100 reviews #6 Shirl

I seem to be barely able to keep pace with Jeff Apter, the Barbara Cartland of rock bios. Apter’s Shirl has popped out so soon after his contentious (to me) book about Marc Hunter that one would assume he had a secret, except reading the books show it’s no secret: he bashes this shit out, and that’s all.

I wish I was Apter’s friend, or perhaps his mentor. I would love to have had the conversation, having read Shirl in manuscript form, along the lines of:

Jeff: So, mate, waddya think? I reckon I really nailed this one, this, er, ‘Shirl’.

Me: Yeah, Jeff, I read it over the course of a day.

Jeff: Amazing, ‘cos I wrote it over the course of… never mind. Any comments, but?

Me: Jeff, I had a few things I thought you could develop.

Jeff: Aw geez, ‘develop’, ‘things’… that’s all I ever hear from you!

Me: Well, like Louisa Wisselling. That’s an interesting angle.

Jeff: (sigh). Why. Who is that.

Me: I didn’t know she was the first co-host of Shirl’s Neighbourhood. You should have tried to track her down.

Jeff: Look, I put a whole week into the research. What do you want?

Me: She was the Judith Durham replacement in the mid-70s Seekers, they were huge. In a way, she might have had an even bigger music career than Shirl – some sources say that ‘The Sparrow Song’ was their biggest hit, and that group sold 50 million records or more.

Jeff: (looking out the window) Uh

Me: You could have asked her whether she ever talked with Shirl about their respective careers.

Jeff: (looking at his fingers) Uh

Me: You could at very least have mentioned she had a huge music career in the mid-70s, like Shirl. I mean, Shirl had ‘cred’ somehow, at least some of the time, but let’s face it, they were both hacks in their way.

Jeff: Gawd. Alright, I’ll put me Keith Lamb bio on hold for two more days.

What gets me about Apter – as I probably mentioned in my review of his Hunter book – is his lack of curiosity, his ‘straight-down-the-line-ness’. He is a clever horse who puts on the blinkers to get to his destination faster. He doesn’t bother to seek out Louisa Wisselling or even mention her background (or, apparently, even type her name into a search engine). He is very focused on the notion that Shirl gave up rock and roll in the late 70s, to the degree that when he mentions Shirl’s early 80s work with the Party Boys (as a touring lead singer) it’s as an afterthought. It doesn’t fit with the narrative, and so there’s no point in talking to any of the other Party Boys from that tour, and nor is there any point in talking about the actual record they made. I remember Kurt Vonnegut once writing about the plotting of a novel – was it Slaughterhouse 5? Breakfast of Champions? Was it actually part of the narrative of one of those novels, or did he write about it elsewhere? Anyway, his method was to draw different coloured lines, characters’ lives, parallel to each other across a large piece of paper. This is pretty much Apter’s approach. Do not deviate, do not pontificate. Fremantle to Midland, stopping some stations.

It was probably a little painful for Apter to work on Shirl who was – if not a hack – a moneyminded showman (ok, a hack), whereas I suspect he enjoys artists who at least bother to muster a sense of artistic vision. This is not a putdown of Shirl. I like Shirl, I liked him when I was 10 and I like him now, long-dead. I think his honesty about his showbusiness career was refreshing, and on this I think Apter and I agree.

The fact of the matter is the best book on Skyhooks was written by Jenny Brown in 1975, at the height of their infamy (and, as it transpired, just months after the height of their success, unless you count as Shirl might the height of their success as being their lucrative reformation tours of the 1980s). Brown’s is a book that satisfies every requirement a Skyhooks/Shirl afficianado might have except that of historical perspective – it’s of the moment – and detail about Shirl’s working relationship with Louisa Wisseling, because that had not yet happened. There was another Skyhooks book, Jeff Jenkins’, which similarly has good points, though Jenkins like Apter is another ‘rock historian’ who is all rock, no historian.

