miracle cure

So for no apparent reason today I was completely pain free and like an animal or something I didn't even remember that I had had pain I just did my daily tasks. Eventually unlike an animal I remembered that I had been burdened with this nonsense for most of last week. Well, I don't get it but I live to fight another day I guess. Of course I will probably somehow contrive to contract the problem again soon enough. Then I'll have to get some St Jacobs Oil I suppose and cautiously stroke my leg with both hands for relief like this oddity.

more important back pain information from me

I wonder what went into De Witt's Pills, which I gather were liver pills. There was a letter from a doctor in the Sydney Morning Herald last year saying that it made people piss blue and another saying one ingredient was podophyllum. If they were like Carter's Little Liver Pills then they were actually just ('just') a laxative. Anyway, I just wanted to tally and tabulate my renewed back pain problem which is muscular. As I explained a few posts back, I know this because of the way it manifests in sitting and standing problems. This morning when I woke up I could barely move but once I am up and walking I am fine and indeed by the end of yesterday, a day in which I walked 15 thousand steps, I was absolutely fine to the degree I figured I'd licked the problem (again). I'm sure it'll be over in the next day or two and I just need to learn how not to aggravate it while I also learn how to counteract it, and while I can't really guess at what revived it a few days ago, I suppose I will just not do anything that might possibly revive it. 

Yesterday was a productive fieldwork day in the western suburbs with a colleague, going around the nascent 'fringe' real estate developments of late capitalism. Some of them I have to say were actually really appealing, some of them not at all, not that I am tempted to buy into a 'future community', except in the sense that (like most people) when invited by the moment to peer into a possibility I do so for a second. That's not temptation, just empathy or something. By the end of the day - a lot of driving, a lot of walking - I was both starving and overstimulated. 

Meanwhile on the page of the Women's Weekly which precedes the above advertisement, there is a really terrible example of how to keep someone you value in your life. 

A wise man, Sting, or was it Elton John, once sang if you love someone don't shoot them. It seems counterintuitive but I suppose all opinions are valid. 

comprehension and memory

 

This picture was taken by Darren Howe and I stole it.

I have spent a little time lately reworking the X wikipedia page, from pretty shitty to slightly less shitty. All the usual wikipedia rubbish had to be snipped away (these usually involve things like referring to men by their last names and women by their first names; curious interjections of seemingly irrelevant information that skew the overall; half-remembered semi-true facts that have to be reordered and clarified). Best example of the last issue that I can think of is a previous writer falsely claimed that Lobby Loyde had been a member of Rose Tattoo with Ian Rilen. But no, Loyde had been in RT some years after Rilen left. In a sense with (they both belong to the category of 'decent and talented men who have unfortunately been involved with Rose Tattoo') but not actually with. It's surely someone's memory playing tricks on them, and although it doesn't really matter, it also messes with the chronology of X to imply that Rilen was in RT in the early 80s which he wasn't. 

But it's amazing how hard it can be to defeat a memory with facts. I was writing a walking tour of Sydney Road last week and had to battle with my own firmly-held memory that Franco Cozzo had shops only in North Melbourne and Footscray in the early 80s. I know that is true, that his catch phrase was 'Norda Melbourne i Footiscray'. Knowing it in your soul isn't enough - I found newspaper articles from the source which show that Franco Cozzo has had a store in Brunswick since 1979. I just have to accept and reassemble the reality.

I also have to accept that it's really hard for me to, um, accept new facts. Maybe it always was hard. It's also hard for me to read critically. Rewriting that X entry in wikipedia I passed over so many bits and pieces, focusing first on weird turns of phrase (someone had written that Ian Krahe played guitar without a pick and therefore had 'blood on his hands'; I thought, no, we have to put that another way) while ignoring other much more important actual errors. I do suspect that I still have too much respect for the written word, and it takes me some time to reassess things written by others which I've seen not exactly in print but in, you know, typing. That might be an outcome of being old, I don't know. 

