late night thoughts

The question of what distinguishes an EP from an LP really bugs me severely. I noticed when I was tinkering with Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons’ Wikipedia entry that someone had listed So Young an album when really – it has 7 tracks and goes for 21 minutes – it’s an EP. The group were making that point when they tried to get their record company (Oz/EMI) to sell it cheap, but this wasn’t done, so they switched to Mushroom and then released a bonus ‘album’ with the initial copies of their next album, it was a live record longer than So Young. But when I decided some years ago to separate my LPs from my 12”s (this was originally a decision based on the fact that I had too many records to fit in the allocated shelves, and I figured one solution would be to store the 12”s elsewhere) I knew that it would take me forever to figure out how to separate them, because I just don’t have that kind of brain to go through methodically and spot them all. Today I was putting back a bunch of albums I had out and I kept weeding out these various 12” EPs, and then there are these anomalies. Not So Young, but for instance the Moodists’ Engine Shudder and Double Life (six tracks each). I chickened out with these two actually – they’re still in with the LPs. I have at least three other Moodists 12” records, however, with four or three tracks on them, that I have decided are 12” EPs. 

Of course many are confused about whether the definition of an album is about length (somewhere around half an hour, maybe less) or about number of tracks (roughly ten three-or-so minute tracks, as a general measure). Famously (to me) the Numbers’ first album was criticised for its shortness (under half an hour) and the follow-up was named 39.51, named after its length in minutes. I wonder what the shortest album is? I gather in 2013 there was a vinyl compilation called the World’s Shortest Album but it was a 5” disc in a 12” sleeve. I also found a long list of the shortest albums ever, but they are all records specifically contrived to be short for the sake of being short. I was more interested in a commercial offering, standard record. I imagine they go lower than 25 minutes but few would go lower than that, apart of course from So Young. I wonder. 

cats are possibly getting to grips with each other

What does 'getting to grips' literally mean? They are both annoyed with me apparently, or at least keep approaching me separately with problems they can't articulate. Nancy got up on the shelf and knocked some things off, including a candlestick which broke, but might be fixable. I looked at some pictures of her from four or five years ago and I have to say, she is probably overweight. She and Helmi have had negative interactions at least twice tonight (it takes the form of Helmi running at Nancy and the two of them scratching the air between them with one paw for a few seconds of 'bring it bitch'.

I'm tired

goodnight

de da de dum all over again

Half a Cow are reissuing the pure original De Da De Dum. Nic Dalton kindly sent me a copy of the test pressing and I'm listening to it now. Just one more time I am extraordinarily and uncategorisably staggered by the brilliance of 20-year-old Pip in I guess 1967, an absolute exceptional original, stream of consciousness, funny, awkward, irresistible. This is absolutely the Pip I knew thirty years later, except this young man had every reason to believe he was going to tackle the world, too, whereas the Pip I knew was happy to have cigarettes and alcohol.*

1967 Pip was a more complex person than anyone knew and I also know, because I got bits and pieces of real reminiscence occasionally revealed in his late period drunken ramblings, had a truly horrendous childhood. For example, he told me he was sexually abused by a family friend for much of his childhood (one of the songs on this album is in part about that) and that when he told his mother about it she said 'I thought that's what was happening' (and did nothing to stop it).

I honestly don't know it's even possible to say that this album and the others that followed were from the heart. I think there's an element of Pip where he was very ambitious and just hoped to get famous from his quirky wordplay and delivery. I think he was also genuinely grappling with some ideas here, too, and pushing the envelope. There is also a chance that (as people around him have told me) in his head he sounded like Buddy Holly. He was competing with his brother and others in their social circle to be relevant and interesting - it's not easy, and indeed it must have been virtually impossible in late 60s Sydney if you weren't, I don't know, the fuckin' Executives or Russell Morris.

Anyway. A truly brilliant original album and as for Pip - you were such a manipulative person** Pip but at the same time so easy to keep happy and such a lovely, lively mind, I do really miss you.

* Although he also wouldn't have minded regular sex and the chance to keep making music. And the respect and love of his children - some of them totally got him, some of them were alienated by, he would say, their mothers but I am absolutely not going to speculate on the truth of that, probably not even really calculable. 

** I feel very bad saying this but my complex feelings come from the difficulties of dealing with an alcoholic. It's a disease so it seems wrong to say Pip was manipulative. 

but also...

