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Hmmm... I don't know what to write. I don't know if I should write anything. After last night I'm almost unspeakably angry, but at the same time I'm very relaxed about it. If I thought about it what would happen? I might cry, or I might break shit. I don't know. I spent 6 hours today being trained on Avid DV software and my brain's a bit fried.
Normal service will resume at some point, I promise. I've got to sort out Cakewalk Plasma first though... Why can't I sort out these Mark Hollis drums to loop properly?!
9/25/2003 08:49:00 pm
For all the fucked-up children of the world...
It's not our job to fix broken people. It's just our job to try and prevent people becoming broken in the first place.
9/25/2003 09:17:00 am
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Oh, and thanks to anybody and everybody who's emailed me over the last few days. Unless of course it was to ask if I wanted my penis enlarged.
x
9/24/2003 01:12:00 pm
Should anybody want a link in the sidebar, drop me an email with your URL and I'll add you. I'm hideously slow and out-of-touch with these kinds of things, and so need some prompting.
9/24/2003 01:11:00 pm
Ben linked.
9/24/2003 12:57:00 pm
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Outkast.
9/23/2003 09:18:00 am
Monday, September 22, 2003
So there I was, walking down to the trainstation, having skipped breaks and lunch again so I could leave early, when a £2 coin dropped from the heavens. No one around. No pocket or purse to have fallen from. Just an alley, and me. And a £2 coin. Magic?
9/22/2003 05:17:00 pm
Throughout all this I've been trying to review Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and failing. Marcello nails it all gloriously (though perhaps a little harsh on Big Boi) so I don't have to. But I still have to for Stylus.
Ugn.
9/22/2003 02:19:00 pm
I'm so tired.
9/22/2003 02:00:00 pm
What's the ettiquette as far as spilling guts goes on the blogosphere? Not that I feel part of the blogosphere anyway... It's not my universe, the concerns are not my concerns... Can I just open up here, where anyone can read it, anyone especially you? I've always been one for sorting things out in my own head before I say anything, do anything, emotionally at least, those sudden vents are always about stuff and never about stuff... Her's is still the only phone number I know off by heart apart from my childhood home. I just don't want to ring it anymore... Not at the moment. My head's been tight- no, aching for a week, ten days, two weeks. I'm not sure. I don't know. We'll see.
9/22/2003 09:46:00 am
"We'll know, won't we?
The stars will explode in the sky.
But they don't, do they?
Stars have their moment, then they die..."
Nick Cave
9/22/2003 09:21:00 am
Friday, September 19, 2003
The thing is, only people who live / have lived in London care about London.
9/19/2003 11:28:00 am
Jeffrey Smart.
9/19/2003 10:01:00 am
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Normal service will resume when my head's back together.
9/18/2003 09:34:00 pm
My name is all over the fucking internet.
9/18/2003 11:13:00 am
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Name analysis, prompted by Ian. Two different results for my first name though, depending on whether you use the truncated version or not...
"Your name of Nick has given you an idealistic nature with a desire to help others. Your initiative often causes you to be the first to act when you see a need. Since you are impressionable and receptive, you feel the misfortunes of others very keenly. However, this name makes it awkward for you to express your deeper thoughts and feelings with finesse and diplomacy to the extent that your candid, sometimes blunt, manner of speaking creates misunderstandings with others. Being somewhat self-centred, you learn through your own experiences, as you rarely take advice from others. Yet, you are sensitive and very easily hurt and offended. You long for praise and appreciation for your efforts, but others find it difficult to understand you. You dislike monotony and system and enjoy being creative in an inventive way whether it be in interior decorating, music, art, crafts, or other endeavours that require versatility and skill. You are imaginative and visionary, somewhat of a perfectionist, yet the results of your efforts often fall short of your high expectations. A leadership position appeals to you because you would enjoy directing others rather than being directed. Your feelings are strong and you tend to react intensely to situations."
"Your first name of Nicholas has given you a clever, deep mind and the talent to excel in highly inspirational lines of endeavour as a dramatist, musician, writer, or artist. You can be lifted by beauty in all forms and you are at the most creative when inspired. Your expressive, affectionate nature responds very quickly through your feelings, but you must guard against being possessive and jealous. You feel and sense much that you do not fully understand and cannot express. Your delight in mystery could draw you into occult studies or religions. Unfortunately, uncontrolled thoughts make it difficult for you to retain emotional stability, and prevent you from finding proper peace and relaxation. You tend to centre your interest too much on whatever means the most to you, and then you become over-possessive and suffer through disillusionment and fear of losses."