One of the things Apter can do, for which we should be grateful, is (as was also the case with Hunter) get to the dead man’s relatives, and assure them that while this will be no hagiography… nah, it will be hagiography, pure and simple. So for what it’s worth, the parents and so on will talk to him, and for all I know he lets them approve the MS in draft form (and look, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that – your informants can validly demand a say in how they, and in this case their loved one, is presented).

To go one step further: Apter basically just doesn’t write the kinds of books that satisfy me. Today I heard on the radio of a Simple Minds – the Church? – Models? I can’t remember, old ‘heritage acts’ event, that’s on next week or something, a completely gross event that makes me want to laugh except it might turn to vomiting. Also today listening to The Now Show on BBC radio 4 there was mention of some racist political party’s website which glamourises the old days of Britain (pre-immigration or something – only there aren’t actually that many people alive now who’d remember that period) as a golden age. It was pointed out that the 'golden age' is just whenever the beholder was young - whenever that was, 20 years ago or 40 years ago. This is why Apter et al bug me. If you believe in the golden age, you have just given up. To my mind, the task of the historian is to put the present into perspective, or as we periodically joke about in my workplace, to ‘show relevance’. It’s not to wrap everything up neatly and take a stroll through it to confirm how great our childhoods were (which – sorry to break this to you – they were not).

So in summary:

1. This book has a lot of interesting material in it. Frustratingly undeveloped interesting material.
2. The lack of development is either for a secret reason of the author’s or because he can’t be bothered
3. It is for people who remember the 70s/80s and think they were great times.

As I so often say – ‘But then, I read it from cover to cover’. That is, I found it compelling. But it’s only half the book it could have been. That possibly says more about the publishing (and nostalgia) industry than it does about Jeff Apter, the cog. 

gentleman's herpes

OK in addition to the cats having all these injuries and inflammations I have my old shingles back. I have absolutely no recollection of when I first got this - maybe a decade ago? But last Sunday I was bitten by something while out on a long walk with the dogs (see where healthy living gets you - !) and over the next day or two it developed into what is technically known as herpes zostex.* It is not very serious (so relax) in fact it only slowly seeped into my consciousness that I had a particular stinging pain (not a rash like on the wikipedia page, which is just wallpapered with gross photographs) down my left side. Even then I was content to be stoic as it was not really destroying my (high) quality of life, but it didn't seem to be getting better, in fact yesterday I think it seemed definitely to be getting worse (headaches etc) so I went to the doctor this morning. He told me if I'd come to him in the first couple of days he could have prescribed something, but back then I was barely conscious of it, so I told him to fuck off  didn't. Anyway it will apparently fade in the next week or so and I will emerge stronger and better for it.

Remember a few months ago I was complaining about a spate of colds etc? Well, I have just been run down since then and I am not making things any more relaxeder for myself, though perhaps after next week it might get a little easier.

*In case you can't be bothered to read the wikipedia page, I couldn't, particularly trying to avoid those pictures, it is not like (um... I think it's called) herpes simplex, it's apparently a hangover from chicken pox, which subsides as an affliction but never leaves you once you get it and can flare up whenever. 

gentleman's wound

I took Bela to the vet today as he had a problem with one of his back legs. He was walking with it inwards and very slowly and did not seem happy - also there was a bit of blood. The vet said it was just a gash from a fight and reassured me that Bela had not been a provocateur or aggressor in this. Had he had a cut on his face or front paws, that would have been different but this was a 'gentleman's wound' - he was leaving the scene and got a jab on the way out.

I mean I am not sure where you draw the line between gentleman and coward but I don't need Bela to be a hero. (This is three days after taking Butterball to the vet for his outrageously swollen lip which, FYI, is just a thing that happens and probably an allergic reaction no-one really knows).

In the afternoon I minded Ernie (aged, erm, not sure - 1 1/2? I am bad with people's ages at ALL levels) while Liz went to the hairdresser in Westmeadows. I was a little worried that he might get weirded out by me, as though we had seen each other at the Broadmeadows Festa a few weeks ago, it had been a long time before that. But no. He was entirely unfazed. At first I thought we were just going to watch tv, because that was what he wanted to do, and it was ABC3 and quite fun. He only acknowledged me a couple of times to point at the TV. Fine.

