Moo! I am having problems uploading pix and links to this blog. Just as frustrating, Error 403 (Forbidden) shows up about half the time I try to access this page. Other stuff, server-related, is happening, too. Perhaps the net is about to implode? I'll keep trying if you keep checking back.
Dammit, maybe I'll just go listen to some Ghostface and read Treasure Island.
I ran two photos of myself through the works, doing that Find The Celebrity In You thing over at MyHeritage and these are the names, in order, of the great ones I am supposed to resemble: Oscar Wilde, Alexandre Dumas, Henry Mancini, George Harrison, Brigham Young, Felix Mendelsohn, Annette Bening, Guillermo Coria, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Klee, J. M. Coetzee, Andie MacDowell, Gabriel Byrne, Mel Gibson, Mira Sorvino, Michael Douglas, and Sylvia Plath.
Never mind MacDowell and Sorvino—or, godsake, Annette Bening! I'm talking about Sylvia Effing Plath here. Are you people absolutely kidding me? Right, so, if I'm a guy, I'm the fattest-faced furbie to ever ponderously grace the earth, while, if I'm a girl, one out of four chances means I miss my bee-loving dad so much I'm going to kill myself. This internet, my desperadoes, is oh-so-cruel.
More words later. Books, today; music, manana.
Why Read The Classics? + Italo Calvino These are not your father's classics. Well, no—actually, a great deal of these thiry-six essays focus on your father's classics, and rightly so, but still, even when the accent is on traditional, it's not all traditional. Essays like "Nezzami's Seven Princesses", or, "The Structure Of The Orlando Furioso" (an obvious easy favourite for me), or "The Book Of Nature In Galileo", or, "The World Is An Artichoke" focus on the more baroque aspects of second-thought classics, and are absolute delights. And these essays are just the right size, too, back to something more Montaigne-intentioned; not neccessarily long, but complete thoughts upon carefully considered pleasures, and not obscure dissertations and erudite showmanship. Calvino does not venture far into modern waters, here—his subject, of course, somewhat hinders him—but does travel downstream as far as Hemingway, Pavese, Francis Ponge, and Raymond Queneau. Listen, academic essays are mostly boring—anything by C.S. Lewis proving the exception—but these are not academic essays, and these are not academic subjects. This book has for its subject the same theme as Casanova writing on women, Jane Grigson on food, Charles Mackay on gullibility, Twain on hypocrisy, or Jane Jacobs on suburbia: the author of the text is concerned, invested, interested, consumed—pick your own damn adjective!—by his or her subject. Laughter is catching, and sad people are not popular; strong emotion is like influenza, travelling from subject to subject, and the only way to avoid it is to bundle up and leave the room. If the author is interested, the reader will probably be interested, too. The subject of Calvino's essay's, like the subject of all good essays, is enjoyment. Calvino enjoys certain books and poems, and tells us why he enjoys them and why we should enjoy them. I don't know how much pleasure I would derive from a close reading of Pliny's Natural History, but I know that I certainly enjoyed Calvino reading it! A good essay, I believe, should fully express the particular state of the heart of its writer toward this or that object. These essays read like reports of appreciative discovery fom some explorer in exotic lands, each essay an expanded "Ozymandias" written for both the author's pleasure and his eagerness to hook others on his enjoyment, a mixtape of essays, if you will. And, as a mixtape, this book certainly succeeds.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women? Right, maybe not. But it would be something, at least. There are no shows coming up that I want to see. Movies? Please. Listen, my one shoe just finished tearing down the instep. That pair of black trousers has gone missing. My second job wants me to increase my availability from one shift a week to, like, five. I just remembered that my damn library fines are at about a hundred dollars. I am very tired and I am in a black mood. I have been trying to fight with a lot of the kids. I wish the people would insult me so I could have an excuse to attack them. I wished we lived in a world of mud and battle-axes and thunder-smash giants and if I wanted to run into a brick wall over and over again, who would stop me? No one would. To hell with Thulsa Doom and everyone else, I say. I don't want to live forever.
I still like the good-looking girls, though. I can't hate them.
"For Real" + Okkervil River A little farther off than last week, Solomon was sitting through one of those dreary officially-designated court days when any man-jack—or woman, for that matter—can walk up to the king and ask for a decision. And there was a fight in the doorway, women yelling and the calm voice of the porter, until Solomon raised his head and said, "Let them in, already, porter, get them in here, then." So the women came in, a brunette and another brunette, good women, non-smokers both, and the one woman claimed that the other had stolen her child—but there was no way to prove anything either way. Solomon shrugged and said "Whatever. Cut the baby in half and give them each a piece." But the actual for-sure real mother shrieked around a bit and then said, "No, let this woman here have my baby, then. Anything so long as my baby gets to live." And Solomon knew that only the real mother would have spoken like that and he gave the baby back to the real mother and made the other woman pay very heavily for her selfishness. Then he said, "I'm taking a break here," and he walked out the back door to where Okkervil River was playing a set in the garden and he smashed his fist against a wall, just once.
We're in her car—these things are ALWAYS in her car—and my girlfriend abruptly chants, with enthusiasm, "ZOO-dle DOO-dle COO-dle!"
"It's probably Tourettes'," I say. "Let's look into that."
"FOO-dle!"
That one made me laugh.
Sometimes you've just got to go with it and enjoy. Blazing—blazing?—noodling away at my next soon-to-be-unfinished novel, I'm going to write in a character called Brigadier James Macrobius Foodle. He will be evil and silly. Somebody, surely, will mutter "Stupid Foodle" over the course of the plot. Because sometimes, you've really got to go with it.
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"There Is A Light" + Arif Sitting in the oak-panelled diner in the quieter part of the city, soft lights streaming here and there as businessmen and their wives sip dark expensive wine, you hear the opening chords of the guitar: solid but not heavy, comfortingly plain. Arif starts singing, nothing fancy, but you can hear the training behind his voice. It's a workmanlike Morrissey cover, and Morrissey would be proud of it, or should be. The waitresses and waiters in their crisp white shirts and black ties accept discreetly large tips, people put their coats on—it's snowing outside—and other diners arrive.
In other news, other music. Yes, it's tripe, junk, derivative, who cares? WRM is climbing my list for favourite pop of the year—their new single, "Girls In The Back", with deadly cheers, is up on their website. Less "Alsation", more "Love Is A Number". Listen, WHITE ROSE MOVEMENT IS SEX. Condoms on your ears, please.
"Morte d'Arthur" + Alfred Tennyson When I was around fourteen years old, I opened a large book crammed with densely-printed columns and read these lines: "So all day long a noise of battle roll'd / Among the mountains by the winter sea." They finished me, those lines; I was hooked on Tennyson from that moment forward. And while I love The Idylls Of The King, especially "Balin And Balan" and "The Holy Grail", and while I think that the redacted version of "Morte d'Arthur" was wonderfully expanded in the last idyll, "The Passing Of Arthur", my first thought, when I think of Arthur fighting with his knights, is not of Malory's story, or Steinbeck's parables, or Tennyson's later Idylls: I think of "Morte d'Arthur" and its slow sad decline, of men fighting without hope in a world of winter, mountains around and a cold cold shore. Why do these men fight, if they fight without hope? Because they fight for their hearts and an image of perfection. Why else should anyone fight?
I know it's the same subject twice, now, but I can't help it, people, not posting this pic would have been daggers in my heart.