Both of which are kind of accurate in some ways (much like horoscope character definitions - "reliable sex with a Virgo" it says for me [Taurus]) but are pretty much horseshit on the whole. Interestingly, if you tell the kabalarians your name is "Asshat" they say this;
"Your name of Asshat makes you quick-minded, versatile, and very expressive. You are adaptable and creative in responding to new situations. This name has given you an interest in people and a desire for new experiences. You have the ability to create a favourable first impression, and so you could do well in the fields of sales promotion or entertainment. The use of this name creates a lack of stability in your affairs as it inclines you to procrastinate. It spoils patience and weakens your stand in matters of principle. You are inclined to do whatever is expedient in order to avoid facing issues. You could suffer bitter experiences through attracting wrong types of association and can be drawn into circumstances involving you in unwise situations."
"Fucktard" is sadly not a part of their database (but "Asshat" is?! wtf?!).
What's in a name? Lots and lots, probably. But not this, I suspect.
9/17/2003 11:02:00 am
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Hmmm... Fact is, I'm quite a hard bastard and an ass-kicker when I need to be. I don't have a problem with the city, I just prefer clean air. I can dance and I can focus my eyes on a distant point.
9/16/2003 10:59:00 pm
One of my best friends is in Japan. James, I love you to bits. Even from thousands of miles away you make me laugh.
9/16/2003 04:27:00 pm
Radio Five Live had some interesting guff about delinquent children on yesterday (or maybe Sunday) morning, teachers living in fear of violence, having nervous breakdowns, suffering from depression, increased truancy, drug-taking, verbal and physical assualts by kids, kids with ADHD, kids on Ritalin, decreasing literacy etcetera etcetera. I'm not a teacher but my mum is, and several of my friends are becoming teachers ("why don't you, Nick?" - because I don't like kids), so I have possibly a slightly better idea of what goes on in schools than your average 20-something who isn't a teacher and doesn't have kids (plus the school my mum works at is one for special needs kids, so I hear first-hand from her the extremes of pupils' behavioural problems which are echoed in, but worse than, mainstream education).
Anyway, I'm particularly intrigued by the question of how, given all these facts about literacy and misbehavior and truancy and the like, GCSE and A Level results are still improving year-on-year. In the 45-minutes or so of the program I head, and in the various other discussions on the topic of bad behavior in schools over the last couple of years that I've heard on Five Live, the disparity between these two phenomena hasn't been addressed. I absolutely refuse to believe I'm the only person intrigued by this, so why isn't much more made of it?
9/16/2003 02:11:00 pm
In related news, Careless Talk Costs Lives is folding with issue 1 (it started with 12 and workd it's way backwards from there). While it's not good that another music magazine is failing I can't say I'm surprised because a; they didn't print anything I sent them (they picked Olav's review of Elbow's latest album over mine - Olav I luv yer but yer a git), b; the paper was far too nice and expensive, c; it's far too precious, and d; once again the furthest it appeared to get away from London was Brighton, which, as everybody not from London or Brighton knows, is just Camden with a coastline. Allegedly.
Where is the music magazine that I can read? Maybe, given NME's imminent (already happened if you live in London, as ever) relaunch as a smaller, glossier magazine (complete with contents page!), I ought to write to Conor McNicholas and try and convince him to hire me. I read NME every week from when I was 15 till I was 22, when the all-pervasive stench of narrow-minded, juvenile badness finally convinced me I was wasting my time. Wednesday's at university would be spent alone in the student union bar with a couple of pints of Guinness, a sandwich, and copies of NME and The Guardian (so sue me - I'm an ex-working class 20-something with pretentions of intelligence and liberalism, what am I meant to read?).
New Musical Express. New. Music. Not just old music played by young people with bad jackets. Please. There's nothing else.
9/16/2003 02:02:00 pm
Bang! have the most awful layout, both online and in print (slightly less bad in print, but only slightly). As if the general layout, typesetting and art direction wasn't scraggly and confusing enough Bang! started a new graphics feature as part of their reviews section a couple of months ago, whereby they would plot the "goodness topography" (my name for it, not theirs) of an album by giving each track a rank on a bar-chart (remember those from school?).
This has problems on several levels. For a start it looks crap, secondly it's passing off subjective opinion as mathematical fact, thirdly it takes up valuable space that could be filled more productively with words, and fourth-
Fourth...