The other thing I wanted to say though was I suspect the Carr and Tyler book had a deeper impact on me, in that it gave me ideas about what was core and non-core, and what was interestingly non-core, and how artists did things sequentially but not necessarily with everything in the canon or in the A-list. So, to pick one example, George Harrison made two 'solo albums' before he made All Things Must Pass, but the two which came before that huge triple album with hit singles on it and so on, were kind of minor works no-one needed to pay attention to (and one of them was substantially swiped from Bernard Krause anyway, though that’s irrelevant right now). The fact was, Artist A could be spending his or her time on drawing a picture in nail polish on toilet paper on Monday, composing masterwork Tuesday and Wednesday, writing her or his novel on Thursday, and propounding a famously mad conspiracy theory on some chat show on Friday. If you want to understand those component parts – the development of the artist’s work – don’t you have to know them all in context with each other? 

Truth is, I don’t know if you really do, but I do want to know if it’s necessary. 

leavening

I guess that in reality once there was no Lennon being cajoled into producing 50%, and no Harrison begging/sulking about his quota, McCartney had to leaven his own records. So with the arguable exception of Wild Life (though, 'Some People Never Know', for crying out loud) the 70s post-Beatles records McCartney was involved in each had at least one amazing candidate for no. 1 hit single (I'll exempt London Town because I find that record hard to listen to - I didn't mention this before - but I just assume it's great, it's only that I haven't quite got on top of it yet). So you sequence an album not by going 'argh, here are the shit tracks we already paid to record so we got to have them on the record somehow' but by going 'this is an album track, fewer bells and whistles but it winds the listener down after hearing 'Let 'Em In' or 'Silly Love Songs' and builds them up for the next epic (eg 'Must Do Something About It', my favourite Wings song and not even sung by PMcC).

the age old question

I was a big Beatles fan in the mid-1970s (following on from picking up a copy of 'She Loves You' at the Auburn South Primary School fair in, I'm going to guess, 1975). Funny to think that, while at that stage it was a retro concern, there was at least the possibility that the Beatles would reform with their classic line-up. Also, while at the time it seemed like the five years since the Beatles broke up was a really long time, I didn't fully appreciate that one day it would be 50 years since they broke up, and that would be an even longer time.

So I more or less know the Beatles canon, perhaps absent a few of the earlier songs - you know, the With the Beatles or Hard Day's Night songs, because I didn't own those albums when I was a kid but I probably have heard them all, probably on numerous occasions actually. I suppose that Beatles enthusiasm turned me towards a few things in life that have occupied me ever after, too, arguably via the Roy Carr and Tony Tyler The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, a big 12" sized book that, now I come to think of it, was designed to sit in your record collection with I suppose your Beatles records. 

Carr and Tyler were all the usual things, pro-Lennon, anti-saccharine McCartney, etc. They actually, I now realise, were toeing a pretty lazy line with a lot of the things they wrote about Yoko,* and so on, and they weren't eager to get vested in any unpopular opinions. I didn't realise that in 1975/6 because I was hearing all this for the first time. I couldn't help but be really keen to hear all of the stuff, particularly the solo early 70s material, a lot of which was actually hard to come by, even then. So in (say) 1976 I had a copy of the Imagine album, and a copy of Ram, and a copy of Wings over America (that came to me new) and a copy of Ringo and the fairly tawdry Harrison greatest hits that, surely to his extraordinary irritation, was one side of his Beatles tracks and one side of solo tracks (I think that was a kind of punishment, when he left EMI). 

Anyway I think there have been enough words written on the Beatles for my opinions to be even less important than usual, but I just wanted to say that over time, I have come to be firmly of the opinion that Paul McCartney is by far the most talented member of the Beatles, and that he considerably outperforms the others in terms of his curiosity and interest in making new sounds and working in his chosen medium - when they're all together, they're riffing off him or motivated to try and work against him or within his sphere, and even when they're apart, they're still all working against or sparking off each other in different ways, but McCartney is at the heart of it. Lennon's Beatles work is about half as good as McCartney's most of the time; what screws Lennon up is he has no particular desire to push the envelope musically, only a wish to use the Beatles as a vehicle, so for instance the song 'Revolution' is, yeah, fine but it's - and Lennon himself used this description a few years later - an example of his general output after the mid-60s, and perhaps even during and before, 'just rock and roll at different speeds'. 'Revolution' is an OK song but it's no 'Helter Skelter' or 'Hey Jude'. Those are songs which seriously advanced matters. On some level, Lennon and Harrison must have appreciated that McCartney was doing amazing things, and they were lucky to have him providing a scaffold for them to fuck around the edges of. 'I Want You/She's So Heavy' is passable, you know, but no-one would buy a Beatles record with just John Lennon songs on it. He and Harrison leaven the great work that McCartney does. 