Listen, V For Vendetta, the film, erases the ONLY complaint I had about V For Vendetta, the (thank-you, AK) trade paperback. Which was the garbage drawing in most of the panels. Which I am entirely willing to blame on the printers. Judging from some of the art-work detailed in the back of the trade paperback, David Lloyd is an amazing artist with a great eye for perspective. But where were the clean lines, the first foundation of a story told through pictures? The print-job, at the least, was poor. V For Vendetta, however, the film, was full of the harsh clean neo-noir the Wachowski Brothers brought to The Matrix. I loved that mask on Hugo Weaving, btw. Talk about creepy, like when the mannequins came alive in that random show on Canadian television—God help me, I CANNOT remember what it was called. Nevermind, then. Anyways, Vendetta is basically Equilibrium without the guns, and a backstory stitched together from a rough copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Phantom Of The Opera instead of Fahrenheit 451. Which means it's like a Talking Heads' song, really, catchy and comfortably numb, pulp fiction for people who like The Shadow better than Quentin Tarantino.
Zugzwang! Muzak, that gentlier on the spirit lies, than tired eyelids on tired eyes, will be posted this evening. And, then, I Am Legend, some notes not so musical.
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The usual difference between my words and actions, right? I didn't get home until eleven-thirty last night, and I didn't feel like writing. Apologies. But imagine a raw cold night, and your hands on the rear bumper of a Volkswagon. Imagine straining the weight of a car up a very slight—and for that reason, very frustrating—incline; knees plowing the snow, hands caked with snow, legs soaked with snow, your whole world the dark night and the shining snow and the stubborn shifting weight of a half-ton automobile. I don't have imagine this, because I've already experienced it. Hm. Carry on.
I Am Legend + Richard Matheson There is the vague horror, the unseen, the Gothic imagination popularized by Ann Radcliffe. And then there is the precisely detailed banalities of life which lend a story that air of reality and legitimacy which make the horrific subject all too plausible; Dickens, to my mind, was a sometime master of this mode; Stevenson, certainly. Bram Stoker tried his hand, successfully, at lending legitimacy to eastern European folklore by presenting his novel as if it was a series of reported facts. Richard Matheson has got realism nailed down. I did not know, when I read this book, that it was first published in 1954. Neville, Matheson's protagonist, is a timeless character: what would you or I or anyone do if we were constantly under the threat of death? Everyday routines consume us, and since death would be part of every day, it, too, would become routine. Death would become banal. Neville is a man of routine, tortured not by the vampiric horde which surrounds him every night, but by his memories of the people he has lost to the deadly disease which created the vampires. The protagonist's fear is not of becoming a vampire; it is of becoming an animal, a mindless creature of the night. Matheson's vampires have more in common with Stoker's child-minded Dracula than any of the more modern incarnations of the undead. In order to avoid such a benighted end, Neville constantly draws a line between the vampires and himself, every day driving around the suburbs and putting stakes through the bodies of the sleeping undead. What he does not know, however, and what the reader does not know, is that many of the vampires are not truly vampiric: the bacteria which has created the undead has mutated enough to allow certain virus-afflicted humans the ability to think and act and reason, even to walk in the daylight. And their appetites have turned from blood to vengeance. Neville has been killing both the undead AND the reasoning not-really-vampire. Neville is a murderer. He has become as bad as the mindless killers he killed and carted away from his front yard. He will die and he will become a legend.
The prose in this book is ragged, certain actions are repetitive, I cannot say that such flaws are not actually intentional authorial practice. Certainly, Neville, getting drunk yet again, throwing himself around in anger yet again, becomes very predictable: all the more shocking, then, when the climax breaks the seeming stalemate between man and vampires. The book is a classic, it seems, and I never heard of it until about two weeks ago. Wonderful vision, strongly depicted scenes. Looks like they're going to do another movie from it: the man who scripted The Cell, Mark Protosevich, has written a script for I Am Legend and it looks to be a lot more faithful to the driving ideas behind the book than the first two previous adaptations. Did I mention that I watched Omega Man years ago, and not once while reading I Am Legend did I connect the film to the book?
This no-posting is out of control. But I've been surfing the cold green sea on the back of a trusty dolphin and—no, there's no imaginary excuse good enough for a week without posting. My apologies. Happy St. Patrick's Day, by the way. And, also, this is the day that C and I have been together for two years, I can hardly believe it! There aren't words.
Back to business on Monday, okay? I watched V For Vendetta last night, so some lines on that, and I'm reading I Am Legend, which is fantastic, and I came up with a new idea for a novel—that's a whole post on its own—and what about Shout Out Out Out Out? Yeah, what about them, dammit? Also, Kudu released its shark-bait yesterday, and it's awesome, so mp3s later. Have a good week-end, then. Lucky bugs win prizes.
Wait, seriously, istoicaEVERYDAY is killing right now, yesterday's post especially, and today's post, too, so check it out, check it out. Beautiful shots, beautiful people.
No content need apply. Lately—like, the past six months, my desperadoes—I have been really interested in les photoblogs. We've all got favourites, of course, and I'm going to list a few of mine. 1) daily dose of imagery has been huge ever since getting a picture printed in the National Post (but even before). I love the combination of absolute professionalism and candid imagery in Toronto-based Sam Javanrouh's shots. Maybe the best photoblog on the net, right now. 2) istoicaEVERYDAY is run by Jessica and Chris, students and couple from the University of Toronto. The site's emphasis, lately, is on portrait photography, of which they are masters. Every shot is wonderful. 3) Absenter, out of Chicago, was the first photoblog I ever paid serious attention to, and everyone else should, too. His shots are mostly landscapes with an often eerie touch. Chicago can be pretty grim. Love that one shot of the projects at night. 4) Matt O'Sullivan, at the narrative, shoots portraits almost exclusively. They can be formal but are more often not. After ddoi, his site is the one I probably visit the most. 5) Locally and lastly, but surely not least, Iraleigh Anderson at iralee focus his lens on bands, scenery, and college projects with his Edmonton-accented website. His photography is often a little grittier than most, deliberately so, I believe, and he's got some wonderful shots of the human eye on his site which have to be seen to be believed. Best of all, I think, or most enjoyable, are his shots of the audience at various shows around town. His shot of a dancing couple is a treasure.
So, if anyone one wants to start a site des photos with me, let's do it! You bring the hi-tech camera, the tripod, the photo-finding car, okay? And I'll bring some Camera Obscura, my untiring legs and some photo-busting attitude. Done!
In other news, sorry about the erratic posting-ness, and the lack of demonstrable interest in books or music. I'm still interested in those things, but I'm also very busy. Over the week-end, I might publish a little something, but maybe not, unforch. Oh, well. Have a good week-end. Lucky bugs win prizes.
"Je Suis Saves", the name, is over, just words on a t-shirt, now. The name was never mine, I can't take credit for it. I read the name on a Singaporean blog a little more than a year ago. A certain commenter had wanted to start a band and call it, I believe, Je Suis Rock Band. The band's first album would be titled Je Suis Saves. I read that pun and instantly fell in love with it. I still love it. But I'm tired of using it as a name. If you see some skinny guy with long lanky hair wearing a t-shirt that says "Je Suis Saves", give him a punch in the shoulder or something, and I'll say hello, but that's as far as the name is going these days. Or why not make your own t-shirt? Threadless should get all over this, I swear. If they can print shirts showing two cars crashing into each other and letters spelling out "ctrl-z", there is no way a multi-layered pun like "JSS" could escape favourable attention. Future millionaires take note: I'm throwing down ideas here, get your pencils out and start jotting. Cut me in on the gross and we'll all make money.