Fourth...
Hmmm... How to get this across? Is it negligent to review a high-profile album when you've only heard, say, 13 of 18 tracks on that album? Possibly. If you then attempted to plot the "goodness topography" of the album though, and both ommitted some tracks because you hadn't heard them and also got the tracks you had heard in the wrong order, then I think that ups the negligence charge from possibly to probably. Well that's what Bang! did when they reviewed The Neptunes Present... Clones.
But that's not it. Because in the same issue Bang! also reviewed Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which they also plotted the "goodness topography" of. Except with Speakerboxx... they'd only heard ten songs. Ten songs out of 39. 39. One less than 40. i.e. They had heard 25% of it. Speakerboxxx... is a 140-minute monster and they offered their opinion after being exposed to something like 35-minutes of it. If that isn't professional negligence then I don't know what is.
9/16/2003 01:46:00 pm
Monday, September 15, 2003
Today's soundtrack;
Can Ege Bamyasi
Brian Eno Another Green World
The Rapture Echoes
Outkast Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
9/15/2003 04:23:00 pm
It's difficult to
understand red when you have
only ever seen
blue, even if people
have described red to you, and
you have imagined.
9/15/2003 11:20:00 am
ear·gasm (îr'gaz-em)
n.
The peak of musical excitement, characterized by strong feelings of pleasure and by a series of involuntary contractions of the muscles of the mouth, chest and genitals, usually accompanied by the ejaculation or utterance of verbal exclamations of pleasure by the listener. Also called climax.
v.
To have an eargasm.
9/15/2003 10:34:00 am
Sunday, September 14, 2003
I have Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.
9/14/2003 11:12:00 pm
Sam writes perhaps the most simply honest and affecting thing about 9/11 that I've read since Ian McEwan's piece during the aftermath about the messages people trapped in the WTC left on their loved one's answerphones. How is a 14-year-old (as Sam would have been back then) supposed to deal with distant death if the rest of us don't know how?
At 1pm (there or thereabouts) on Tuesday September the eleventh I was just stepping out of my car; before I turned the engine off someone on Radio Five Live (Simon Mayo?) announced that a plane had hit the WTC. I assumed it must be a microlite or something, stepped out of the car, and went about my business. An hour and a half later I got back in the car and turned the radio back on and the world had collapsed. I rushed home and sat glued to satellite television for the next few hours, trying to make sense of it, gather facts, understand, before going and playing football as I always do on a Tuesday evening. What else was I meant to do?
My business in that hour and a half was death. A schoolfriend of mine had died of cancer. 23, talented, engaged to be married. Dead. Saskia Carter. She'd been at RADA. She was a singer, dancer, actress, poet... You know when obituraries of people who die young say they were "full of life"? I always think that's bullshit. Saskia was. Someone actually did say of her once to me "if you want something doing, ask a busy person - Saskia's the busiest person. She can do anything." And it was true. The hour and a half had been spent discussing her memorial service with the person who'd said that about her; our old drama teacher. In a very real sense, death was all around that day.
A couple of weeks later I went to Saskia's memorial service, felt very strange, left early and then drank myself into a melancholic stupor in the space of barely an hour while watching a shit band made up of more ex-schoolfriends embarass themselves in a pub. 9/11. I still don't understand what it means.
9/14/2003 09:31:00 pm
Friday, September 12, 2003
TWANBOC linked, at last. I am a lazy shithead.
9/12/2003 11:24:00 pm
I love Orbital. I wish I could articulate it.
If pushed, I will admit to being inspired by (in terms of writers) Hunter S Thompsn and AA Milne. But really, the reason I write about music is The Stone Roses, Orbital, and maybe, at a push, Jeff Buckley and The Verve.
9/12/2003 11:11:00 pm
Speaking purely from a second-hand perspective, depression is an evil, evil thing. I'm lucky that I'm blessed with a thick skin and an easy-going demeanour (I know that seems unlikely, but it's true).
9/12/2003 10:55:00 pm
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
She comes in colours
(black & blue); whiff of belly.
Lifted up to grass.