* updates, always updates: I finally got around to looking in Ian McFarlane's Encyclopaedia of Australian Rock and Pop and found there were quite a few earlier members, inc. Geoff Holmes who I'd put into the wiki entry as an early member then taken out because I couldn't find evidence anywhere else. So I guess I will have to go back sometime and fix the fixin's.

an item from an age editorial from 100 years ago today

(21 Feb 1921, p. 4) The Age in 1921 was a really dull and mean little paper and people must not have had the internet or something, if this thing could actually sustain interest. I mean it didn't even have a Green Guide. Anyway, this editorial reads to me like there was nothing to editorialise about and someone ordered someone to have a negative opinion about something that actually wasn't a terrible idea, just to fill up column inches. The railways should pick up on things like this today, except there aren't enough places railways go anymore. Baldwin Spencer was a man of his time by which I mean he studied Aboriginal people and considered them an inferior species. That has nothing to do with this article but it's still true. 

a hundred years ago today, le prince received les lettres du foreign pays

 As if! The Prince of Wales a multimillionaire! Instead of what he is! Sacre bleu! 

a review i wrote, apparently, for some reason, possibly to be published somewhere, fifteen years ago

Neville Staple

The Rude Boy Returns

(Reign Records)

Neville Staple was once a member of The Specials.

This record features Rat Scabies and Mick Jones as guests

It sounds like it was recorded at a midi studio one afternoon.

The songs are grotesquely awful, pastiches of the good work Staple was once involved in.

I resent it sorely for the time I wasted listening to it.

2021 observation: apparently this was issued in a kind of Rude Boy Returns, Returns situation on vinyl last year. Christ! Some things deserve to be thoroughly forgotten forever. 

mars rover

Carlisle Sentinel 17 August 1985 p. 22 thanks Trisha used without permission. 

I know I have grizzled about this before but I have to say the news of a new Mars landing really gets my goat not least because, once again, it is framed in the press as a search for life on other planets. Why does this bug me so much? Partly because I suppose if this is what the search is for, then I think that shows an extraordinary lack of imagination or intelligence amongst... amongst everyone who thinks this is a good idea (although I also feel that, if life-on-other-planets was found on the absolute closest planet to Earth, then it would be pretty funny - what are the odds! If the odds are that low, then I guess life on this planet can't be all that special, really). Hey, I'm fully interested in the history of people being interested in life on other planets, don't get me wrong, I don't think it's such a boring topic in a manner of speaking because how people envisage life on other planets (I always think of a Kurt Vonnegut idea in one of his early novels which I probably didn't finish reading, about a silicon life-form that reminds me somewhat of a slinky, that just reproduces a replica of itself in a procession of replicas, whenever resources are available, for no apparent reason and certainly with no conscious principle) says a lot about how people think about their own lives and/or life in general, particularly but not exclusively human life. But for all that, I think the search for life on other planets is futile even if they find it, because it tells us precisely fuck all about how to solve our problems on this planet, or how to bring, you know, peace to the middle east or whatever cliche you want to dredge up. If humanity can't fix what ostensibly seems to be the simplest of problems in its own nominal backyard (or front yard, no geographical relativity here), then what is knowing how life came about in another part of the universe going to tell us? I'm not naively assuming that the sum of human progress should be all about figuring out how to make people (or enable them to) get along, but I am naively assuming that while we can't understand our own behaviour and motivations (yeah, it might be that friction and fear of the other eg racism* is essential - but do we have consensus on that?!) we are not going to get anywhere. 

This is why all resources that might accidentally or purposefully lead to the discovery of life on other planets should be diverted to the study of history, until humanity's own shizzle is comprehensively understood and resolved. 

* This is a hypothetical nonsense, i.e. the idea that everything that happens happens for a reason. 

a hundred years ago today

The Melbourne Age, 19 February 1921. I miss the days when Big Tram could approve 'the issue of' a particular denomination of coin and then demand that the nation bend to its will. 

tellus

Humming and hahing about whether to purchase (on DVD) Tellus, another Finnish crime drama, this time from 2014, and also featuring Lauri Tilkanen who plays Nurmi in Deadwind. The synopsis:

Over the past four years a group of young activists has executed a series of eco-motivated sabotages. They have not made a single error and the police is totally without leads. Their first mistake accidentally kills someone and the group needs to make a decision: to stop or become more effective by doing selective murders. Eevi, 23, is studying to be a doctor and is one of five activists in Tellus. She falls deeply in love with Alex, 26, who wants to save the environment with legal acts. How could Eevi combine the love with her double life in Tellus? Taneli, 55, an investigator for the Finnish Security Police, returns to work after a minor brain attack. He is immediately back in the investigation of Tellus and the pressure is huge as now Tellus has killed.  How far are we willing to go for our beliefs? A group of young eco-activists under the name 'Tellus' operates, are sabotage against environmentally unfriendly organizations. All their actions are carefully planned so no one runs danger. But when they make a mistake, accidentally there is a dead involved. A manhunt is launched to the members of the group.  An exciting and intelligent Finnish crime series on the moral dilemmas of a group of young environmentalists.  