I've got my own trophies, I don't need any Jon Stewart-based ceremonies to get me through the night. He was great, though—the man was good, too good. I rate his chances of being invited back to the Oscars about on par with Arrested Development actually making it on air again. You keep hoping, but you don't talk about it a lot, that might jinx things. And, speaking of last night, Three 6 Mafia? Jerseys in front of the mike, I don't know, but it's still good to see. "It might be new to you, but it's been like this for years".
In other news, Paddy Day is coming up fast, and normally I don't go for it—not wanting to appear like just another greenshirt storming Cobra-La—but I still plan on using the day as an excuse to buy something green. "Mushaboom" (click through the link) kills for Lacoste, btw, so does that mean I'm on board with a cool-by-association ticket? "It may be years until the day / My dreams will match up with my pay."
For Godsake, real-life Simpsons (via Edward Champion)!
[Editing and sedition, early morning, March 7th—some stuff about books and Burroughs will follow, much later.]
"Locked Inside A Liquor Store" + Dash Rip Rock Oh, man, I almost posted a Lesbians On Ecstasy track here, but then I remembered that I wasn't a total moron. Sometimes, I forget. No, no, it's not the band name (although, yes, it is also the band's name), it's the junk-ass music that blows. BUT, speaking about band names, this here band's name renders any thumbs-up-or-down-nonsense pretty much superfluous. Obviously, this twenty-something-year-old band has good times. But what about le music? I wrote a poem five minutes ago, check it—
You don't suck
As much as you think you do.
Rose are red, by the way,
Unless they're blue.
But I'm not talking about roses,
I'm talking about you.
That poem almost doesn't suck, does it? There's a kind of I-don't know-what about the attitude that's agreeable, I think. If I let the robe drop, you might see the word INSOUCIANT shining brightly, like the sword Excalibur if Excalibur lost the "s" and became a mere word. The poem doesn't make sense, but that's another story. Now, Dash Rip Rock is putting out music that should suck, but it doesn't, because it's good. It's like some indie kid's version of mainstream rock, and it's all killer while being all filler, and that's okay. Good AM radio for the guy who likes good AM radio. I've got nothing more to say.
[Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday]
Pellucidar + Edgar Rice Burroughs There is no change or knowledge of time in this place, where the forested moon revolves with the earth and keeps eternally the same high spot above the same dark plot of land that is called the Land Of Awful Shadow—this in a world where the horizon curves up at the edges like a grim reptilian smile. The inner earth is full of faerie evolution, five-pound whales which nibble on scarlet lichen, gorilla-shaped men with the head of sheep, giant tigers and bears (oh, my!), and sea-serpents large than Ouroboros. Anyone could get lost in a world like this one. Anyone could get lost in a book about this world.
The Munsey pulp-fiction All-Story Cavalier Weekly first published Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar across five issues back in early 1915. Each issue cost ten cents and would cost, today, about a dollar eighty-four. That's a good price for fifteen-plus stories and some excellent cover-art. Burroughs had proved he was a saleable author with the phenomenal success of Tarzan and A Princess Of Mars, so when its time came, Pellucidar was republished in book form with the requisite J. Allen St. John cover and plates. Pellucidar has never really been out of print since, the last English-language publication of which I know being sometime in 2002/2003 under the imprint of the The University Of Nebraska Press. That's a solid pedigree for the first sequel in a third-string series by a pulp-fiction author from pre-WWI!
Now, there's little enough about the plot that is selling this novel. David Innes returns to the inner world of Pellucidar, hoping to find again the woman with whom he had fallen in love, Dian the Beautiful. He begins to map the country as he travels and runs, fortuitously, into his old friend Abner Perry. Together, they set out to track down Dian, not knowing she has been traded to the evil race of lizards which dominate the inner world. Adventures ensue by land and sea, the latter filled with even more terrible monsters than the shores and mountains of the land. Eventually, Dian is discovered, the man who had betrayed her is dispatched, and David Innes, Abner Perry and Dian the Beautiful live happily ever after in a wild kingdom by the sea. The end. But this story deserves to be read if only because it is still in print, and this without, mostly, the academic curriculum which keeps afloat hundreds of texts like Clarissa or To The Lighthouse or Martin Chuzzlewit. This story deserves to be read because it is suffused with a sense of the marvelous, because it raises expectations and meets them, because it is a treasure of justified spectacle. Such a treasure, such a wonderful parade, is, in the Burroughs universe, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing special. But for the receptive reader peering into this universe, what a pleasure it is, what a fine house of wonder, what a many-mansioned heaven can be had in the words of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
I saw the prettiest girl in the world today and I wanted to hit her. She's not anyone I know or have ever seen before, just a person I saw on the bus, dark hair, red lips, good style. As the driver lurched away from the curb, another girl, stumbling down the bus, fell gratefully into the empty seat beside the girl I now loathe. If you could have seen the look which the first girl gave to the second! I understand not wanting to sit beside a stranger, no one wants to do that. The bus, sometimes, is like a public version of picking teams—you hope, at the very least, you don't have to sit with the losing side, the unattractive people, the people who smell bad, the people who sing softly along to Michael Bolton—actually, that last might be kind of interesting. You want to sit with the people you know, at the very least, right? But, come on, there's a lot of rides left in the bus. Anyways, the grateful girl opened up her free daily, VUE Weekly, I think it was, and spread it across her lap. There was a lot of rustling, flipping of pages, puzzled expressions and so forth. The girl was really into her newspaper. And then the first girl turned to the second and said, "If you can't be quieter, could you put that away? I'm trying to concentrate." Understand, N and I are yakking loudly two or three seats down, the noise of the bus itself is killer, and I can hear some tinny Jay-Z coming out of someone's iPod. The second girl put her paper away. She opens her bookbag. She brings out a granola-bar, one of those yogourt-covered candy-style things. She begins to unwrap it. "Excuse me," the first girl says. You know, I thought it had been our collective breathing which had fogged-up the windows of the bus, but I now realize that the windows were covered with the cold white frost of her near-sociopathic and very bitter personality—"I'm fasting for Lent right now and I've given up all processed food. Would you mind putting that away while you're beside me?" EXCUSE ME! At that point, the bus drew to a stop and the pretty girl gathered up her bags and left. Okay, you know what? You know what I'm fasting from this Lent? I'm fasting from ever trying to like people like that, and I mean, ever. And I'm not even Catholic!
I'm happy to say that as the pretty girl walked away from the bus, the second girl recovered from the shock with which she had been frozen to her chair, ran to the door of the bus, tossed her granola bar at the girl and yelled, "Process this, bitch!"
