it finally cooled down

When it cooled down, it cooled down pretty radically from 40 something to 20 something within an hour, but I still feel damaged and want someone to blame. Yesterday in the extreme heat we watched the documentary on Patty Hearst which was OK although the ululations on all those early 70s tapes was a bit annoying (I can't believe they couldn't have fixed that with today's technology, and sometimes I felt it was being done for effect - especially as the closing music seemed to deliberately echo this annoying kink). Also, Kitchen Stories which I really liked though neither Mia nor Annabel seemed willing to pay attention to it consistently. The digs at modernism got a bit dull - particularly to a diehard modernist like myself. We had a barbecue in the backyard in the evening and again I wondered if when we have a barbecue we fill the back room of the people next door with smoke. Annabel and I drank a bottle of wine and Mia drank beer, and we listened to side 2 of Todd, side 2 of O Zambezi, side 2 of The Pleasure of Your Company and side 2 of Tres Hombres, side 1 of Trouble is a Lonesome Town and side 1 of Flash in the Pan. Of course we didn't just listen, but it was happening. Millie and Charlie were also a big part of the conversation.

Spontaneously I decided to choose an image of an album sleeve to illustrate this post and because a ZZ song ('Have you heard') was in my head I went for Tres Hombres. But I am aware that this is a multifaceted and ultimately political act. I also knew Tres Hombres would be piss easy to find on the internet in seconds and the Australian records listed above might not have been so simple (finally after much fruitless scrolling and clicking I found an image of O Zambezi which doesn't reproduce well at such a tiny size but that's another issue). This is where the internet is troublesome. It allows for a minority viewpoint in a manner of speaking but it also facilitates the amplification of canonical mythmaking, which I tend to see as a bad thing, even if it involves the lifestyle-choice promotion of a record I like such as Tres Hombres. Once at my mother's house Danny Butt so objected to me playing Tres Hombres he insisted on switching it to 45 rpm so as to get it over more quickly. This was way before the rise of the internet, of which he is now a noted commentator/critic/etc. If I had then said 'Danny, one day I will write about you, me, Tres Hombres and the internet on the internet', he would have said, 'What's the internet?' and I would have had to say that I didn't know, because it would have been 1992 or something and none of us did. I would have only added to my reputation as a generator of random non-sequiteurs. No-one would have remembered me saying it, either, so I wouldn't have had the satisfaction of one day making sense.