9/10/2003 11:24:00 am
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Last minute. The floodlights are off on the far pitch and the people who were playing or training or whatever over there are walking past. Some of them are on our third of the Astroturf now, walking back towards the gate behind the goal my team are attacking. The fat lady is singing. It’s 6-all. I’m on the left wing and Jim delivers the ball to me. Martin Henson is between me and the goal. It is very much the last minute. Martin is a big man and not young, incredibly skilful and with years of experience; but he’s not a defender. A touch with the left foot, I’m not sure where it’s going but I know where I want it to go; between his legs. It goes there, Martin is unbalanced and stumbles, teetering in the right direction to allow me to nip round and touch the ball back on to my right foot. But it bobbles, someone else is there, it knocks off them and back towards me, too high, and my step is out of synch with the ball, it hits my left thigh and moves forward slightly, knee height and 18, 24 inches away… Left foot, gentle but with a sense of ultimate purpose, the ball nearer the ground now, beneath and through and round at the same time, not clipped or hit but struck and struck perfectly at that, across the defender and the keeper and inexorably into the top far-corner! “Oh yes!”
People walking behind the goal and one of them stops and says “fucking good goal mate”, never seen him before, never see him again, for that split-second he’s my favourite person. Oh wow. What’s that feeling? Complete loss of conscious thought, complete surrender to instinct. It wasn’t me that struck that ball, it was my foot… If that makes sense. I’ve had a shit day and now it’s all alright. More than alright. I scored three goals and we won 7-6. Last-minute winner. Is that shallow? I don’t think so. It’s almost better than any song, that feeling as- no, not as but just before the ball hits the back of the net, the entire, endless and yet still non-existent moment from connection of foot and ball to the arrival of the ball in its proper place (the top corner!), the instant just before the ball pushes the net backwards and outwards… That’s the best feeling, when inevitability kicks in and no one can stop it, the second before climax.
Forza.
9/09/2003 11:51:00 pm
I've just acquired a copy of Britney and on the inside back cover our eponymous heroine looks astonishingly like Dusty. Complete double-take the first time I swung the jewel-case open.
9/09/2003 11:07:00 pm
Richard Long is also a genius. Here is his website.
9/09/2003 11:43:00 am
Andy Goldsworthy is a genius. Here is his website .
9/09/2003 11:41:00 am
On a plus point, Lisa and Ian are another two new recruits at Stylus who look to be filling holes that have needed attention for a while. Less of this fucking hand-wringing and more simple joy and pleasure and passion about music. Lisa's the only female music writer at Stylus and she's out on a limb at the moment (blog-scrapes being a baptism-of-fire), but I have a sneaking suspicion, a hunch maybe, that given a bit of time to get used to the scenery she'll be punching way above her weight. Plus having people who are both this good and reliable to boot means that I don't have to worry about churning out reviews so much.
9/09/2003 11:26:00 am
And it's not getting better, with criticism and fading hopes for elevenses.
9/09/2003 11:19:00 am
Laughing Stock and grey skies for breakfast...
9/09/2003 09:53:00 am
Monday, September 08, 2003
I got a parking ticket. I got a parking ticket for parking in Dawlish Warren carpark for an hour on Sunday morning whilst Billy, Eva and I went for a walk around the spit and ate blackberries straight off the brambles. In September. On a Sunday. When it was raining. And there were no other cars in the carpark. Well, only a hundred maybe, in a carpark that takes probably 800 cars. And we were parked at the far end by tyhe nature reserve, well away from the machines. I always used to park there on Sundays.
Fucking parking nazis. £20 for a morning's relaxation.
9/08/2003 11:30:00 pm
I'm not afraid of post-punk - I've been listening to Wire all weekend...
I can see Mark's point a bit better now he's framed it (he's not saying the knackered vocals of Lumidee are the only good thing about "Never Leave You" [and yes it would be horrendous if Beyoncé sang it - doubly so if she did her faux-sexualised Bond-girl dance routine all over the video like she does on "Baby Boy" {this time with no shoes! for double-sexiness!}]), but even so I'm still concerned about the inevitability with which post-punk is trotted out as a genesis point, influence, staging post. It's like 1996 all over again only instead of The Beatles and The Small Faces it's Wire or PiL or whoever who are being mythologised. People who can't sing have been making wonderful pop music since pop music began. People who can't sing have been singing since singing began. I guess in a sense then I am afraid of post-punk, afraid of it becoming a new musical monarchy, a new standard, a new heirarchy, even if I'm not afraid of the actual music. I don't like anybody who insists it was ever better in the past becasuet hat invalidates both now and the future, and although that's not what people are doing they are setting up others to do so if they are creating a moment when everything seems to have to be framed in the context of its relationship to something else (one specific thing).
