i just love the studs

I know there's a story to The Silver Studs/ The Studs but I have backwards negative fucking no idea what the hell it might be.

I went looking for information online and found something I'd written about their beginnings in camp rock theatre but it was a bit of a non sequitur let's be reasonable. Their biggest hit was 'Funky Feet' and they made a video for 'Dr. Bop' on, I think, the set of The Young Doctors. Seems like Chrissie Amphlett is in the video. 

I'm pretty sure Gino Latorre is dead. Lance Reynolds lives in New York, according to fb. I wonder what he does. 

andrew sachs

For precisely no reason other than, I suppose, the noble aim of procrastination, I have spent a lot of time on Wikipedia today updating Andrew Sachs' entry. I was particularly interested in Sachs' writing career which, until I came along, had barely any recognition on his entry although he had in fact written at least 14 (probably more) plays for radio and stage, one of which - bizarrely I now realise - I had actually heard when I was 13 or 14; it was a radio play with no dialogue. I remember my father telling me 'the man who plays Manuel on Fawlty Towers has written a radio play...' little did we know he had been augmenting his acting career with the same for a decade and a half. I don't think that one was typical, of his work or anything, but I don't know precisely.
I am surprised how much stuff can be lost, to be honest. My main primary source is newspapers, and I use Trove of course (invaluable but it mainly runs out at about 1955, with the exception of the Canberra Times and a few other things, and is in any case largely useless for things like Andrew Sachs, who is an English thing). I also like newspapers.com, which is however almost all American with two useful exceptions: the UK Guardian/Observer, and The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, up till about 2000. Tremendous stuff. However, I think Sachs' dramatic output (as a writer) was small beer from the Guardian's point of view and it tended not to discuss it much.
As usual with Wikipedia, women sit in the background producing children, but Sachs' wife Melody was in any case a bit of a mystery. She didn't help by sometimes being known as Melody Lang and sometimes Melody Sachs. Of course, the entry was about him, not her, so I just packed her in a little round the edges.
Spend any time with Wikipedia and you discover that nobody knows a fucking thing. I am still used to reading stuff and thinking 'oh, I didn't know that'. Wow I have to get over that habit, it's what babies do. So there was stuff in the Sachs entry about how Sachs recorded 'Shaddap You Face' in Spanish. No, you goof, he recorded it as Manuel - in a Spanish accent. Or at least I think that's what happened (I hope I'm not the goof).
Look, the weird thing is I have no special interest in Andrew Sachs. He sounds like a nice man, and in fact, I purchased his autobiography, published the year before his death, from AbeBooks, since I figured - going to be shut in here most of the time for a while now, might as well get some treats, like they do in prison. Of course by the time it comes I'll be like - huh Andrew Whochs?
But sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet. Nobody knows a fucking thing. They don't know how to research, or how to read what they find if they accidentally stub their toe on an unprocessed fact. The writing on Wikipedia is so shitful so often (particularly the music entries, Christ, I can spot the writing of someone who grew up reading the NME ten miles away). (Because I did too.) (But it's not the way people should write, now.)

the blow monkeys

So in 2020 I finally got to grips with the Blow Monkeys, and I have their first three albums. I am really enjoying them greatly. I am intrigued by Dr. Robert's formative Australian years and the claim that the group was initially inspired by the Laughing Clowns and also that their name came from a song by an 'Aboriginal group' that Robert Howard interviewed when he was a university student (I put that into their wikipedia article). I wonder how much they feel they were a victim of sound and style of the 80s; they seem to have had to bend in a number of different ways in response to the general mood (just like Joan Armatrading did I guess!). I think in the scheme of things the first album is my favourite, but I am keen to investigate their plunge into the depths of forgetting why they were ever in the music business in the first place as they twist and turn to the whims of their record company or whoever. Maybe, once again, I'm guessing about what happened and I'm wrong. I don't know. I do know they split up in the 90s and reformed this century and possibly are still really interesting I suppose I should also pursue that but I think my interest is partly just thinking of them fitting into the period in which they were a top 40 proposition. But their songs about hating Thatcher are cool maybe they have new political songs I wonder I should check.

joan armatrading

I can't remember why precisely but when I was in Sweden in October last year I watched a documentary on youtube about Joan Armatrading. It was an hour long, informative in a basic kind of way, series of recollections with JA and various producers, record company people and so on going through her career. I learnt about 700 times as much about JA as I had previously known, though there were still a lot of questions unanswered. 