I'm going to suggest this is actually two synopses twice, the second one (starting I think with 'A group of young eco-activists...' but certainly once you get to 'accidentally there is a dead involved') a computer translation. But I don't know. 

Jesus I wish my name was Pirkka-Pekka.

Update: yes, I altered this a few hours after posting because I decided the observations in the original post weren't appropriate to, I don't know, niceness. I note 11 people have already seen it so if you were one of those I'm sorry. 

deadwind: a classic moment

 

If anyone ever asks you to visit Finland with them, make sure they haven't taken too much of Deadwind to heart and also make sure they don't want to kill you. This sequence in particular suggests (well, admittedly, I haven't seen the whole of season 2, so maybe there are ramifications for Sara, the Mayor of Helsinki, for pushing the disloyal former associate Henri, who has just obliquely threatened her, into the sea) that it is perfectly possibly to drown someone in a matter of minutes while your blind daughter is going to get ice cream on the waterfront of what is basically central Helsinki. Sara seems confident (up to a point, I suppose) that there are no cameras or even passive bystanders/observers around to witness this, much less do something about it. 

WHAT NOT EVEN BELIEVABLE 

deadwind

As you know my obsession with Finland is reaching its nadir (god, I hope that's the case) and it has lately manifested as a major investment in a frankly pretty trashy murder program called Deadwind which I think is a Finnish-German coproduction, *on Netflix. 

To be fair to myself the main interest is not the sprawling, cliched storyline of loose ends and melodramatic conversations but of course the locations and the language, which naturally my poor brain continues to fail to retain any of (except kiitos, which the very polite people in this program say a lot, in different ways reflecting all the different ways you can say thank you in English too). Really I enjoy this program the same reason I enjoy Shetland, or for that matter Jack Irish, it's made in a place I am familiar-ish with and like to see represented and perhaps, just perhaps, there are bits I've been to. I mean the acting is good but the script is just the same old hack in exotic tongue/scenery and I can't help feeling these are smart actors (probably extremely accomplished in many other ways) who are just doing a job of work and not doing it badly but actors embrace the project don't they if they're professionals. 

Some of the show, a significant plot point portion of it, is shot in Käpylä, my favourite place in Helsinki, and indeed an important element of the program without putting too fine a point on it makes a thing out of something I'm fairly sure is not a thing, that these houses are joined together underground. I'm doubt that's true or even possible but I suppose I won't go out on a limb over it. 

There's a lot of this kind of shizzle, with people driving long distances but explaining what they're doing over the top of it: 

Essentially it's fun if you're a Finnophile but even Finnophiles probably end up thinking... isn't there something different about Finland, that means it's a bit above (or at least to one side of) a long involved 'pretty woman murdered, pretty woman solves it' show? 

Update - S2:E3 - TFW the mayor hides from a gunman in city hall one evening and she is the only person in city hall (except for the gunman) and then she is rescued but the gunman escapes and they just drop her off at home without even seeing her to the door because the gunman knows where she works, I guess, but could not possibly know where she lives???!!!

Update S2 E11 - Nurmi can fly a helicopter but he can't bear to be a part of his own child's life!? There's actually something exceptionally conservative about this show in that everyone without two parents is up shit creek psychologically and it's just a given that that is what happens. Karppi's mother, whose funeral she leaves half way through because she gets a clue, never told her who her father was. This is why she is emotionally more equipped to solve crimes than to be a parent. Karppi's kids' father is dead and they act up in all kinds of ways, Emil by having ridiculously long hair and playing computer games all the time and bullying other kids at school, and Henna by... well... no spoilers. In S2 Kerttu is tormented not only by not really knowing her father, hence druggs, but also by him giving her a vast, sprawling 'cottage' in a dirty part of Estonia near an abandoned prison (yeah, that's a holiday destination to die for). (Also to die at, as our heroes nearly do). 