9/08/2003 12:18:00 am
Nothing is ever finished, merely no longer worked on…
What am I…
The romantic or the realist… The romantic without realism (cynicism) is just a dreamer, carrying notions in his heart without any intention of ever setting them free, knowing that he wants them close because they’re fragile and special. He needs the dispassion and resignation, the bloody-mindedness or the realist in order to bring those dreams about, to act on them, to let them go and offer them the space that would give them life. Some of them will die, but some of them will fly. And none of them will go anywhere if you keep them to your chest. Perhaps. Likewise the realist needs dreams to add colour and sound, to reveal pathways…
This is storytelling, what I do. Each time I write here I am telling the story of me, the story of how I felt about a record, an idea, a person, a strange event. A dream or an imagining. The structure and placement of the words has no more import other than to keep you (me) reading, smiling, furrowing the brow. Nothing really beautiful exists in complete abstraction; it all needs to come back somehow to stories, the stories we tell each other with words, with songs, sounds, images, colours, cloths, tastes, scents, kisses… Science has pushed us to deny the Grand Story and instead see our lives as series of anecdotes, tales and comments, and this is fine. This is better. Because once the scale of the story is reduced it becomes controllable, in part, by the person at the centre of it. Stories are how we understand, how we progress, how we enjoy. A beat can be a story, a wave can be a story. A dasein is a story. Stories move through and over and between one another and they never end, they simply stop being told, or become another story, or are forgotten for a while.
The opposite of the story is the spectacle, the image without narrative, the object without history. The spectacle can be beautiful but it cannot be profound. It can only have the appearance of profundity. This is because the spectacle does not move, it is a stasis, and a stasis is a lie and a figment. All real things have movement, all real things change and decay; it’s by changing and decaying that they help us learn. By touching something and eroding it we take from it and learn from it, and continue its own story as well as our own. The spectacle cannot be touched because it has no substance. Substance is movement; even if only internal, and the spectacle has no movement because it has no animation and no story. Anything without a story is still and dead and forgotten.
The writer is interested in the creation of spectacle, of the freezing of imagined perfection, capturing something and holding it forever. Denying it movement. Removing its story. The pleasure for the writer comes in the placement of the words themselves, in the arrangement of the spectacle, the manipulation of their poses to assume aesthetic loveliness. The storyteller is interested in the telling, not the placement. Telling must necessarily involve communication, parlance, discourse; all of which are antithetical to the spectacle because they encourage movement and decay and change and would therefore corrode and alter the aesthetic of the spectacle.
The romantic holds his notions to his chest as the writer arranges words into beautiful shapes and stills them of movement. The realist casts away notions to allow them to become stories.
I want to be a storyteller, not a writer.
9/08/2003 12:00:00 am
Saturday, September 06, 2003
The storyteller and the writer sat down to talk...
The storyteller spoke, and then paused to listen to the writer's response. The writer said nothing, but gazed into space. The storyteller spoke again, hoping to say something the writer would enjoy enough to respond to this time. When the storyteller paused to hear the writer's response once more, the writer continued to stare into space.
A third time the storyteller spoke to the writer, and in the midst of his tale the writer turned quickly and said-
"Oh, my words can be beautiful."
The storyteller cried.
9/06/2003 12:29:00 am
Friday, September 05, 2003
Tell me; what is the difference between brain and belly? And is one more important than the other?
I like to think that brain and belly can be the same thing.
9/05/2003 02:03:00 pm
Thursday, September 04, 2003
August 28th (my brother's 33rd Birthday) and Two kinds of music lover; yes. Got my vote.
Enough of this inter-blog communication and back-patting. Uergh. So distasteful. I know who I'm writing for now.