Since then, I have bought almost all her 70s-80s albums (apart from the first and the third, which I haven't seen in shops). I love them all, although the copy of The Key I got is pretty scratchy so I don't play it much (I'll have to replace it). I don't want to name favourites, and I am personally of the opinion that they are a really fine bunch of pop records. Most of the album tracks - I'm going to say about 70% - could easily have been singles. At the moment I'm really enjoying Walk Under Ladders. It's stylistically diverse, some tracks very new wavey (Thomas Dolby and Andy Partridge play on it) and others more, you know, rootsy or whatever it's called. But it's solid. 

The thing I'm thinking about when it comes to JA is about her crappy marketing, then and now. It seems like half the singles she released in the 70s-80s, maybe more than half, didn't have videos made for them. She is notoriously introverted so maybe she didn't want to make videos, I don't know, but when she did do them she seemed to take to it. It just seems peculiar that A&M - a pretty decent, big vision record company in the scheme of things - weren't up for investing heavily in her promotion. What is even weirder to me is she hasn't had the 21st century repackaging/promotion treatment. I read an article from the 70s on her where she said she wrote many, many more songs for each album than she recorded. There must be a huge amount of demos, etc just sitting around waiting for JA to get the box set treatment. She's not some kind of limp pop star, she's a major artist and still has a lot of fans. Why isn't anyone ramping up the retro reissues? 

then...

So I am trying this new project which is really going to stretch my capacities. It requires me to draw and also to draw things again after I have already drawn them once, something that does not really suit my personality, let alone my instincts. Wish me luck. This frame is a reject by the way and I will have to start again. Not being able to leave the house (much) is a plus I suppose.

fighting with nancy

Nancy has three teeth (a mass tooth extraction a few months ago left her with four but one fell out). She is I am sure much more comfortable but oddly she has become food obsessed in a way she has never been before. The obsession is that of a gourmet as she begs for food but is very fussy about what she does and doesn't eat. Begs is the wrong word anyway. She bites my feet when I'm in bed and runs around the top of the bed and onto the floor to get what she wants, and we have arguments but eventually it is too charming to resist. I suppose I should get her into a timing habit - in which circumstance she would probably be more inclined to eat what she's given rather than try again in a few hours for something different.

*Update 24 March: This morning around 6 she was biting my feet to get breakfast and I did something I swore I would never do to Nancy, I got up as if I was going to feed her and when she ran out the door I shut it and went back to bed. She obviously took this in her stride and when I opened the door a couple of hours later she was so under my feet it was as if she had always been there. 

krazy ii

The early Krazy Kats are really intriguing because the strip was obviously for Herriman a bit of an extra responsibility/opportunity and he didn't see the need to be consistent... I had never really appreciated that, at least on some days, Krazy ate mice (although it's not clear here whether Krazy ate Doctor Hank or just chased him away and then thought fondly about what eating him would be like).

I could be wrong but I don't think once the Krazy Kat strip got up and running as a serious concern that there was much of a cast of mice characters, though I suppose there was no restrictions on this precisely.

But the other thing that I enjoy about this strip is that there's no real sense in which Krazy can be lurking behind the horizon like that. I mean that's really bizarre, even given the difference in size between cats and mice.

krazy

I'm 57 pages into Michael Tisserand's Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (2016). The central premise of the book, I gather from reading reviews, is that Herriman lived his life (1880-1944, not a really long one by our standards but not insubstantial and very successful artistically and I imagine financially) always a minute away from being discovered as 'passing' - he was, by the measure of the times, African-American. Tisserand is able without too much trouble to pull together Herriman's ancestry going back to New Orleans in the early 19th century, and since we know Herriman did 'get away with it' there's not too much tension but it is intriguing to note that, in becoming successful and famous under his actual real name, he was arguably endangering himself and his family. If people back in New Orleans recognised him as one of those Herrimans, they would have known he was 'black'.