Then the power went off! He thought I'd turned it off. But everything in the house was dead. So I just made the executive decision to go outside. Liz had told me he likes watering things in the garden and it's true, he does. He watered most of the plants and also made a mud puddle, which was a problem because he also doesn't like having dirty hands or feet. Luckily he does like washing them under the tap, and detaching the hose from the tap to do this. And putting the hose back on the tap to watch the water coming out of the hose, etc.

Then he grabbed Jeff's Galapagos Duck soundtrack to The Removalists (he is obsessed with LPs) and was kind of doing this taking the record out of the sleeve, putting it back etc, and I was thinking, 'I should try and replace this record with something else because that's probably a pretty valuable LP'. But he wouldn't hand it over, at all, or swap it for anything else. Yes, the power was still off. But then Liz came home, much earlier than I expected. He had shown little concern about her absence (except possibly once when a woman was speaking in the street and he wanted to go out into the front garden - he was certainly looking for something there, or someone) but he was really happy she was back.

All in all, I really enjoyed that little time I spent with him. And now I have made paella. From an online recipe labelled I think 'Cheat's Paella' or something similar.

* Later: I had a thought. When I was at the vet's they offered me a receipt for Bela's treatment and I said no, it's not tax deductible why bother. Then I thought (and said - god I was chatty yesterday) I suppose if I used my pets in ads or as animal actors then I could deduct their treatment, and the receptionist (Ashley or Ashleigh) said, some of our clients actually do that. So then I thought, if I 'monetized' this blog as blogger is always inviting me to do, could I then claim all kinds of shit - including vet bills - as tax deductions? If a tax accountant is reading this, and s/he can give me valid advice leading to my monetary gain, I will compensate. 

100 reviews # 5 The Dictator

So the Westmeadows DVD rental place is great, because (I suspect) it is going out of business, or at very least for some reason that its owners can’t be happy about it is running at a very slender profit margin. Last week I tried to borrow three DVDs and was told that if I borrowed 4, instead of $9 it would be $7. So I got 4. One was This Must Be the Place which, peculiar as it was, I actually enjoyed, particularly Sean Penn’s character’s giggle. The other one we watched was The Five Year Engagement which had its moments. Also, I borrowed The Dictator and Hunger Games, but we didn’t get round to watching those. But I was intrigued by The Dictator, and went back on Tuesday night to borrow it again. It was Tuesday so it cost $1.

I don’t want to just review things that are bad, but I have consumed a lot of bad things lately. I have to tell you, The Dictator is a seriously terrible film. It is one of those films that are so bad that the one decent thing about them – the extended speech at the end where SBC’s character lists all the things that are good about dictatorships and bad about democracies, except all the things he’s listing relate to recent US history, is ruined by the fact that the speech itself is a sad, hollow imitation of/tribute to Chaplin’s Great Dictator.

The real, genuine, absolute problem about The Dictator, however, is (I seem to recall this as a criticism from when it hit cinemas a few months ago) there are no sympathetic characters. We are apparently somehow meant to have some kind of empathy with the SBC character (sorry, I can’t be bothered looking his name up) when he loses his status and power but why would we? It only confuses matters that his one ally in New York, the scientist he thought he had executed a few years previously but who only bears him ill-will in a slapstick kind of way, seems to be the ‘sensible one’, only he wants to restore SBC’s character to dictatorhood again, for no real apparent reason (well, it will allow him to continue his research into nuclear weapons – I can relate to that). The only person in the film we might have reason to empathise with is the wholefoods store manager Zoe, but since she apparently falls in love with SBC’s character, why should we trust anything else about her? Ultimately she is mainly to be a source of jokes about armpit hair.* Beyond these it’s a stretch to think of anyone in the film who is an interesting character.