9/04/2003 09:52:00 pm
The most fun (read ‘satisfying’) part of my ‘job’ at Stylus (apart from having people tell me they want to fuck me, or whatever) is editing Dave Q’s pieces (to call them reviews is an injustice). The man is a genius. Deranged, malcontent, misanthropic, cynical, bitter and nonsensical, but a genius. EVERY time I open a file from him in my inbox I’m astonished and enlightened. We’re so lucky to have him writing with us. I Love Music has been a happy fishing ground for Stylus lately, with Dom Passantino, Cozen, William B. Swygart, Matt DC (killer first review, by the way)and Dave Q all recent recruitments of note from there, and maybe a couple more on the way. With the relaunch looking good (a few niggles to be ironed out and further developments to be finalised aside [not that anything is ever finished, of course, merely not worked on anymore]), these ILMers onboard, plus a couple of other recent writing acquisitions who seem really promising, I’m feeling really confident that in a couple of years we can be contributing something really worthwhile. < /smug>
Foxy Lady
I don’t listen to it often, or him often, because I’m not one for living in the past, however illustrious it may be, but when I do it’s undeniable that it’s complete sex, vocals pushed all the way out wide on the right-hand side to make way for that instrument, grinding and spinning and wailing better than any voice, drums and bass played well but just fucking ignored, because, let’s face it, if you’re having a wank (let’s not romanticise what this is, for once) it doesn’t matter what colour the bedspread or the curtains are, does it? They’re just context; and if you’re going to drop yourself in it and lose that linear fantasy you had in mind and give into pure sensation then there’s no point in adulterating the fucking thing. So Noel’s doing these backing vocals only they’re not at the back, they’re on the other side, just quieter (and Jimi’s voice isn’t amped up enough as it is), and Noel sounds drunk, punch-drunk maybe, or fuck-drunk, woozy cos the blood’s not in his head anymore, it’s in his pants and in his bass (Mitch and Noel always looked shit too; Jimi’s dressed like a fucking magician on the cover, cos that’s what he’s doing, and these sidemen look like a member of The Small Faces and a stupidly white-fro’d Maths teacher who’s spectacles have been nicked – Jimi’s got two buttons undone and yours are done all the way up for fuck’s sake). But yeah, Mitch can barely speak because his member’s engorged and Jimi’s just as turned on, more so, probably, but in control. On the edge of it, yeah, of course, but in control. You couldn’t play that if you were totally off it. Could you? I’m not a magician. I mean ‘musician’. “Love Or Confusion” spells it out succinctly but it’s not that we’re interested in. If it’s succinct it’s not quite as full-on, is it? Even when he’s succinct he’s giving into synaesthesia though, “must there be all these colours without names / without sounds”, but he’s remembering. It’s in “Foxy Lady” that he’s totally out of it in terms of his headspace, body together just enough to co-ordinate his fingers (which he does backwards you fucking limp-wristed fuckers, backwards and upside-down!). And anyway, it’s not wanking if you’ve got an audience, is it? It’s making love then, performing, which means that other people are involved and you’re all getting yours. Back to a more innocent time, is this? I don’t understand who or what the Baby Boomers are but Dave Q hates them and blames them and I’m inclined to agree with him. But there wasn’t popular and alternative music there was just stuff lots of people liked and stuff fewer people liked. Courtney Love, of all people, made most sense about it. Why feel guilty about being good? Oh yeah because you’re fucking privileged and therefore guilty and therefore a; have to corrupt it into being art and b; have to make it seem like you struggled to get there anyway, you fucking Catholic little piece of whinging shit. Oh, and of course, if you’re privileged it’s not your place, is it? So either stop whinging about it or else get the fuck out. But yeah. “Foxy Lady”. Like “Voodoo Chile” (the looooooong one) he’s not gonna hurt you (“I made love to you in your sleep / and Lord knows you feel no pain” – oh the pressures of having a big dick, eh Jimi?) and maybe he even throws Tarantino’s “Like A Virgin” speech into full relief (oh to be black and a musician and sexy, eh Quentin?- that’s why you made such a shit vampire-killer; I bet Van Peebles could do it with a silver bullet and a string of garlic). Yeah. Jimi’s off on one. “Not necessarily stoned… / but… / beautiful…”
Up next, “Piss Diary”.
9/04/2003 09:11:00 pm
After two days of worry, sitting up late at night, attempting to install over and over and over again, after a midnight email to Cakewalk techsupport, I've finally installed Cakewalk Plasma on my new computer. My adventures in modern music begin here...
By the way, Olly, you need to get (Bytes) by Black Dog Productions (Warp 1993). I think you might like it.
9/04/2003 07:25:00 pm
Olly's started blogging! Olly, I miss you. I emailed James telling him to do a Japanese Adventures blog. The Lumidee single is great. Outkast are the best band in the world (in Nick's subjective little world, anyway). Bimbolake is wicked and "Senorita" is great. N*E*R*D are wonderful.
I must do some work.
