the public image is rotten

First up: fucking awful title for a documentary.

Second up: is this actually a documentary? Well, it has Thurston Moore in it, like most music documentaries that don't have Bono in them, and I have to give TM credit for never saying no to any documentary who wants to include him. Look, when the Cannanes played the Knitting Factory on the 15/5/1991 Sonic Youth were outside the venue with Epic Soundtracks (I remember talking to him and Aileen McNally about how he liked Reeves and Mortimer and she liked Julian Clary and he didn't like Julian Clary and she didn't know anything about Reeves and Mortimer, but I don't remember if he introduced me / us to Sonic Youth; my point being why wasn't Thurston Moore in the Cannanes documentary? He had at least some geographic proximity to something in that group's existence and he will clearly go to the opening of an envelope). But...

Thirdly, if this doesn't have John Lydon's fingerprints on it as a producer or something, or if it isn't officially sanctioned by him, there's no excuse for its shallow, pandering tone and even if it does/was, there's still no excuse. It is obvious to everyone - surely everyone involved in the band, let alone everyone around them - that whatever passes for PiL today/in the 20th century is a complete travesty of the original. I mean, beyond a travesty. It might as well be a PiL covers band but even that would be better than what it's become, a schmetarded piece of shit. I suppose it at least achieves one ambition of the original band: it unsettles and angers some members of the comfortable middle class i.e. me. But only because it has fallen so far from anything high quality. Those first three PiL albums were supreme genius. I admit I haven't heard Album and maybe I should do myself a favour (?). And really I haven't spent any time with anything produced under the PiL name since Flowers of Romance. But I watched this film and fucking hell. Lydon's fall from ability/capacity is just one of those sad, sad things that happen to 90% of great artists I suppose, you have to be just grateful you got them once at a good creative place. Christ. Awful! 

The film is unable to say what is clearly apparent: a great idea for a creative working unit became, over a  long period of time, a sad (if lucrative?) footnote to a career. Obviously a lot of this is due to economics and accidents and drug use (most specifically Keith Levene's) and the music industry being a crock of shit and shame, and even if JL doesn't believe his own myths (or those which have been thrust upon him) he still has to work with them. But argh. Frustrating. Thank christ it's not my problem lol. Actually I sought it out and let it upset me so more fool me. 

Two great albums I happened upon* this weekend which I heartily endorse. One is Punko's Plants Singing which came out earlier this year and which is a total gem (well, I've only listened to one side of it, but I can't imagine the other side would cancel it out even if it was gruesome) and the other is Shrapnel's Alasitas which is midway between being a 2021 cassette release and being an actual vinyl (I guess) LP and I have been playing in the car a lot. If I had to review it, which I don't, I'd say that it sounds like all those great early 80s Flying Nun bands if they'd actually formed five years earlier and were 'indebted' to prog (eg Caravan, Jethro Tull) instead of whatever they were 'indebted' to, Television or the Velvets (or imported german beer or whatever). I love it. 

*This is a lie. Both were recommended by Alec Marshall. 

just a minute

Twelve years ago I mentioned my interest in Just a Minute and um I also mentioned my interest in it a few months ago too, it's one of those very addictive slightly guilty-pleasure shows that not only runs and runs on a very simple premise / set of ideas, it has also developed its own internal ambience which probably makes it a little hard to get into (I'm not sure) if you haven't been listening to it for close to fifty years on and off like I have. 

After Nicholas Parsons died, which was always going to happen, they rotated hosts for a little while from the regular panelists, now it would seem they have settled on Sue Perkins as host. She was an excellent panelist so it's kind of sad to lose her in that capacity. She's very sharp of course and does a great job as host except in the way she consistently demonises Gyles Brandreth when he's on. 