When it comes down to it, the script is ridiculously – I won’t say predictable – but it is thoroughly unimaginative and uninteresting. As Mia said, we did watch it to the end (a couple of times I suggested curtailing this activity with the underpinning sentiment that I was easy either way, and we agreed to keep going a little way longer, then it ended).

There were some other films I wanted to write about. Any Questions For Ben was kind of engaging, in a disappointing way. I can’t even remember the others we saw recently so they must not have been very important. 

* Armpit hair is not suitable for grossout humour because it's not gross enough. I'm more disturbed by a cinematic trope that armpit hair is gross, than I am by armpit hair. It makes me feel like someone's trying to manipulate me into finding something gross that is actually pretty nothingish. 

slight improvement

I know, I know (though no-one said it) it is wrong to have a big health whinge when there are people with real health problems and some of them fatal. I was frustrated.

I think overall it is improving and with the end of the teaching year as of NOW it will probably improve massively. I should have got the flu shot when they were offering them at work and dumbly the reason I didn't was I heard that some people felt crappy for a week after it. (And a month ago I was still congratulating myself for not getting it because I thought I'd got through the winter without any ramifications.)

world of crap

I have been ill with flu or something for close to two weeks now. That has included three days off work and a Saturday that was also spent in bed. It is one of the grossest illnesses of this type I can remember having, and I have no idea how to make it go away. Waiting it out, which was the first strategy, sure isn't helping. I suppose the devil is to blame.

PS Thank you Robitussin ('Chesty Cough Forte') for four hours of decent sleep. When I awoke all I needed was two different forms of aspirin.

PPS I am perplexed still as to why, as soon as I start moderating comments on this blog, which I have never done before, I am suddenly riddled with comments relating to the sale of ugg boots - I mean probably about 10-15 a day. They are all very polite. 

PPPS While I was waiting for the aspirins to kick in I did a random 'next blog' thing from this one and I found a quite interesting blog which doesn't seem to have been updated for 6 months or so but it's called Guide to Zone 2. I enjoyed it. I thought the author and Nadia were very unfair on Broadmeadows but I would I suppose. 

100 reviews # 4: FIfty Shades of Grey and Tempest

A few weeks ago I made an undertaking to review two phenomena of the age, the blockbuster S&M porn novel Fifty Shades of Grey and Bob Dylan's Tempest. When I made the undertaking I was not very sure how these two would fit together in terms of content, approach or scope. All I knew was they were two examples of culture product which had the world abuzz (Tempest for about half an hour, Fifty Shades for months and months). I wanted to look at how champions and/or consumers of these items embraced, analysed (or not) and explored them. I was intrigued by the number of women I had seen reading Fifty Shades on the train and wondered whether their doing so was any kind of a statement or indeed whether there was any self-consciousness at all to the act. I wondered about the Dylanophiles who consistently heralded and defended this man's work into his dotage, taking every apparently wrong move as a puzzle set for acolytes by a great mind. I wanted to show that there's less of a disjunct between these two than might initially appear, if only because - here's my 70sness coming in to play - they both belonged in the bag of Things We Had To Know About in 2012, the passing show of stuff made and on sale, for which the media gives us context and then talking points.

Unfortunately, I hit and unexpected snag. In both cases, I had dissed the works out of hand in the first instance because what little I'd heard about (or in the case of Tempest, of) them sounded bad. On reflection I assumed that in the larger works there would be some nuance or quirk or set of ideas that would intrigue me. After all, only boring people get bored. Well, I read the whole of Fifty Shades of Grey and listened to Tempest (admittedly only) a couple of times. They suck! They really, really suck. I was not expecting them both to suck so badly.