"Who Dares, Wins" + Kim Newman This is the kind of guy who writes Doctor Who books and Warhammer novels. This is not the kind of writer I like. But I like this writer. Yes, that's innacurate, I don't know the man personally, leave it be, let it go, okay? The only stuff of his I've read is the online stuff. Some of it is not so good. Some of it is pretty stellar. He's a concept man, is Kim. His stories are not about character—though, in the better stories, strong characters are not lacking—his stories are about What If, the grand question of all good science fiction slash fantasy. I so want to read Newman's Anno Dracula—and Bloody Red Baron sounds even better. A squadron of vampire pilots led by the literally immortal Manfred von Richthofen? Let me tell you a few details I've discovered about that last book. At one point, the flying Baron shoots and kills a small white dog. LOVE IT! At another point, the main protagonist of the novel (there are several) comes across Doctor Moreau and his assistant, Doctor Herbert West, operating on wounded vampires in an underground chamber behind enemy lines. Alan Moore, eat your heart out!
"He wants Transylvania, Home Secretary."
"Not in our gift, more's the pity. Would he take, say, Wales?"
Oh, lines like that, it's hard to get better! "Who Dares, Wins" is set in on Embassy Row in 1980's Kensington. A certain vampire is leading the "Back To Transylvania" movement and has taken an embassy hostage in order to draw attention to his and other vampires' desires. The parallels with the real-life Middle East and Ireland are explicitly drawn with mentions of Teheran and Belfast. The interesting point of this story, however, is that everybody is a vampire. Not only the individuals taking over the embassy or the individuals trying to defuse the siege (hello, Lord Ruthven!), but even the media reporting the story (the journalist-protagonist of the story is an adapted creation of Bram Stoker, one vampiric Kate Reed) are vampires—even the humans:
Kate saw Anne Diamond, collar turned up and microphone thrust out, sorting through anxious faces at the barrier, thirsty for someone with a husband or girlfriend trapped inside the Embassy or, better yet, among the terrorists.
Lovely, Mr. Newman, just lovely.
Tomorrow, I'll write about Wednesday night and controller.controller. LATERZ!
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Doodle doodle doo. Laterz has arrived! Wednesday night, then, and the lead singer for Something For Rockets looks like Stephen Wright making fun of himself. Smooth music, all the notes were there, only the heart was missing. Kudos to the man playing the plastic keys, though, for dancing like he was every member of Nickelback at once. I've never seen such macho keyboard. Next band at the plate was You Say Party! We Say Die! and they need to be better. Cacophonous Metric, with singing duties split between the two female singers, they weren't helped by a some not-so-keen mixing on the sound, I think. But they were good. Because they had fun. Because then the audience was having fun. The lead singer of locals Frosted Tipz and the lead vocoder of SO4 got on the stage with YSP!WSD! to shout what I'm going to call the vodka-version of "The Gap", and that was good, too. End of performance. It took next to no-time for controller.controller to get their business set up on stage, and then the real show was on. You know, I thought the first two bands were decent, until the difference between them and the headliners made SFR and YSP!WSD! look amateur, let's face it, amateur. I first saw the lowercase c's about a year ago in the same venue and I want to make two observations, here: 1) the sound is a lot tighter (last time Nirmala actually dropped her mike), a lot sexier live than it is on that disc—don't ever listen to this band on cd or mp3, unless you're talking their first EP, buy a ticket, instead, you'll not regret the price BUT you will get sweaty; 2) the appearance of the band is much better, by which I mean, they've solved the whole "Don't focus on the singer just cause she's a girl" problem by putting the bass right at the front of the stage and Nirmala behind him and, Nirmala herself, who was unexpectedly chunky last year, and has obviously toured off just about every excess ounce, and she's svelte, godsake, and makes you look. Anyways, the band did a killer rip of "Silent Seven"—I love it when N sings, "I always feel like somebody's watching me". The sheer energy put forth by the guitar players in this band is approaching self-destruction and as for the drummer, I LOVE HIM. Long hair under that Guy Fawkes balaclava, rearing his head around like he's a blind lion, beasting away at the drums like your demented calculus prof, genuis showmanship, I'm sold. This band is sex. A good night, Wednesday, good loud sound, lots of crashing disco, a warm night of dark music. Wednesdays should always be so fine.
Hipsters are going to be saying that The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have lost their edge, thus demonstrating classic hipster-ignorance of good music in favour of classic hipster-insecurity. "Image compromise alert!" their tiny cortexes will bleat, as they fear losing their piecemeal identities to newly-popular culture. There will be only one response when someone sneers that Karen O has bailed out on her new tunes. You must pull your left shoulder toward them, let your right shoulder quickly drop, ball your right hand into a fist and punch them hard in the middle of their faces. Plus, if they're attractive, maybe Jiffy-marker your digits on their forehead while they're out. Okay?
In other news, I saw a bunch of the Disney Channel yesterday, and it blew chunks. Even the cat was bored. However, like everything bad, there was some don't-mess-with-me good mixed into the mess. Kim Possible is a seriously hot line-drawing. Just my observations, here, folks, nothing else to see. Move along if you wish to, the tour guide has lots of other stuff lined up and his microphone is slim and silver.
"Magnetic Strip" + controller.controller In honour of the ticket in my pocket for their show tonight, here's a little number off the new cd by the awkwardly-named collective from Toronto. I love the band's name, actually, but, MAN! is that sucker hard to get busy with. Everyone is so inconsistent on the spelling, I've seen all kinds. I'm giving you the writing on the packaging here, though, so rest easy, acronym-collectors, I'm not even going to try to break you with anything original on this band's punctuation.
Old stuff versus new stuff. I liked the old stuff better, it seemed punchier to me, but I've got nothing against the new. Just like the old, it needs more voice, but whatevs.The music doesn't need to be talked about here, we've all heard it before, low dirty basements and some pretty sweet rave moments here and there (man, I can't believe the crap I write sometimes—""sweet rave moments"?). I hope I get there in time to see You Say Party! We Say Die! because the mp3s in the old pc seem like nice hard-edged pop, like Metric dressed up rock-style. But, whatevs, it'll be a good show, I'm certain.
Maybe it would be better if I brought along some glowsticks.
The week-end was mostly garbage, mostly because of about fourteen hours where the side of my head felt like a large damp fireball. Does that make sense? Hurtingness and swellingness and not-nice-ness. All gone, now, though! Just in time for the grind to begin again, which is not school, but work. This morning sees me up at five-thirty because I'm working in St.Albert at seven. Then jet off, or move slowly by bus, to classes down at Uni, then work tonight at the WEM until ten, then back home by eleven. Garbageness. Tuesday, I'll have some music business about The Ark, nothing more today. Plus, I'm going to do some stuff about Edgar Rice Burroughs, who I love despite all of his many and terrible and grotesque flaws as a writer. Plus, what is the deal about this former local Matthew Skelton character who went astray in England and now has a million-dollar book-deal? Endymion Springs? This sounds like a Dan Simmons novel, for godsake, not a first-effort children's thickie worthy of mucho monetary reward. You can hear the publishers breathing heavily in the background, hoping for another Rowling, which isn't going to happen, it just isn't. But it makes me hope that Skelton's book will be able to stand on its own two feet. It's going to have a lot of competition from the Pullmans and Rowlings before it.
At The Earth's Core + Edgar Rice Burroughs I always liked Professor Liedenbrock. I liked the everyday romance of the man. And I wished (I still wish) that I could live at 19 Königstrasse, one of the oldest streets in the city of Hamburg, and that cowbirds would squawk in the highly-trimmed trees as, one by one, up the long sidewalk, would come venerable Henri Becquerel, Captain John Franklin, the Irishman Edward Sabine, Andre Dumas the chemist, and many other holy and reverend physicists and explorers. Axel and I would play with pretty Grauben to see which one of us she liked the best, and the Professor would walk from room to room with mathematical steps, his hands clenched comfortably at his sides. And our journey to the center of the earth would be a story we would never really talk about, simply because there were so many more interesting stories to remember than the mere vague images of the end of that long trip through the caves and fissures buried under Iceland and the volcano Stromboli.