* Nah. It's Finnish only. I just thought 'why do they keep bringing up Germany all the time?' An Australian co-production would be like 'well, Belgians aren't going to understand this unless there's a Belgian best friend and his dog Milou'. I guess it was just, like, a storyline. They probably didn't even go to Germany to shoot the 'Germany' scenes. 

100 reviews # 14. Skaldowie: Ty, Pretenders: Pretenders, Deaf School: English Boys, Working Girls

These three LPs came in the mail today from a Danish supplier. One reason I like getting records in the mail is the way in which it is very similar to someone curating albums I might like because of course by the time I get them I've forgotten what I have ordered. Pretenders is an outlier here because I have owned this album since it came out but I needed to replace my scratched up copy (but, a la Wild Planet, I still don't have, but really want, Pretenders II). 

NY Daily News 18 September 2005

I have been a big fan of Skaldowie for decades but only by dint of one album of theirs I bought probably more than twenty years ago at that weird second hand shop in Smith Street that then became a hairdresser. I can't understand why more people don't love them (I imagine if they had recorded in English that might have been a plus for their appeal outside Poland/ Polish speakers: the titles are translated, for no good reason, into English and that's what I'll be referring to henceforth). They did record in German occasionally, the only other record I have of theirs is a 7" EP in German. The album I have had all this time is Cała Jesteś W Skowronkach which google translate tells me means 'You're all in the larks', obviously I'm missing something there. This one is called Ty, which means 'you', I think singular 'you' (because it also means 'thou'). 

Knowing precisely 0 about the group except they are from Krakow, a city I have spent about 24 hours in and which I enjoyed greatly and would like to see more of one day, and speaking absolutely 0 Polish, I found myself rather regretful when wiping presumably 50 years of fingerprints off the vinyl before playing Ty, and thinking of course if only those fingerprints could talk about what the eyes of the people who bore the fingers who made them (the prints) had seen. However, in the meantime I will just be satisfied with the wonderful rich bass sound of this record, hollow and wandering not entirely unlike the sound Carol Kaye made her own on (for instance) Pet Sounds, and the solidly simple drums, and the virtuosity of a group with one foot in folk, no doubt hamstrung as far as what it could 'really' sing 'about', almost certainly hearing some music from the broader zeitgeist but, like the Australians of the period, getting on with their own thing and not letting anyone's perception of the supposed superiority of the Stones or Carnaby Street or, I don't know, Woodstock cow them. 

Side one is a fine bunch of pop songs in a late 60s style. Had anyone had the slightest imagination (actually it's not really a matter of imagination - more like, lack of imagination) they should have been translating things like 'Yearning', dreamy pop a la Jimmy Webb with a little bit of dour chanting to boot, and shopping it around to the aspirant next-gen Harry Nilssons and Glenn Campbells of the era. I daresay Tin Pan Alley, or whatever the LA equivalent was, had enough cheap 'n' cheerful songsmiths as it was, but then again, a hit's a hit and 'Yearning' had hit written all over it. Barbara Streisand would have done wonders with it. As for the soft-shoe silliness of 'Hymn of the Narrow-Gauge Railway Workers', well... to be honest musically it would have fit pretty nicely on something like the Bee Gees' Odessa, except probably better than most of that album, and the Bee Gees, whatever their strengths, would not have thought up something as dinky as the 'Girl from Ipanema'-style ending. 