Brandreth is a very, very funny man. He has created a wonderful persona for this program (or maybe it's him - I don't know, I've barely ever encountered him in any other forum). It's a kind of pompous showman with a grab-bag of old tropes that belie his apparently horrible politics. What gets up my nose is Perkins' decision to make Brandreth a scapegoat as though he was some sort of old perv at worst or at best someone who always needs taking down a peg or two. I don't really understand why; she may not like his politics, which is fine neither do I, but he is a brilliant personality for a show like this and he adds a huge amount. More to the point, with JAM's rather sour history of tolerating (but no-one knew - did they?) an actual sexual predator as a beloved member of the core cast for decades, I'm talking of course about Clement Freud, it seems a bit rich to be berating Gyles Brandreth in ways that, if you didn't stop to think about it, you'd think he was actually in some way toxic or handsy. I'm sure he isn't, because it wouldn't be tolerated for a second. 

I'm still sad about Clement Freud! I thought he was magnificent and I loved the Grimble books too. 

Incidentally I found a copy of The Kenneth Williams Letters somewhere (I can't remember where) and am dipping into it. It's interesting and absolutely not funny. Like a lot of people in his profession Williams is not only a miserable person, he sees the world very much in black and white. Of course he was intensely inhibited as well. Complete fucking genius though when he was doing what he did best. He was superb on Just a Minute indeed that might have been where he did his best work - ? 

Seems silly to be writing about JAM and to not mention the completely excellent Paul Merton. The glue that holds the thing together - even when he's not on it, in some weird way. Merton is also the link between the old and the new JAM, having essentially replaced Williams and so worked with the other three original panelists of Peter Jones, Derek Nimmo and Freud. But I should also say that paradoxically the show really improved at the turn of the century, in my unscientific estimation (i.e. I have no proof of this, just my memory thinking back) before Parsons started to seem not entirely sure where he was, and from when Jones, Nimmo and Freud were still around, joined by Merton, and then transitioned into a much larger pool of guests including a lot more women. I mean the show in the 70s and 80s was a lot of fun for the time but looking back it could have been a lot more than a show of five white men talking amongst themselves, for crying out loud! But I'm going from unscientific to ahistorical, aren't I. Apologies. It's still a great show but maybe it's a bit uncertain, well I suppose a lot of 55 year old people are uncertain so imagine being a 55 year old radio show. 

en route to complete destruction

The Shiel St building when I passed it last night. Not entirely demolished just yet. In other news (see below) I have been asked to revisit an old character and last night you know I was finding it really difficult to get into because I made the classic mistake of having a few good ideas which I am now wedded to but I either didn't consider how to put them together or I did and have forgotten. So we'll see where this ends up. Things like this usually take on a life of their own. 

I'm going to have to get him into some other clothes (or naked) soon because I'm already sick of that cable knit jumper. 

5 shiel st north melbourne and the time is right for romans, baby

This building is coming down rapidly in Shiel St. If I lived in those flats behind, facing east, I'd be a bit concerned about what was going to replace it. Well I'd be massively concerned. 

The place was never functioning as anything all the time I've lived here which tbf isn't a massively long period of time. People used to use its forecourt to park in in ways that looked like they were parking each other in. More strangely than that, there are often people waiting in cars in the street immediately outside. 

In other news I have to confess my Pintandwefall obsession has only grown, after a brief pivot to renewing my acquaintance with Big Star. I got another Pintandwefall album in the mail last week, the first one they released on vinyl I think. 

It's called Time is Right for Romans, Baby and it takes that obscure pun a little further by including a drawing of a centurion on the lyric sheet but that's it (otherwise, the actual song that starts the album is called 'Time is Right for Romance'). So you assume that the whole thing is some kind of tossed-off in-joke, which by the way I've never been against from an artist. Oddly TIRFRB isn't streamable, I think possibly their only album that isn't, yet it features at least a couple of songs for which they made videos (there's also a ten-minute Youtube video called The Making of Time is Right for Romans, Baby which is intriguing but entirely in Finnish, so, unintelligible to me). TIRFRB is, on preliminary listens, more rugged and seems to push the envelope a little lyrically (songs that seem to be about domestic violence etc though don't quote me on that). But then I flipped it over to side B once and I was taken aback - it seems like the second side of the album is a real departure in terms of sound and style and is going to take time to absorb. Will report, hold your breath.