I always liked Jules Verne's A Journey To The Center Of The Earth. But I always felt betrayed by the final chapters of that novel, when the heroes navigate their way over the nebulous lava, see some strange plant-life, some colorless images of mastodons, perhaps a cave of bones and one glimpse, at a far distance, of a buffalo-headed man. And then back to Germany. That is no way to end thirty-plus chapters of atmosphere and exertion, Jules. That is no way to serve your readers.
Edgar Rice Burroughs to the rescue, then. At The Earth's Core is not concerned with evoking atmosphere, so much as creating spectacle. Pictures, not emotions, are the centre of the story. Spectacle is created by contrast, of course, so the book starts off with a deep bow to realism. Although the title page of Burroughs' work is stamped with his name, page one of the story begins with a complete disavowal of the whole thing. Burroughs did not write this little novel, but claims to have received it from someone else, a man who wrote this book not as a novel but as a record of exploration and incident much like Richard Burton or Edward Shackleton would have written if they had taken such a journey. Everything in the novel, then, that rationality smiles at, becomes rationally defensible. "These things couldn't possibly happen." But Burroughs is not saying they did, he's just passing on what someone else told him, there's no one to argue against here. The man to pick a bone with is not present, he is, well—the title says it all, doesn't it? So the story begins with this man, David Innes, who has a lot of money and a yen to simply do something (Umberto Eco, elsewhere, writes "I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason . . . ."). Innes is healthy, young, a typical representative of Empire, something along the lines of Sir Henry Curtis or Richard Hannay and he's got the usual Watson along in the form of Abner Perry, a man who studies paleontology for relaxation and explains it for the reader's education. Perry has a theory about the earth's core, Innes has the money to build a machine to test the theory, and, bingo, Burroughs has a novel. Getting to the center of the earth takes all of one chapter. What happens at the center of the earth has little to do with the just-a-glimpse-before-the-story-collapses realism of Jules Verne. Verne is trying to write a realistic version of a more-or-less logical series of events. To describe the creatures of an interior earth, their habits and borders, would be to wander very far away from realism, which necessarily bases itself on what we perceive to be real and likely, not on what would be real under unreasonable circumstances. That is why Verne's journey through the earth is most of the novel and mostly rock. Burroughs gives a nod to the real and the likely by having Abner Perry wash it all away with pseudo-science about evolution. Leidenbrock, like Perry, has a theory. The aim of Verne's novel is to demonstrate the validity of that theory. Perry also has a theory. The aim of the novel is not so much to prove or disprove the theory (the theory is taken for truth in the introduction to the novel) as to demonstrate what life would be like if the theory was true, or, rather, to have fun with the possibilities under the new rules. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth closes with nearly everyone residing contentedly in Germany. At The Earth's Core has David Innes, in danger of death, doing his utmost to return to the center of the earth. The first novel is a treatise, the second a vision. Verne's work is much the better written, much more realistic, much more well-known. Burrough's work, I say again, has the vision. The titles of these books say it all, don't they? One is the cliché concern for the process over the result, the journey, and not the end of the journey: the other is concerned with what is happening in the present instant. There is no journey, there is no process, there is only Right Now. This spectacle is Burroughs' flaw as a writer, of course, lending itself to cardboard characters and paper-thin plots, but also lending itself very easily to a constant parade of action and marvel. Burroughs gives us the circus, the spectacle, he does not bother to show the moving parts behind tha machine, the shabby lives behind the carnival. He is selling a show, not defending a premise; creating a vision, not dissecting it. He is selling tickets to one of the gaudiest cheerful shows in the golden era of early pulp fiction, he is a ring-master, and not a scholar. And thank God.
"This Piece Of Poetry Is Meant To Do Harm" + The Ark Let's throw around some sounds-like ideas, here. Okay, The Styx, I hear it, certain turns of the voice. Anything folk-rock from the seventies, sure, I'm listening. Yeah, and Shakespeare. Especially this song, and not just because of lyrics like "Let the cool winds roughly shake / Out all darling buds of fake", and not just because of the Elizabethan-style wrenched metre of "COM-pare" in "So with what shall I compare thee? / Summer's clay or winter's sleet?". I'm talking more about the idea, knocked out in the title, that words are engines, construcions, concrete machinery, really, fashioned to certain solid ends. That these ends are within the reasonable reach of these words. Do you know what I mean? Not spells or incantations, although that wild aspect of words is certainly there, but something more along the idea that words are the equivalent of actions. Oh, and how they can be, too.
As far as the sound of this tune goes, which is what I started discussing (but I sidetracked myself), very poppy, very folky, but a solid combination of the two, warm country harmony rock—NOT alt. You know this song is going to be good the instant you hear the second guitar in the second verse. And you can hear the payoff at the end of the fourth verse when the break comes, it's wonderful.
Next time I order a Danish, I'm not going to order a Danish—not, that is, if I'm in Iran. Which reminds me, isn't a Danish a strange thing to have in a not-very-cold country like Iran? Heavy pastries, hot climate, yes! The Arabs may defeat our ideology, culture, technology, even, but as long as they insist on devouring fat-saturated sweetmeats with icing and jelly filling, listen, we've got them lock, stock and barrel of oil. No wonder Tim Horton's is now majority-owned by American money. Les Yanks have obviously discovered the real and ultimate weapon to be not WMDs or fear itself, but pastries. Godsake, I'm more off-track than a burnt-out stereo, let's see—Danishes! Because the Muslims are now aping the Americans, and instead of calling the newly-offensively named Danishes "Danishes", they're calling them "Roses of the Prophet Muhammad". Well, inshallah, of course, but that's a bigger mouthful than most pastry will give you, I think. Anyway, I'm loving it. Kudoes all round! Non-violence! Democracy! Pastries! And to celebrate, I think I shall get my gf a dozen roses in the very near future.
Books and music in this space over the week-end, check back if you want to see—you know the drill.
The Mysterious Mr Quin + Agatha Christie I read this book about once a year as if it was my duty to do so when, actually, it's not. I just enjoy the book. This is the kind of book that should be turned into a graphic novel. As a collection of short stories, it reads like something from the English outskirts of an Edwardian Gotham, which, if you know me, is exactly the kind of shallow eye-catching silverware I like to slip up my sleeve and walk out of the store with. And you should, too. Not walk out of a store with silverware, that is, unless you happen to be under eighteen and attractive enough that the security guard will let you go after five minutes in the safe room. But you should read this book. Why? Because it's the kind of thing Neil Gaiman has been trying to do in novels, unsuccessfully, since day one, is why. Because it's the kind of thing Alan Moore would do in a heartbeat (after giving the mysterious Harley Quin a suitable torturous background, of course). And speaking of Alan Moore, this collection of short stories really reminds me of V For Vendetta: the main character, always surrounded by mayhem or murder, redistributes responsiblity by apparently bringing a form of chaos wherever he appears. Which is a lot more difficult than it sounds, not at all, for instance, like bringing a cat with you, or a model airplane or an indie rapper. Chaos is very much harder to cart around than those things, which is probably why Christie never bothers explaining exactly how Quin manages to be omnipotent. And not the good kind of omnipotent, either, like Santa Claus or the North Wind, but omnipotent like Mephistopheles or the average household cat, very sinister omnipotence indeed. Harley Quin appears out of nowwhere on a snowy New Year's Eve and saves the Portal's marriage by solving a ten-year old murder hanging over the house. He is Vengeance, he is Nemesis, he is Love. Batman has nothing on this character, he is more like the Shadow than anyone else out there. He is present in twelve stories, no less, and, I believe, no more. Christie's writing style is a superb fit for these stories, a light skimming touch deepening quickly into fierce stage-drama. Deep characters, awful motives, would ruin these vignettes. Better the technicolour English hall, sunlight through stained glass, strange shadows in the cypress trees, than any poorly-ascribed fount of human hearts and ageless wisdom. These are stories, after, all, not Russian heartburners. Agatha Christie is a wonderful storyteller, I wish she had written another twelvemonths supply of this character.