Side two grabs me in greater detail. It starts with a piano-based pop song called 'A Man is Born' with a 'Hallelujah' in the chorus which makes me assume that it has a religious aspect to it. It also has french horn, chanting, organ, and the sound of a baby crying in it in which at first sounds like... something was really broken, which might be the point? Don't know. I get a little kick out of a group in cold war Poland getting away with what seems to be a song about Jesus, although at the same time, I am not very interested in regarding Christianity much less Catholicism as anything radical. Things pick up from here: 'You' i.e. the title track is a light jazzy pop song with a fabulous very punchy, balloony drum sound in the verse which I really think a lot of groups then and since would kill for. However, I have to say it's the funky 'At Railway Stations All Over the World' which really makes this side. It's not idiotic to describe it as evocative of a Monkees track I'll remember soon enough (um, possibly 'Tear Drop City') and perhaps a bit of 'The Beat Goes On'; clearly the verse is meant to evoke a railway train, an old trick (probably old even in 1970) but done well, the outcome is pretty grand, and these guys are clearly tight players as well - whoever plays the keyboards is really Keith Emersoning it up at the end and it's sensational, and just drums, bass and keys go for a bit of a crazy loop before the whole comes to the end. (In case I haven't made it clear, I'm not really saying that Skaldowie are imitating anyone, it's at worst the zeitgeist, at best their own creative genius). 'The Last Scene', a bit of a folk-rock opera, adds a massive slavic bass line to some gentle if disturbing harp and a classic example of Beach Boysesque balladeering which I have to say (viz mentions of Carol Kaye above) is a real element of the Skaldowie sound, and then, um, of course - a truck driving away (!?). The last track is 'Epilogue', which true to the times ends in mad tape-speeding-up craziness, is a bit of a frenetic bit of hilarity as is and you can sort of imagine this knockin' then dead at the Krakow clubs while smileless guards watch on from the surrounding dark corners. 

It seems that in the late 1970s Rolling Stone magazine supplied a syndicated column to newspapers, 'hence why' (as they say) when you search for Deaf School's third album on newspapers.com this same review appears a billion times, though only once I think (here, in the Ithaca Journal 27 May 1978) zanily crediting the record to 'Dear School'. 

To tell the truth, on early listenings (I will keep trying I think) English Boys/Working Girls is a bit of a disappointment after Don't Stop the World, which I love, having bought it on spec from a good record shop in Preston for cheap. EB/WG is the third Deaf School album (DSTW the second) and I guess by 1978 the band might have been thinking, well, who are we and what do we do exactly? There were way too many members (8) and probably also just too many ideas, if that's possible, and I think it might be, particularly when another big pervasive idea is 'crazy intellectuals can't new wave'. God it must have been difficult and I guess this is the kind of problem Split Enz had (but got over, somehow). 

Listening to English Boys/Working Girls you get a strong sense of the kind of showmanship that must have been a big part of Deaf School; a whole lot of guff going on at once, seemingly everyone doing their own thing, then sometimes they would click into unison and you'd realise it was all rehearsed. 

Songs like 'All Queued Up' are totally of the moment (the 1978 moment), and could be Blondie or, um, something off the Starstruck soundtrack or... well, the moment, and it was quite a moment. The sound of people who thought things were going to be better by now. Partying till they drop the atom bomb (I was talking to someone much older than me last week btw who mentioned how despairing his grandchildren were about the future because of the environment - I didn't quite say it right but I sort of said - jeepers, everyone who was sentient before 1990 had the same kind of despair re: nuclear annihlation I'm sure). (Actually both - the atom bomb and the environment). (And it's not like the atom bomb has gone away, but no-one thinks about it anymore except regarding Donald Trump and he's gone (for) now). 

'I Wanna Be Your Boy' is one of those songs that just goes everywhere, three directions at once like the Marx Brothers all in a huge suit. What Deaf School clearly 'needed' (though I'm glad they didn't get it) was a producer who took their songs apart and said no, don't do this bit, just concentrate on this amazing riff, and forget trying to make the song some kind of 3D hologram of an explosion. (Oddly enough the producer was Mutt Lange, who went on to work with people whose music wasn't complex, like AC/DC and Def Leppard). 

So that's my assessment of English Boys/Working Girls. Too many people in the band, too many ideas in the songs, funnily enough not a problem with Don't Stop the World. A long time ago I had an idea for a kind of, I don't know, studio group who would take whole albums that were considered problematic for significant artists (I guess things like Their Satanic Majesties), and remake/repair them (basically, rerecord them, but show how they could be made to work). A thoroughly 'academic' exercise that no-one would have time for in the real world, but it did appeal. If I were to do that to this album every song would be three songs. It would be a triple album. Tell you what though, the last song ('O. Blow') really tells you everything you need to know about where Madness found significant support for their sound/style. 