9/04/2003 10:13:00 am
Radio Five Live last night (or was it technically this morning?) got talking about music again, which they seem to do quite often for a station based around live news and sport that doesn't play any music. Anyway, they had in a dancer (not sure if he was professional) who danced to rock n roll music and latin music and all other sorts or music (12 hours a week was the figure he kept giving for how often he danced), but who didn't own a single CD or record. Why? Because he didn't actually care at all about the music, merely the dancing, which I guess he kind of saw as exercise / sport. The presenters and other guests were incredulous about this (one of them was Steve Lamacq).
Anyway, the upshot is that they got people to text, email and phone in either suggesting the first record that this chap should buy (I think one of the presenters offered to buy it for him [I texted in suggesting Spirit Of Eden]) and other diversionary anecdotes and opinions about music, whether they like it, if it's essential, how many CDs they own etcetera. But there was one chap in particular, who phoned in and explained how he used to be a music junkie in his late teens and early 20s, unable to walk past a record shop without buying something (Lamacq was nodding with agreement at this, as was I, distractedly). But he'd had an epiphany a couple of years ago (he was still only late 20s I think) and stopped. Not just stopped buying, but stopped listening, and had got rid of most of his records/CDs. He had, he said, taken up reading instead.
I don't know what to think of this at all. And what's more I've got stuff to be doing at work this mornign, so I'm not going to be able to formulate ideas or thoughts on it properly, and will probably forget about it soon enough anyway. But my initial impression was that if you can love music so much tat you can become impulsive about it (and presumably this guy must've had some emotional involvement with it at least) and then drop it like a stone and take up something else, feel no remorse, and what's more state that listening to music is "a complete waste of time" (which is what this bloke said) could you do that with anything/everything else? People? I'm all for the idea of people changing, but...
9/04/2003 09:50:00 am
Yes, I am basically saying the same thing over and over and over again. But it needs to be said, sometimes.
In related news, I am very tired. And I've finally linked It's all in your mind after promising I would ages ago.
If you read this blog, please email me at nick@beatbay.co.uk (again). That goes double if you think I'm a twat / want to puke everytime you see my name. Thanks.
9/04/2003 12:01:00 am
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Like any sane man (woman or child), Mark K-Punk likes the Lumidee single. Unfortunately he has to contextualise it in terms of post-punk qualities, ie; the fact that she can't sing. OK, she can't sing, it's true, and her weak vocals add a degree of emotional desperation (near hysteria, but contained massively) to the tune, giving it's slinky, funky, irresistable handclap-percussive hook some empathic clout on top of the masterful fishing lines dropped neatly into your jiggy-centre ("uh-uh-uh-oh" in the remix, which she mimes along with in the video like Buster Keaton falling off a cliff on a burning train - ie; beautiful, fatalist, tragic and brave all at the same time), but the less-than-technically-brilliant vocals are not the only thing that's great about the tune. You might as well say you like it because she's not a skinny lass vacuum-formed from plastic in the anorexia-melisma mould like so many other female singers these days (or airbrushed to look as if they are). Excuses, excuses, excuses. There's nothing post-punk about "Never Leave Me (Uh-Oh)" at all, but there's everything brillaint about it.
9/03/2003 02:11:00 pm
Credibility, authenticity, the genuine, feeling really real and clubbing a baby seal…
Written for The Turntable…
The thing is that all these notions are obsolete, and what’s more I’m not sure any of them were ever not obsolete. The problem is that they encourage a belief in universal truths, in objective facts about music, art and humanity, and there is no objective truth about these things. You may find Ott an interesting writer, Todd, but for me he’s flawed because he thinks he’s got it all worked out, when the reality is that there is nothing to be worked out. Ott’s “where’s your cred at” jibe may be amusing, but it’s also dangerous because it assumes that if you like X then you must ergo like Y as well, and what’s more that you must dislike Z, as if the vagaries of human tastes must fit directly into analogous compartments linked by threads of logic, when they don’t. We’re not dealing with logic, we’re dealing with aesthetic and emotional responses to things, to music, art, and ultimately through that, to the people and events and objects that compose our universes. “Credibility” as such, trusting a writer’s taste implicitly and completely, assumes that you’re the perfect fit for that writer; the only way you can be is if the writer created you as a perfect work of fiction designed to fit, like in The Circular Ruins by Borges. And like in that story, once you start trying to create things as objects of your own perfection you lose track of your own creation and existential choice, and thus lose the credibility you were pursuing in the first place. This is the whole problem with Pitchfork. As soon as you think you know the order that everything fits into then you’re fucked, because that kind of codification, linearity and mathematical proof simply doesn’t exist outside of science and mathematics. Even science as a discipline recognises now that none of its findings and laws are immutable, because the universe, like individual people, is a work in progress. Much as we can’t understand it, given that the universe is infinite, gravity could stop working tomorrow if something alters in the fundamental physics of the cosmos for whatever reason. If something that you’ve invested a great deal of faith and thought in as being a permanence, a given fact, an absolute, if something like that ruptures, flails, and alters completely for a reason beyond your understanding, then where does that leave you? Because if you pin yourself to a mast of one system, define yourself by it, and that system turns out to be wrong one day, then you have nothing of yourself left and you have to start again.