"Pirates" + Spitfires & Mayflowers Pirates are going to be big again, now that it looks like the Black Pearl will be sailing this summer. Say hello to another Halloween papered with eye-patches and misused handkerchiefs. But crass populism will never drag down a song like this one. This song is the kind of thing that would be good to hear at almsot any hour of the day, but let me outline what makes it so good. One: hi-hat. Because, like handclaps, there is never enough hi-hat in the world. Two: the drumming that fires up around 3:02 is a good thick wonder, especially when it reinvents itself around 3:31 over the lead-singer's introductions. Three: that nano-second of time after the band asks, "Where did you go?" and the beer freezes in the glasses, that girl's mouth stays half-open, the four drunk guys forcing themselves up the room are turned into statues, that half a nano-second of "What next?"—THAT is what makes this little indie-party song more than just the sum of its parts. Because its parts, while perhaps a little awkwardly put together, are determined to work together.
Global warming, people? So inconsistent, isn't it? Anyways, the snow last night means my brother called me to say he couldn't get home from Banff. In fact, he'd already wheeled off the road, so he's staying overnight in some random hotel. And the evening before last, my other brother bashed the Honda against a curb slo-mo because the ice meant his wheels couldn't grip it or rip it. What can be said? Too bad the car wasn't a Hansel. So now he's looking at seven hundred sweet ones plus parts, Godsake. It's a tough time to have a metal body and all-weather tires, is what. On the other hand ("There is always the other side, always"), I look at my car parked useless in the garage and feel bad about the no-license thing. The beast is just sitting there, taking space without insurance, a beached whale with a mouthful of silver baleen. And that garage is so cold.
Music in this space on Thursday. Book business too, and sexiness from France. I've got to go to work, now. Doot doo dee doo, doodle doodle doo. Doot doo dee doo, doodle dee.
The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde In 19th-Century France + Joanna Richardson Um, I guess it's okay to look at the painting of the naked woman on the front of this picture, because, like, a woman wrote the book, right? So if the author think's it's okay that some starving prostitute got exploited by a sexually virused member of the Victorian patriarchy just so he could support himself by selling peached-out smut to impotent aristocrats for a handful of francs which he later spent buying green liquor and STD's, well, that's cool, because now I can look, too. She's naked, people! Actually, Joanna Richarson is a very well-respected author, winner of the Prix Goncourt prize and a biographer of half the famous elite from the French and English Victorian era. Reading her is like reading Proust, but for real (FULL DISCLOSURE: seeing as I have never read more Proust than what you can find in Bartlett's, the preceding sentence was nothing more than a pathetic grab for literary cred—you are now at complete guilt-free liberty to go read anything other than the rest of this paragraph). Reading this book, however, is depressing, and beautiful, all at once. Villon or someone wrote that famous phrase, "But where are the snows of yester year", and that is TOTALLY this book. At first, the people and events are amazing, wonderful spectacles. But as the body count rises, as courtesan after courtesan dies friendless and alone, nearly starving or surrounded by sad lists of wealth and bitterness, I become oppressed with a sense of "What's the use?" The one woman who WAS good in all of this miserable prostitution died a reject, an outsider, spurned by everyone she had known. Never give a stripper an even break, right? These women were amazing, what they did, who they knew. Public prostitutes, for sale at their own discretion, many of whom kept many more than one or two men at a time. For their crimes, for their indiscretions, which were really but the indiscretions of the men they knew, these women mostly failed of their object, which was to achieve wealth and worship frequently and continually. Which seems a little unfair, seeing as how they gave everything they had to gain their ends.
The phrases and paragraphs of this book are strong and utilitarian, not given to flights of fancy or metaphor. Information, not atmosphere, is the purpose of this book. What atmosphere it does contain comes from 1) the constant repetition of the same story told over and over, and 2) the excerpts, of which this book includes many, from the letters and books of the time which reveal, through bitterness, spite and romance, who these women really were at least as much as the author of this work herself reveals.
"You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) (Murder Mix)" + Dead Or Alive This is standard eighties business, rising up and crushing indie rock like nobody knows. You don't hear a word, it's just all beats until 1:32 and then the classic chorus kills you at 1:59. This is for weaving between eight o'clock morning traffic, and you better be driving a red rusty Geo, you hear? Overtake that Navigator, cut off the Audi on the yellow, you don't care, you've been up studying till three the night before and now you're going for coffee with a pretty girl before taking the last finals of your life. I hope you remembered to brush your teeth. Either that or you're on acid and haven't been out of the house in three days and don't even know it. Yikes! Get out of bed and have some Corn Pops already, feed the cat. Okay? GO! GO! GO!
Today, outside of the wide windows at work, a little girl in a fuschia-coloured parker and matching track pants showed off her excellent hip-hop moves to her slightly older brother. This girl was maybe seven years old. It was a very grey day, today—later, the sunlight came out very strong—and all the signs for all the stores glowed that much brighter in the plaza, and the little girl swung her knees and slumped her back and her arms moved like flourescent animals sliding from branch to branch. Coming up beside their children, her parents enthusiastically applauded moves they must have seen a thousand times before. The little girl carelessly tossed her head, and the whole family came into the store. Something about that incident, the entire acceptance of each other in that moment, makes me glad I saw it, glad that I saw that families can still be happy, still be wonderful with each other.
The whole weekend was like that, really, work, Whyte, everything. Strong colours and nearly silent pictures, familiar actions made new again, everything seen through glass. I'm groping for words here, but I believe what I mean, in this moment, this minute, this right-here-and-now, is contentment. That is what the week-end was. Then again, this is reading week. And a solid week free from studying wouldn't have anything to do with feeling fantastic, would it?