Which leaves us with Pretenders. Serious?! I don't want to listen to this album now. It does have four of the best songs of 1980 though, hands down: 'Precious', 'Private Life', 'Mystery Achievement' and 'Up the Neck'. Wow! Not to mention 'Brass in Pocket' which I guess 41 years ago for all I know today I spent a day going from radio station to radio station on a little transistor radio hoping one of them would play it. Maybe if I drink a bit more of this Salmiakki I'll play side 1 (but I'll yank it off before that fucking 'Space Invaders' track, what a dog). 

back back back

My back continues to give me as they say gyp (btw I looked this up on wiktionary and although they have no direct connection between this word and all the other words which are derogatory and about 'gypsies', you'd have to assume everybody who ever used it up until now assumed it was in some way a reference to 'gypsies' and how they were so awful their mere existence causes bodily pain in others). It is not my back per se, it's a muscle or two (not sure how many) in my lower back which all along for 55 years without thinking about it I have activated when sitting, standing or lying down. So basically anything inbetween these is more or less fine (with some twinges). (There was a moment a couple of days ago when I was doing nothing at all and it just suddenly started to get worse and worse, but it dissipated; that was a panicky few seconds, because I could see no obvious way to make it stop). 

As per my knee 'injury' last year, it's not really that bad, completely manageable and it's not like this was the week I was going to compete in the over-50s Olympics, and all that really concerns me is that it not get worse (and of course that it ultimately get better, which I imagine it probably will, in fact, it is improving slowly I think). I can walk (not that I'm likely to be doing that much today, which is a gross hot one) I just have those moments at times when I have to strategise a new way of standing up, which is a hassle but that's all it is. 

I'm taking ibuprofen which makes me feel slightly seedy, that's the only word I can use for it - like the very tail end of a hangover - though apparently although I got the strongest on the shelf in the chemist I should have asked for the special under the counter stuff. Don't know why that has to be a thing in this day and age. 

100 reviews # 13 part 2: side 2 of wild planet

One thing about the B52s in their early days was their unwillingness to fuck with the formula. Someone might have had a talk with them along the lines of: this is going to be a hard thing for the mass market to swallow so if you're going to launch this on the world in any sense, you have to basically not deviate from it thereafter. 

I shouldn't pronounce on this because to be honest I don't remember ever having heard a full B52s album aside from the first two (there have been seven plus an EP that's about as long as most albums,* still, a pretty tiny output for a group that's been in existence for 45 years - it's one song every 219 days, including cover versions. 

I have really hurt my back. I am not sure how it happened I think it was when I was trying to put a harness on Nancy to slowly introduce her to the idea of going for a walk on a lead. I have completely abandoned that idea, not because it was hard to get the harness on, though it was, but because when we got to the door she didn't want to do it and indeed turned around and got out of the harness almost immediately. I guess at that stage I wasn't that aware of having pain but it developed soon afterwards with a vengeance. Now it's that interesting situation where you start to get a vague idea not of how your muscles work but that they certainly do have a complex arrangement when you go to do things. It's not great lying down completely, it's better sitting, it's initially uncomfortable but ultimately fine standing/walking, but getting between those states is really, really painful. I'm not here to whinge, it's better this morning than it was last night, as long as I don't throw to many discuses or play too much squash I am sure I'll be fine. 

Side two of Wild Planet only has four songs on it, of varying durabilities. As usual the comedy component is the thing that wears out first, so 'Quiche Lorraine' for instance which reeks of mid-to-late-70s improv and which doesn't even really stand up too well (I know what that's like) on first listening, is the most throwaway (also the storyline makes me uneasy). '53 Miles of Venus' is a kind of faster, sparser 'Planet Claire' and while its emptiness is perfectly evocative of emptiness, and it's a good thing it doesn't have any lyrics (aside from the words which make up the title) so there's no riff on Venus (wolf whistle) Mars (hunting horns or something else warlike) Pluto (woof woof) Uranus (uh-oh), it still feels unfinished. That, or it's a pleasant wind-down after the frenetic work out of the previous eight tracks. 