At the age of 57 one is meant to not get heavily into new music (by which I mean music made after the time you turned 25) and this album in any case is from 2011 but also I am consistently in awe of their 2022 album Seventh Baby which I can't stop playing either. In fact it's basically an ongoing competition to decide which of the four Pintandwefall LPs I own is going to get played today (and right now I'm exploring another I have never heard, Be My Baby from 2013, on spotify). 

For the last few days I've actually been getting to know the first one I got, Red and Blue Baby, which was released in 2017, better. I liked it well enough when I got it, enough to also purchase Seventh Baby which I instantly thought was far superior (my real major objection to RABB is that it has a song about a killer dolphin, called 'Killer Dolphin', which really gets up my nose). There were elements of RABB which just sounded kind of affected to me and perhaps even like they were trying to paper over the cracks of being slightly uninspired, by overdoing the gothic / histrionic vocals (eg the ending of 'Yours', which is just a silly rave-up). But I've made peace with it now. 

I have to admit a major component of my intrigue here is why isn't this band massively huge?! Why aren't they, like, touring the world every other year at a (say) Courtney Barnett level, appearing on late night TV in the US like CB has? The actual possibility (I may have countenanced this here already, sorry if so) is that they might sound massively like a whole slew of bands, they're just an example of something, and so they're purveyors of a product that you can get more easily in other ways and there's nothing too special about them. Maybe I just don't know that some group / bunch of artists already do this, arguably better, because I am so removed from the mainstream (or the mainstream of whatever now passes for 'alternative') that I don't know about its breadth and capacity. Another possibility is that Pintandwefall are drawing on the same basic musical styles and sounds that I liked as a child (and as mentioned previously, they do throw in that reference to the first Magazine album on the cover of their most recent record, which suggests not only an awareness of the past but extremely good taste) and I take on these retro tropes as manifestations of something new. Ugh, I don't know. 

It's interesting that all their songs are in English too which is obviously something that you do when you think you're going to go places internationally, but from what I can see they've only played about three shows internationally - a couple in Germany ten years ago and one in St Petersburg a few years before that. Weird, weird, weird. 

I mean they're not a 'hot new group' like Wet Leg or whatever, they've been around for 15 years or more, they are clearly ensconced in their particular scene, which btw is I think centred around Tampere? Which goes to show that when I was in Tampere for a month in 2016 and trying to figure out (not very concertedly, it's true) what constituted the 'scene' there and getting nowhere, there was a lot more going on than I could glean. 

Anyway I am sure at some time soon the scales will fall from my eyes, which will be completely disgusting, and when you have non-scaly eyes suddenly you can see again, and what you see is the scales that just fell, presumably on the ground around you or on the table or whatever, gelatinous as I imagine them but drying out, and you are like, I will have to clean this up, and then you'd be thinking, fucking hell, should I keep these scales and take them to the doctor because we should probably get them analysed in case I grow eye scales again? Then again, scales are always falling from people's eyes, maybe it's a common enough problem that the doctor would just know how to deal with it and anyway it's possibly simply a waiting game - scales will fall from your eyes eventually. The whole thing makes me feel queasy. I don't think I have eye scales but none so blind as those who will not acknowledge eye scales. 

joan niewand

You may recall a few years ago I gleaned basically everything there was to glean re: Una Niewand nee Dempster but this morning for no reason other than I am a procrastinator par excellence I did a quick google search on her daughter Joan. I was shocked to discover Joan exists online. She died in 2004. Edna Walling, who was apparently a good friend, took this picture of her sometime in the 1950s. It's in the NGV.

Not too much more to say except she was on the committee of the Murtoa Girl Guides in 1939 according to the Melbourne Age of13 June 1939 p. 12. Seems possible. Also, she wrote this letter to the Age in July 1949 (published 4 July, p. 2):

She was rebuked a couple of days later in the same paper (6 July, p.2) by someone called Buchanan saying she was confusing primitive areas with national parks. 