So as I said I'm 57 pages in so I'll reserve judgment on the actual book until I've finished it. But I just wanted to ruminate for a moment on what appealed to me, as a child, about Krazy Kat. I was first exposed to it, I would imagine, at the age of 6 or 7 (we lived in Parkhill Road Kew until the beginning of 1973, and I am fairly sure I owned the Penguin Book of Comics, which my father bought for me in a big hardback edition, at Kew). If I remember rightly - I should have a look at it again sometime - this volume had three, page-sized examples of Krazy Kat. I am sure that I loved the idea of it, and the look of it, more than I loved the actual strips, which I either didn't understand or didn't know enough about the world to know whether I understood them or not. It certainly had an otherworldliness implied in it that gathered me up, more than anything, particularly the shifting backgrounds (I see even in the entirely random two frames I grabbed above the background completely changes, though obviously the action is unfolding in the same place). I liked the language too, which undoubtedly meant a whole range of completely different things to Herriman and his audience than it did to me, still learning English I guess, in Australia in the early 70s.

But just look at how beautifully Herriman renders a landscape in this sequence, also from 1911 (20 November, actually):

Particularly the first frame, which is to die for. 

I wonder what stopped me from becoming one of those great visual artists inspired by all the great visual art I was exposed to (by dint of the Penguin Book of Comics alone!). I guess I have a vague sense of feeling not so much that everything had been done, but that there was a daunting array of options and to choose one was to limit oneself. It's not like I didn't get praise for my limited drawing skills as a child so I could hardly claim to have been inhibited from without. 

So after writing the above I sat here for a couple of minutes thinking of a world where I might have made a big impact by developing my capacity to draw and then I thought yeah well whatever that would be in some respects cutting myself off and being limited to one narrow track, in terms of personal awareness/knowledge and that's really how it is isn't it. I'd rather be interested in a big range of things than focused on my own capacity to create. Possibly that indicates a limited faith in my own ability to convert whatever art I might produce into a wider commentary/ agent of change. I can live with that. 

whatever happens next

I have always been a Swell Maps fan, and someone on social media’s very dismissive putdown of them – something about schoolboy war fantasies and a great guitar sound I think – revived my interest and even made me do something I’d been meaning to do for decades, which was, replace my copy of Whatever Happens Next. This was the third Swell Maps album, released just after they’d broken up. It’s a double album containing some different versions of songs from their first two albums (including some Peel sessions) and two sides – two! – of dithery home recordings that probably should never have been released. It also has one ‘new’ song – ‘Armadillo’ – which is almost as good as the singles, and appears here in two iterations. Whereas there is a cottage industry of Swell Maps reissues and compilations and so on, in which even abortive solo efforts have been reworked and rehashed, this album has never been considered either canon or classic and hasn't come out again - possibly because of the difficulty in relicensing the Peel material. 

I guess Swell Maps are one of those bands who really should not have worked or made sense. Their lyrics are, as that poorly remembered critic points out, often really fucking dreadful. Nikki Sudden’s tendency was to write songs evoking lame adventure stories from, I assume, childhood enthusiasms  and sing them in a bored, suitably atonal manner. Sometimes (eg one of the versions of ‘Armadillo’ for instance) other members of the band, I’m guessing maybe Jowe Head who was probably really if not the most talented member then someone who didn’t really need to flower until later in his career, would add back up in the style of 1970s rock theatre (‘oh yeah, baby’ stuff). In a way, I would say, Nikki’s songs were just the conversation starters for embellishment by others, particularly Epic who remains one of my favourite drummers (no-one else on earth would have put that beat to ‘Midget Submarines’). Not that Nikki couldn’t write a great song when he put his mind to it – ‘The Big Store’ is still an all-time favourite – but his role as main songwriter was probably at least as much reigning in the formlessness as anything else. 