'Devil in my Car' is possibly the hidden delight of the album and a song I had never really thought about before. If you slowed it down, oddly enough, it would be not unlike one of REM's hits, I can't remember which one because it's too hard to think of one tune while listening to another, but I think maybe 'Radio Free Europe'. It has a little more of an Americana, country feel to it, the - um, bridge? (the 'freeway to hell' bit) - is a bit reminiscent of American X, too, something like 'White Girl'. In any case, it's a keeper. 

I bought the single pictured above of 'Strobe Light'/ 'Dirty Back Road' when it came out, forty years ago, and unlike so many things I have retained it ever after. They are good songs (I like 'Dirty Back Road' the best) but I don't know why the hell I purchased this, considering I could have bought the whole album for a bit more outlay. Anyway - 'Strobe Light' is a pretty interesting take on, sorry to come back to this but all things considered - a pretty interesting take on heterosexual lovemaking/seduction - the thing where Fred rings the girls and they respond with such contempt/disgust/ennui is still pretty funny to me. The later bit about kissing the pineapple, I don't know where to go with that but I will sit with it. 

So looking back on the whole, this album is completely formulaic, in the sense that it's to the formula of the first album and every track is a parallel universe version of tracks from that album; they're not entirely in the same sequence but they almost are (admittedly there's no equivalent to the 'Downtown' cover on The B-52's on Wild Planet but that is by far the weakest track and poorest performance, so there being no quavery/sullen 'Que Sera Sera' or 'The Beat Goes On' here is a plus. Wild Planet is just slightly more electro (I think the drums on 'Quiche Lorraine' are drum machine, for instance, and come to think of it that might also be true of '53 Miles West of Venus').

Thanks for indulging me in this I had a good time. Now to get comfortable to do my real work - 1500 words of book chapter at least. 

*Wild Planet has nine tracks and is just under 35 minutes long; the 'European version' of Mesopotamia, which was marketed as an EP, has six tracks and is six seconds shy of 33 minutes long. The 'European version' is, according to discogs, 'much more raw and electronic'. The US version (which is also the Australian, and the Canadian, version) is 25:43 minutes long.  

100 reviews # 13 part 1: side 1 of wild planet

I wonder how I would have felt about the B52s in 1980 when I was 15 if I had known they were 4/5 gay.* I had a very ambivalent attitude to the gayness of others during my teens because of some odd episodes that I now realise were just part of life but no-one talked about things like that then. I always knew I wasn't gay but like a lot of other things I didn't realise that my desire for people to not discuss things that went outside a (my) very heteronormative (etc etc, elite) world view wasn't just a wish for people to be civilised and tasteful and logical but a wish for people to deny a core element of themselves for my peace of mind. Luckily, my opinion didn't matter and also, it had fully changed within a few years. To be clear, though I was terrified of being thought of as gay, I was never hostile to gayness, but I certainly didn't want to know about it. 

The other side of the story is of course the B52s completely sidestepped from any discussion of - um - anything at all really, because they just went with this kitsch weirdness look, and a sound that at the time I thought of as retro but I now appreciate that was just me responding to visual stimulus - I mean, 'Planet Claire' off the first album was a step beyond Kraftwerk really, and there were quite a few other songs (I'm thinking for instance 'Dirty Back Road' on this album) which were just set and forget grooves which could have as easily been tape loops as a band playing (probably to a click - if they did that then - I think they did, otherwise how could they have done that party remix album). So that's kind of modern, and there is an extra disco oomph to a lot of the songs here which were possibly so common for the time no-one noticed. Then there was the other thing they did, which was often very Fred Schneider-directed, with his public-announcement voice half-singing, half calling a square dance. A propos of that, I'll just say that the song 'Private Idaho', which closes side one of Wild Planet, is the song that shows up how much of a progression (in terms of instrumentation) Wild Planet is from the first album, basically because it doesn't fit on Wild Planet and it would have easily fit on The B52s. 'Private Idaho' is not a terrible song I guess but it already felt old hat in 1980 whereas 'Give Me Back My Man' was a very fetching new hat. I'll get this out of the way now: that 'I'll give you fish, I'll give you candy' is fucking ridiculous and someone should have had the hard talk with the 52s back in 80 about the wisdom of ruining your chorus with something that embarrassing: 'do you want to be singing that for another forty years?' (Ricky: 'wouldn't mind').