It's a good surname Niewand and I like it. I wonder how they said it and actually I wonder how they say it now. 

last night's viewing

I remember the kind of mental blankness that comes at the end of semester every time it descends on me but still I'm never prepared for it. Yesterday was a huge day and I ended it with watching two shows new episodes of which were released in the afternoon/evening and which I like to keep up to date with: We Own This City, which is up to the fifth instalment of six episodes, and Better Call Saul which is pushing out two seasons this year, or two mini-seasons or however they're framing it, and which ended on a mid-season cliffhanger yesterday in a way that didn't really do much for me. 

I am the world's worst television watcher and always have been, because I just can't pay that much attention. I don't seem to have the concentration span, and I know I'm not unusual in that (it must drive directors, actors etc mad that so many people are like this: 'just fucking watch, damn you!'). We Own This City is actually fairly mundane, the most interesting thing about it is that the tales about police corruption are so cheerily and apparently voluntarily (well, they are in prison, but they have no qualms about discussing their actions, never couch it in justifications) given by the corrupt police in question. There's no time in this show for anything but the sketchiest backstories and it's really all about the various injustices and crimes committed over a long period of time. I guess I enjoy it, as I've stuck with it, but (and? because?) it is very unusual television. 

Better Call Saul has been overlong and it is hard for me to follow all its characters/narratives, so I just take each episode as it comes pretty much. Obviously I have stuck it out this far and I look forward to an accelerated final seven episodes. But maybe it has come close to outstaying its welcome. Somehow I have been exposed to a lot of social media excitement about the series and yes it has a lot going for it but I can't help feeling that there's quite a bit of water-treading going on here. 

The other thing I watched last night was Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, a film which critics are saying is 'far better than it has any right to be'. I remember in my childhood any time I encountered anything meta or fourth-wall-breaking I would be completely thrilled, and so too I suppose were millions of others of my generation, which is why it's so common these days in mainstream media. Anyway, this is a film in which Chip and Dale, two ridiculously minor Disney characters* are former stars of a 1980s/90s tv show (which they were) which means something to a certain demographic (people around the age of 40 now I suppose, or a bit younger) but the chipmunks themselves are washed up, or one of them is (Chip I think, whereas Dale is still trying to trade on faded glory). The whole premise of the film centres around a preposterous beat up re: pirated or 'bootlegged' characters and knock-off movies, unless it's not a beat up and this really was/is a major thing. Nobody dies and there are some scary moments. I don't think I laughed but I actually enjoyed quite a few things about it, not least that Dale is a 3D animation and Chip remains a flat, cel animation. I gather there is a massive amount of references to animated cartoons from the last 100 years most of which I didn't get, and I also didn't really get the guest appearance of Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural who was never an animated cartoon character as far as I am aware. Or maybe I dreamt that bit. 

*OK wikipedia tells me one of their 1950s shorts was nominated for an oscar. So I suppose they have meant something to some people sometimes. 

more confusion

So this is another thing I don't understand, same as the friend requests from purveyors of online sex things and their weird names. Tell me why this kind of thing happens: 

Obviously (?) I don't have any interest at all in Two and a Half Men and I would never select this from Amazon Prime to watch, at any time, for any reason. But what I don't understand is why it's in the 'Horror TV' category. Is that a mistake? It might be. But it might also be a really complicated tweaking of categorisation so that, let's say, people who want to watch Two and a Half Men will search for it and find it by other means, but some people who go looking for 'Horror TV' might be the kind of snide losers who see this and go 'ha ha, it is horror TV, particularly look at that thing on the far right', and maybe even watch it. 

Though I suppose Amazon Prime doesn't necessarily care how much of it you watch, only that you subscribe to it, so it's all a bit irrelevant. Isn't it? 

I've been thinking maybe I could do a podcast about Homicide, looking at each episode in detail. It would be a lot of work but it would be pretty enjoyable. Like a lot of big projects I end up going 'look I just don't have the time'. But I wonder.