There is also a certain asceticism and sexlessness to those military strategy lyrics which sets them apart. So they’re not generally singing about personal things or romance (I mean, ‘Cake Shop’ on the second album is a funny work of genius – it’s a Jowe song, not a Nikki song) and ironically the uniqueness of this approach, as bizarre as it is, has kept them in a world of their own. 

I don’t know. I’ll keep listening. At the moment I’m stuck somewhat on side 4, where the Peel session stuff is, and Lora Logic is guesting, enhancing the overall by about 200%. 

crampy

I woke up at 4 am with a really huge cramp in my left leg, normally the approach is to get up and walk around but this was so huge I couldn't even walk on it. Nancy saw this as an opportunity to ask for breakfast. I guess I am slightly worried about Nancy's appetite, not because I think she's necessarily overweight (well, I know she is) but because I am worried it's symptomatic of an inside-the-house-permanently-after-once-having-had-the-ability-to-go-outside-neurosis.

Just as I was trying to go to sleep last night around 11pm some teens/twenties rode a shopping cart down Morrah Street and crashed against the post on the corner with Park Drive. A couple were killed, but whether by the impact or something else I'm not sure. The bodies are still out there.

Luleå to Kemi mid-October last year

 Lulea sunrise or sunset I can't remember who cares it's perfect

(From 14 October 2019)

You’d think that travelling over a number of weeks in interesting places would be reason enough to blog – you sure can’t say ‘nothing’s changed around here’ – and in the last three or four weeks I’ve been in Scotland, Norway, Sweden and just arrived (15/10) in Finland. I have the prissiest, stupidest reasons for not keeping my loyal readers up to date with my activities and observations. They come back to that fucking password business again. This blog is associated with an old email address: can’t change that. And when you want to go between blogs, you have to move around passwords and log out and log in and it’s just a hassle. I told you it wasn’t a very good reason, it’s a terrible reason, I get that. 

So anyway this morning I took a bus from my digs in Luleå… no I didn’t, what am I thinking. That’s what I tried to do. The bus didn’t stop for me however, despite what ‘maps on my phone’ (I don’t actually think it is google maps – anyway, whatever it is) told me, the bus stop wasn’t a bus stop. So… I contacted my airbnb host, Carl, who had mentioned he was available to give people lifts to and from the little house I was staying. What he didn’t say was that he was an actual bona fide taxi driver. He actually came and got me in a taxi and took me to the bust station. Then I got a bus to Haparanda, then a bus to Kemi (where I am now, at the delightful Puttikihotelli) and in 25 minutes I’ll be on the train to Oulu.

I am not doing cartwheels of delight over anything right now mainly because I had a very bad night’s sleep because sometime over the last few days I caught a cold which is probably not that surprising – it’s cold here – but annoying, on the last leg of a long trip, it seems really unfair and harsh of the universe, but I guess tbh I’ve let myself get a bit run down as it is so I can’t really blame anyone else – can I? There are pluses, too – like for instance that no-one has to suffer me in my idiotic illness state. I’m imagining that once I get to my hotel in Oulu I’ll be just doing not much for the rest of the day and then tomorrow getting out feeling much, much better and doing heaps of field work. 

Now I’m at Kemi station and hanging out in this cafe I’m kind of thinking, I wish I could spend more time in Kemi. But I can’t, my time is winding up (I’m in Europe one more week, really – let’s say 8 days – OK, 8½ - and there’s still a lot to do, but I’ve hit most of my marks, and feel pretty positive about the overall. Thanks for listening. 

blogs are the new vinyl

So where did I go? Nowhere, I just didn't have the will power to negotiate the stupid situation of the password to get into this blog. I actually wrote quite a few entries shortly after the one published before this but couldn't / didn't get it together to find the password. Now, of course, I won't be able to find those entries anyway (I know you're gasping for that shit, it was descriptions of my international travel in September/October last year).

Anyway I think I'm back so what shall we talk about