So, let's look at the side as a whole: it starts with 'Party Out of Bounds' wherein the gang crash a gathering and bully the attendees. Best bit: the really awful trumpet noise half way through - or the fucked up walkie-talkie grind noise at the end. But I love the way it's partly a recipe for social success, partly for social suicide. It has a slightly threatening vibe which I have to deal with every time. 

'Dirty Back Road' is this album's '52 Girls' and it's got all the same ingredients: Cindy and Kate in unison sing a vocal melody which seems to come from nowhere - certainly not from the fairly pedestrian instrumental track created to be featureless to let them do their stuff - and which fits perfectly. 

'Running Around' is the 'Dance This Mess Around' of the album, and while it's very energetic, it's probably not as good though the interplay between Fred on the one hand and K&C on the other is very engaging. 

'Give Me Back My Man' is everything that's good about pop music, including that execrable fish-candy chorus line. They get to it almost immediately. It's Cindy singing solo and her voice (I wonder if this would have hit me at the time?) has a certain edge to it that wasn't common to female pop singers then. The way John heard traces of Yoko in the B52s says more about how glibly sanitised pop music was in 1979-80 than it does about Yoko's influence on them I suspect but it's still a thing.** A voice like that not only cut through in terms of sound but also, while you never for a moment thought that anything the B52s sang about was important to them in and of itself or had resonance for them or genuine feeling (at least, not on the first couple of albums), there was something more genuinely expressive about it (kind of 'help! I'm trapped in a fucking pop song'). Along with the evocations of Lesley Gore, etc, which added to the overall. 

I never really got this forty years ago but subsequent reading has made it clear to me that the first two B52s albums are really testament to the wayward (?) genius of Ricky Wilson, a guitar player who apparently devised his own unique tunings and came at the material intuitively. If you just listen to the guitar on side one of Wild Planet you hear things you wouldn't get from any other record I can think of, although there are probably traces of for instance Television in there.*** 

I have always wanted to own Wild Planet but I never did until Saturday and while other records are presently also clamouring for my attention, this is top stuff. I expect to turn it over some time later in the week. I also want to see One Trick Pony again. 

*I went on a wikipedia search on all their lives and it would seem that not all of them knew it then so it would have been testament to my gaydar if I had. 

** Hilarious moment at the end of John and Yoko: A Love Story when John calls Yoko to tell her about 'new wave' and how it's what she was doing ten years before. Was he listening to the B-52s on the radio when he made that call? Probs.

*** After writing this I read that the only non-B52s recording RW did was when he played on a song on a Tom Verlaine album. So I'm right. 

Boston Globe 22 August 1980

lupin lupin

A few days ago I started watching Lupin which is I guess an enjoyably fast-paced piece of work with some very good actors and the sumptuous backdrop of Paris (a city I have never really enjoyed quite as much as I could or should in real life) and all the same old shitty tropes that you'd get in any Hollywood production all about revenge and crimefighting and crimecomitting except for a couple of twists like, I don't know, they're French? And the hero is a criminal? But he's a criminal for the right reasons maybe? To be honest, that's not entirely clear (at least not at first - actually I'm wrong - he's a criminal for criminal reasons at first, but then he becomes a criminal for the 'right' reasons, I guess). But look, it kept me mainly engaged, although I was - I won't spoil- particularly pissed off by a death in the 4th episode that I felt was entirely unnecessary, although perhaps I don't know enough to have a complete opinion on that because I decided half way through the last episode I wouldn't watch it till the next season comes along;* the only thing I know about it is it's a cliffhanger anyway but it does seem it's a cliffhanger based on more trite and well-worn tropes we don't need anymore really. 

To be honest the best thing about Lupin is the plot holes, which are crazy, but it sets the whole thing on a extra superheroesque level which I kind of enjoy more than if all the ts were crossed and i's dotted. After all, the whole thing is anchored by devotion to a series of Rafflesish crime thrillers and the ones who know, know (I don't know, I've never read any of those books, though I am tempted now). Assene Diop's bad habit of doing his crimes via fake people whose names are an anagram of Arsene Lupin is going to get him into trouble, I can see that already. 

*Wikipedia says the next five eps will be with us in 'the summer of 2021', which of course I will have to change now, because fuck that hemispherism. 

lapin lapin