To start with Tempest. Of course, and understandably, all discussion of Bob Dylan these days revolves around not whether the residual interest in his 21st century (or in fact post-1970s) work is predicated on the appeal and impact of his first 15 years or so as a recording artist, but to what degree the new work is a degraded echo of what was once an interesting voice/artist. We all want to be kind to old people, and presumably much of the niceness extended to Dylan in the last couple of decades comes from sentimentality about who he once was. He is not that person anymore - who would want to be the same person they were fifty years before, much less be able even to approximate it? - and what he is now is a performer of almost no appeal whatsoever. Detached from the legacy, Tempest is an amazingly poor album. If it had been written and recorded (and I bring this up because it was so reminiscent of the genre) by a periurban retired schoolteacher and his friends from the men's shed, and released as a CDR in an edition of 50 copies, no-one aside from the wives would give it the time of day. Its most original idea is a song nine minutes longer than appropriate that mixes up the actual Titanic disaster with fictional representations of the same. Its best song, the opener 'Duquesne Whistle', has at least an agreeably warm sound/production; luck or skill, who knows. The only thing that interests me about Tempest, ultimately, is the question of whether Dylan makes his lyrics up as he sings them, or whether he spends five minutes writing them down in free-association first. If these words are the product of any kind of concerted effort, then the great man truly has lost it. No, no 'ifs'. He lost it years ago and there is no excuse for this kind of absurd banality. I do blame the press, for giving it oxygen, and editors for scoping round amongst potential reviewers for finding those who would regard it positively.

Now, those who love Tempest (no-one really does love it, of course, though many have found it possible to pretend to) no doubt would turn their noses up at Fifty Shades.  That's appropriate, but everyone should turn their noses up at this particular piece of dross. It's barely worth going into, but to dismiss it lightly when Tempest got a big paragraph would be to give Tempest too much dignity.

Fifty Shades is a sexual fantasy epic in which a young woman called Anastasia is seduced by a billionaire twentysomething called Christian into the world of what we used to call bondage and discipline and now I can't remember what it's called. I gave my copy to an op shop in Swan Hill - I saw no reason to continue to own it once I finished it, and I did actually finish it (spoiler: it doesn't end, indeed the first, most popular book is one of a trilogy of books each the same enormous size and almost has the status of a prequel, setting up for whatever happens in the second and third). All I retain from my reading of the work is these notes:

I have an email address? p. 178

Eradicate hunger across the globe p 237

The first note is to my mind the most preposterous, unbelievable aspect of the novel - that college student Anastasia Steele does not have an email address, until Christian Grey sets up an account for her.  I would ask firstly, what kind of a prat in 2011 (I assume this is when the book is set - it's when it was published), educated, ostensibly within the book's mythic universe articulate, in the first world (Seattle or Portland or somewhere) doesn't have an email address? 'I have an email address?' is as crazy as 'I have a middle name?' or 'I have a library card?' 

As for the 'eradicate hunger' note, I am not entirely sure why I thought this was worth writing down, though if I remember correctly this is Christian Grey's main business, somehow. I don't know why no-one thought of the billions to be made from this before but like Fifty Shades itself I guess you just need to get a niche and work it. 

I am no great judge of literary sex scenes and I tend to avoid reading such stuff, but the descriptions peppering this book are lazy, cliched and vapid. Christian has entirely no flaws - he even knows how to set up an email account - except that he Cannot Love, as his mother was a Crack Whore. Anastasia, deprived of the use of 21st century communication tools such as email, has developed a close relationship with something she calls her Inner Goddess, a kind of judgmental witch in her brain. The book starts, goes six hundred pages, and then ends. I did read it to the end, so it was in one sense 'readable', in the same way Tempest is 'listenable'. 

Yet both of them let me down shockingly, even given my low expectations. The thing that links these two really is that one has been received as being at the high end of popular culture, and the other at the 'low', porny end. But they are in fact roughly of equal value: bloodless going-through-the-motions. At least Fifty Shades will have a long-term impact; no doubt sales of big leather belts skyrocketed in 2012 as readers briefly (probably very very briefly, but what do I know) experimented with the presumably quite mild practices espoused by Christian Grey; it's also, I bet, likely to be many children's first exposure to fiction on sexual themes, and while 'scarred for life' is going too far, it will surely shape attitudes. Tempest will be so forgotten - actually, I think it already is - before long that only completists will know of it, and even then few of them, surely, will want to know it.