Bath Tangle + Georgette Heyer You've seen her novels, even if you think you've never seen her novels. Metropolitan airports couldn't keep her away, it seems, a few years back, and why not? Her books are perfect airplane reads, and I mean that as a compliment. Well-written—most of them—with guaranteed happy endings, full of witty dialogue which, if it never rises to Oscar Wilde brilliance, at least achieves the comfortable verbal tricks of a Wodehouse novel, her books are small parades of ideal fashion and ideal romance circa the late 1700s. Which should be boring and unexplosive (and, granted, Bruce Willis will not be playing any of the stock Heyer characters, although I think he would be hilarious as a Regency dandy), but succeeds by coming at the reader through different channels other than the usual cliched will-they-won't-they "suspense" of every romance novel. The will-they-won't-they is never in doubt in a Georgette Heyer romance—they will, and how! No, Georgette Heyer succeeds as a novelist because of her characters. Which is strange, this success, because her characters are more types than anything, but she's got the Dickensian trick of helping the reader be comfortable, even enjoy, her cardboard characters. The long line of usual suspects in Bath Tangle, for instance, were always there, long before the novel was ever written. You've got the boldly handsome very fashionable aristocrat, in this case, the Marquis of Rotherham. You've got the wilful and beautiful daughter of an eccentric father, a woman who refuses (of course!) to be defined by the patriarchy around her. Bingo, you've got the novel. But you've also got something the book-cover doesn't include in it's embarrassing catch-all synopsis—you've got dialogue:
"It is a pity you cannot be kinder to that boy."
"I might be, if his mother were less so," he responded coolly.
"You look a trifle peaked."
"If I do, it is because black doesn't become me. I mean to lighten my mourning, and have ordered a charming grey gown."
"You are mistaken."
"What, in going into half-mourning?"
"No, in thinking black does not become you."
"What am I supposed to have done?"
"Everything you could, to blight every ambition I ever had," Gerard replied, with suppressed violence.
Rotherham looked considerably taken aback. "Comprehensive," he said dryly.
"Do try to cultivate a more orderly mind," interposed Rotherham. "The very fact that I take a malicious pleasure in thwarting you shows intention."
"Now I shouldn't wonder, Emma, my pet, if half the time you thought he was scowling at you it was nothing but the way his eyebrows grow, which he can't help, though, of course, it's a pity."
Enough said.
Music, later. Music, NOW!
"Make It Through" + Smoosh Look at this list: Jimmy Eat World, Mates of State, Rilo Kiley, Pearl Jam, Death Cab For Cutie, Sleater-Kinney, The Presidents of the United States of America, Cat Power. Stellar company for anyone, never mind a couple of tweens. Well, it's pretty clear what direction Smoosh will take over the next couple of years and where they will go. Brilliant shadowy rock is where they will end up, I'm betting, something in between Monster Magnet and Kate Bush, just trust me on this. I love the way Asya sings through her nose, it should be bad, but it's wonderful in a sort of, "Look at me, I don't even care, I'm so #$&@ talented I'll still make your head spin without even trying." Everyone goes on about these two girls being prodigies or whatever, I don't sense that in their songs. Mozart is dead, he's never coming back again, and the child prodigy thing in music is over. What these girls have, of course, and what labelling them "child prodigies" undercuts, is talent. Not genius, not Mozart, just talent. With a little luck, and no coke, they're going to be making music for years, and it will always be music worth listening to, effortlessly good, naturally miles above most anyone else.
Today, sitting down at the computer table, I knocked my leg so painfully against the table-leg that I felt sick to my stomach. Incredible. But all gone away, now. What is it about painful things that I can't ever remember them as they truly were? And not just physical pain, either, but doing really embarrassing things over and over again, like, oh, for instance, skipping so many classes that asking the prof for a deadline extension is like begging a favour off of a stranger, money from a random passer-by. Over and over again, I've discovered that I am the biggest obstacle I have to overcome. And that's the problem, isn't it? I shouldn't be discovering this, I know it already. So, from now on, when I want to lie in bed those extra five minutes, I'm going to do my damndest to get up RIGHT THEN. When I see that the clock says ten to the hour, I'm not going to sit around a table at school for another forty-five minutes. When I have an essay due in an hour, I'm not going to hare off to the grey marshes and ditches of the blog world. These are life-time habits I'm talking about, though, and, of course, they're going to happen again. But when they do, I'm going to try to grab them by their collars, turn their pockets out, give them a good shaking and boot them out the door. And when they come back, appearing without effort in my thoughts and ways, I'll boot them out again. This could take years to get rid of them, but I don't care. I'm divorcing myself from these lacklustre cheaply-clothed kids, I'm renouncing their slack mouths and twisted hands, I'm giving up on the whole giving-up scene. No more putting off. No more.
"Skullcrusher Mountain" + Jonathan Coulton The new Streets single is leaving me cold. Whatevs. I can't stop playing the Diplo or the acoustic version or even that pagan-style video of the new YYY model, so good, so very very good. Also, Jenny Lewis is a god. But whatevs, whatevs, what to post for the after-Valentine's party? So much good music out there, so much new music, too, and nothing pour amour. Godsake, Johnathan Coulton, yes! Because the guy is crazy good, like Great Big Sea mixed in with Jonathan Richman and smothered with low-key Weird Al (and, where, exactly, IS Weird Al these days?). This single is from last spring, solid gold. Coulton describes the most romantic lover of them all in this tune, a man who asks, "Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?" Apparently not, and so we get a great song. The music is for real, the talent is incredibly obvious, and the songs appear farcial (they are). But a second listen, and a seventh, and a seventy-seventh will probably pass before you appreciate just how good this song really is, music, words, everything coming together for four minutes and sixteen seconds of perfect pure pop. You know it isn't easy living here on Skullcrusher Mountain.
Maybe you could cut me just a little slack.
Would it kill you to be civil?
I've been patient, I've been gracious,
And this mountain is covered with wolves.
Hear them howling, my hungry children.
Maybe you should stay and have another drink and think about me and you.
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For some reason, I'm just too suddenly sad to post today. I'll be happier tomorrow, right? Right, I will.
[Thursday edit: Negative to the above, whatever it is—bullshit and self-pity, I suppose. Done with, is what it is now. And over.]
[Thursday edit re-edit: And, no, I haven't been sad this whole time, I've been out of my head busy, and now an essay has gone missing, but it's DUE YESTERDAY BUT WHATEVS, RIGHT? OH, WHATEVS!]
alpha: Like, I so much HATE when I phone someone, but their cement walls keep smothering the conversation with damn static, so I switch to text messaging, but their incoming text message cuts mine off, so I phone them again, but their damn land line interrupts my call and IT MAKES ME INSANE JUST CUT MY ARMS OFF CUT THEM.
beta: The bus is not a pleasant place. I prefer my car. My car, however, prefers the garage.
gamma: This guy has emailed me about the photos on this page. Yes, yes I do take these photos, that's what that site on the sidebar is all about, son. Buried in the archives, there are a couple of Raveonettes promo shots I clearly did not take, also a shot of a silhouetted statue which I did not shoot. Everything else is mine, the good AND the bad. Yes, and the ugly, too.
delta: Seriously, we're all recording Arrested Development tonight, right?
"Golden Days" + Smorgasbord Straight outta St. Albert, this one. Looks like local Smorgasbord is calling it quits, or that's what the lead singer said last week. So their final show is tonight, then, laces-out at Queen Alex. That's a lot of talent in one room. Smorgasbord is full of folkness and rocking, guitars and voices and a steady light beating across the field. Their songs are not cheerful, but they are strong. If their music built a man, that man would have straight shoulders, good posture, not a mouth for needless laughter.
Bookness posted over the week-end.
#1) And, of course, Gogol Bordello was a huge show on Monday, wasn't it? According to E, Eugene Hutz was screaming into a mike while stomping all over E's table. M said it was the benchmark for all time. NOT FOR ME, IT WASN'T! I spent Monday either at other people's houses or homework, I honestly can't remember. And it better have been homework, I'll tell you that. Wasting my time with people and school when I should have been wasting it at The Sidetrack. Godsake.