It’s interesting then that we still, as music writers in general, try to pin these little numbers on works of art as if we can state the immutable and universal quality of them, as if we actually know the minute differentials in class between a 7.8 and a 7.9, as if there’s a quantifiable (qualifiable!) system for working these things out. One of my lecturers at university sent off my final essay to be externally moderated, and it got sent back having been bumped up 3%. This didn’t alter its grade or even bring it nearer to a higher grade (it was already a first), and my lecturer confessed that he had no idea why they saw fit to add 3%, and also added that anything below 40% (a fail) or above 70% (a first) was simply arbitrary. With music writing this is accentuated, in that every mark is arbitrary, because there are no guidelines as to what constitutes a certain grade like in academic work; you simply have to rely on how you feel about something. As such I’m erring closer to Julio Desouza’s assertion that you ought to give everything either a 10 or a 1 – ie; bother or don’t bother.
Smashing apart these meta-narratives of universal truth is what postmodernism does at its most useful and positive utility, because it encourages (for me at least) a degree of incredulity and existential awareness (by removing meta-narratives it forces you to choose your own path and understand your own opinions). Cannibal Ox are not necessarily/intrinsically better than Jurassic 5, The Jesus & Mary Chain are not necessarily/intrinsically better than Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, post-rock is not necessarily/intrinsically better than trance. You cannot ever hope to prove these memes (ideas? - opinions) as fact. All you can do is understand and explain why you’ve come to any conclusion that you have come to. As soon as you start accepting these kind of memes as universal truths then you’ve given away your existential control to an external party (and what’s more you don’t even know exactly who that external party is).
What this comes down to is that all you have is you, your own opinions and feelings about things, and your ability to communicate them to others and make yourself receptive to the thoughts and feelings of others in turn, in order to further your own understanding of your opinions and feelings. There isn’t one system of order which you can buy into which sorts it all for you, and believing that there is, and that understanding and subscribing to it gives you credibility, is both futile and short-sighted. I have much more time for the opinions of someone who knows their own mind and feelings and is open to suggestion and tries to understand different values and cultures and approaches and forms on their own terms, rather than trying to squeeze them into a matrix of pre-defined judgement. I prefer the incredible to the credible.
9/03/2003 10:57:00 am
My legs are fucked. Last night I rediscovered my footballing form, scored four goals, created four goals, made some blinding touches and some crucial interceptions, but boy, am I feeling it this morning...
9/03/2003 09:26:00 am
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
I try, oh how I try, to look mean and moody and unapproachable. I've even taken to wearing my walkman+headphones at all times lately (primarily cos my snazzy new Sennheiser PX100s rock and I got some kick-ass NiMH batteries for the minidisc) in order to deter people, and yet still I am asked for directions seemingly in preferrence to anybody else in the vicinty. Just half an hour ago I was standing on a grassy knoll, staring aimlessly into space and dreaming of JFK's blooded head jolting back and to the left whilst listening to Vibert's exemplary "I Love Acid", when some chap asks me where Cornwall House (better known as The Lemongrove) is. Do I look like I know? Evidently. And I did. But still...
"Ghettomusick" and "Flip Flop Rock" from Speakerboxxx/The Love Below have been downloaded (worry not, Arista, I shall a; be reviewing the album for Stylus, b; be singing it's praises in all likelihood, c; buy myself a copy, and probably d; buy other people copies too as I have done with Stankonia, so you're not going to lose any money by me pinching it off the net first) and fuck me is they aren't both perfect. Fuck me if they are perfect too. I want to fuck every molecule of everyone ever, we're all beautiful.
 might just prove to be the album of the year, and then some. All this and The Rapture too on Monday! It's becoming too much. I may have to have a lie down.
9/02/2003 01:40:00 pm
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