#2) I really want to rent Dick Tracy for tonight, where Madonna plays The Blank. I used to have the glossy movie cards with Littleface and Flattop and The Kid. Haf-n-Haf is a way better Two Face than Harvey Dent, you don't even know. Or maybe you do.
#3) Five O'Clock Charlie is playing at The Track on February 16, doing the GMCC H.O.P.E thing for building schools in SA. Tickets are ten, so why not come?
"Every Day I Love You Less And Less (Boys Noize Remix)" + Kaiser Chiefs/Boys Noize This monster will cut your milk teeth out. I listened to it eleven times in a row, straight from Moebius Rex, which is, of course, a tres tops blog. Anyways: the drop at 0:59 is HUGE. I love love love the way the narrative lyrics match the loop. They're, like, symbols of each other, see? So meta. Look out for the beginning of the song, though; those kindervox are so annoying (so neccessary), and they just don't stop, BUT I have a theory about that, which is—the bad makes the good sound better. And the better sounds so bright and heavy and shining and bitter and having-fun-being-nasty, well, those tintinitis vocals just get me all jumping and Pavlovian over what's coming up next. Eleven times in a row? Twelve, now.
Book update this afternoon. More Raymond, more excellence.
The Simple Art Of Murder + Raymond Chandler "Spanish Blood", one of seven short stories in this book, is masterful. Look at Chandler's construction, he's like a careful cabinet-maker, strong pieces of quality furniture appearing to grow like plants, without effort, of their own accord. This—THIS—is how you begin a story, this is how you introduce a character: There is no messing about with objectively illuminating a character by his actions and reactions here. The reader is not meant to like this man. This man is to be a bad man. There is no compromise, no responsibility shirked, no, "Oh, but the discerning reader should be able to figure it out", none of that business. The second section begins the same, quick description of a man's appearance, little details gleaming brilliant off the page, but things are different, we just don't know it yet, because, all of a sudden, the words take a sharp turn: Some people might kill me on this, but Chandler, to me, is practically Beethoven. He takes two notes—da-da-da-dum—and works up these desperate stories around them, not only the same themes and plots ad infinitum, but the same situational writing (I'm sorry, I can't think of a better way to phrase that) over and over. And it works. He's a master of repetition, and his plots can't be trusted. Just as the reader is spotting the pattern, something else happens to shake the pattern up, the pattern doubles back on itself, and the reader has to do a double-take. This lends an atmosphere of menace to Chandler's books quite apart from the plots they contain, and give his novels a dense air of authenticity. Phrased another way, well, similarly, really, the dangerous atmosphere of Chandler's novels lends credence to the convoluted plot; the atmosphere is the product of the unpredictable repetition of the sentences and paragraphs which make up the book. Wonderful.Big John Masters was large, fat, oily. He had sleek blue jowls and very thick fingers on which the knuckles were dimples.His brown hair was combed back straight from his forhead and he wore a wine-coloured suit with patch pockets, a wine-coloured tie, a tan silk shirt. There was a lot of red and gold band around the thick brown cigar between his lips.
Blood had soaked the left side of [Marr's] vest, made the grey flannel almost black. He was quite dead, had been dead for some time.
[Edit: Yes, I cleaned up the spelling, it was too horrible to let lie.]
When Younous Kathrada, an imam who preaches at the Dar Al-Madinah Islamic Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, called the Jews "the brothers of the monkey and swine", well, I had no real problems with that. Yes, I'm sure he would be relieved to hear this, right? I don't agree with the man, by the way, but I like living in a society which lives, ideally, by a certain standard. Free speech? Then free speech for everyone, no exceptions. The point is not what the standard is, but that the standard is maintained.
What I have a problem with is the Islamic response to the same kind of insults against Islam. Killing a Roman Catholic priest? Burning down Danish embassies (the moronic arsonists also casually burned down the non-offending Chilean and Swedish embassies, by the way). Using guns and taking over the EU office in Palestine? All this, THREE MONTHS AFTER THE INSULT WAS FIRST KNOWN? So what this means is, the bully is allowed to call the other kids names, but if the other kids insult him, well, he's going to chop their heads off. A professor of mine, an exile from Baghdad, used to say, "Allah is infinite justice and infinite mercy". The Muslim response to the Danish newspaper's insults have made a mockery of that professor's words.Islam has no standards, it moves the standard to suit itself. Islam is now synonymous with hypocrisy and fear-mongering. Islam is a shame to the nations of Arabia.
"I Will See You In Far-Off Places" + Morrissey The very last track on the new Morrissey release is reportedly called "At Last I Am Born". Nice to see the man is keeping up the great tradition of the British confessional—circa 1870, that is, or whenever Dickens was cranking out those huge birth-to-desolate-marriage slash semi-autobiographical novels, which, by the way, reminds me that it's sort of sad to see the singer abandon his Liberal-hearted Wilde for the more Socialist Dickens, although that's what is bound to happen when you gain an audience of the underprivileged (read "Latino") like this man has found in what has now been officially renamed Moz Angeles. You know, I can write lines like that all day. The only thing that could possibly be more inflated than a sentence like that is one of the Moz Master's songs, or two of them, then, off his new CD. And I'm not that keen on either song. The first tune is like the worst parts of Quarry, great guitars and soaring vocals really not making up for the sloppy focus of the lyrics, and the second tune, while better than the first, could still be SO MUCH better. Don't get me wrong, emo is amazing, and everyone, I think, will be rightly eating this second single up (it's not bad, it IS good)—it's just that Morrissey can shine so much brighter than the Starbucks version of himself that he's currently selling. I'm not against new Morrissey (I thought "Irish Blood, English Heart" was a genuinely great song, great tune, great lyricology, even better when it came to "First Of The Gang"), I'm not even against laziness or self-parody or so-called selling out. I'm just against music done on the cheap and sold as gold. I'm against buying B-sides packaged as A-listers. Stephen Patrick Morrissey, I love you, please let the rest of your CD contain some really great tracks, even if it's only one track, at least one. The Simple Art Of Murder + Raymond Chandler There appears to be a lot of versions of this book out there. The version I'm reading was published by Hamish Hamilton, Ltd., copyright 1950. It contains a short introduction by the author, then "Finger Man", "Smart-Aleck Kill", "Pick-Up On Noon Street", "The King In Yellow", "Pearls Are A Nuisance", "Nevada Gas", "Spanish Blood", and the essay, "The Simple Art Of Murder". Just a note, for now, on the very first story, "Finger Man": in a brief passage which puts my ranting to shame, Marlowe observes— I like Philip Marlowe. I think we all like the man. He's balanced, he keeps a cool head, he turns his anger on other people only when it's the right thing to do, the last thing to be done. Everybody is guilty in "Finger Man" That's not important. Everybody is always guilty in Marlowe's California, even Marlowe. The point is the standard. The standard must be maintained. Criminal is one thing, hypocrisy a very much worse thing, betrayal the worst of all. What to do, then? Down those mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, right? Marlowe is the hero (he goes by other names in this collection, but he is always a hero), and Chandler is the author who creates him. In whose image, I idly wonder?
"Dear God, Please Help Me" + MorrisseyI didn't say anything. I was way past the age when it's fun to swear at people you can't hurt.