So when McCartney strikes out on his own - unwillingly, incidentally - or with Linda, and then with Wings, he's really an adventurer. He doesn't have Lennon and Harrison dragging him down, and he does some of his best work in the 70s. After that time, I agree with most critics, he gets a bit complacent; he is 'near enough is good enough' with some notable exceptions. He's still got it, but he pushes himself less often, perhaps in realisation that his new work is slowly becoming less relevant through the 80s. Which might have been a relief as much as an irritation. 

So it's fun from my POV to bait the Beatles fans by hinting that Wings are a better band than the Beatles but in many ways I believe it, notwithstanding the obvious truth that there would be no Wings without the Beatles. But the Wings albums essentially hold up, in the way that few other Beatles solo records don't (of course, Wings is a band - McCartney was the only one of the ex-Beatles, I suppose Harrison/Travelling Wilburys aside, who actually put himself back in a band). 

McCartney first picked up a guitar, I gather, about a week after his mother died. If there's a better way to understand his particular genius and drive, I can't imagine what it would be. He seems to be a somewhat damaged figure all along, and being damaged is what drives him. He's keeping it together. I don't know if his music is an articulation of his pain, or a wish to deny it (I suspect the latter) but while I have nothing more than pop culture understanding of psychology (Linus' blanket) it seems painfully obvious that music is what keeps Paul from falling into the precipice of despair and anguish he's always on the edge of.

Of course, unlike - blah, Ian fucking Curtis, to pluck someone from recent conversations because I think it was just the 40th anniversary of his death or something - McCartney's stock in trade is rarely explorations of his or anyone's pain, only sometimes allusions to an abstract notion of pain, which could easily be just dabbling in sadness for the sake of colouring a lyric. I suppose it would have been nice on one level for Paul to have made his own version of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band but on the other hand, he's doing what works for him. I still hold that Ram, Wings Wild Life, Wings at the Speed of Sound*** and Back to the Egg in particular are some of the best albums of the 1970s and better than most Beatles albums, a kind of false competition because you can't (as I said above) give Wings/McCartneys albums a status above the Beatles in terms of impact and adventurousness: McCartney is always working, and perhaps was doing so most particularly throughout the 70s, in the shadow of his 1960s. Wild Life did not, and could not, have had the impact Sergeant Fucking Pepper did, on any level, whatever it was.** But it was a hell of a lot more revolutionary than freakin' Two Virgins. Anyway, I have already admitted my opinions are unimportant, and I hold to that, but as I have so often said over the last 15 years, my blog my rules, and it makes me feel better to write these things. It's reasonably wholesome right. 

* To continue being a cliche I have to add that I think Yoko Ono is far more talented than Lennon and at least as important a figure as McCartney, but it's hard to compare their respective impact because they work(ed) in such different worlds. But christ, I love Yoko getting Harrison, Starr etc to back her on for instance Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band doing things a hundred times more compelling than they really ever achieved again in their careers, just by accepting their place: we're session people, the Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke of our day.  

** Of course Ram (and I suppose Band on the Run) was an attempt to return to the general richness of the late 60s Beatles epics, but people couldn't see them necessarily like that anymore. I am surprised that Band on the Run is so often cited as the best Wings album though, because it's actually a little subpar compared to, for instance, Back to the Egg or Speed of Sound, although I suppose it has a consistency of sound (and a wild back story) that those albums lack. 

*** Update a year late: I'm such a fucking idiot, only today (30 May 2021) did I realise that this picture, from the inner sleeve of the album:

was a joke on the idea of 'Wings are playing at a venue called the Speed of Sound... yeah... Wings at the Speed of Sound'. I wonder if this image was an original album cover proposal. It's pretty good except for the photo in the middle which is stupid and makes the whole thing look bad.

this is us

This morning, Helmi and Nancy almost played. I pray to the lord that this great world-changing friendship will come into being soon. Meantime, Helmi is always in or near my bed, either during the day when she's asleep in it, or at night when I'm trying to sleep in it. What a palaver.

forty years ago

So tonight I did a fill in for a RRR show called Mystifying Melbourne, and it was a case of - didn't have quite enough time to do everything I wanted to, and there were some technical fluffs, but in the main, it went OK. I had a little thing about Richmond Recorders, which is where the record above was recorded, and it was released apparently forty years ago this month, and apparently it is therefore exactly as old as The Empire Strikes Back. I was informed a few years ago by my sister Tamsin that I saw The Empire Strikes Back when it came out; she claims we saw it together. I have sincerely no recollection whatsoever of this film. I barely remember Star Wars but I know I saw that because I had a t-shirt of the movie and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have worn the t-shirt without having experienced the, you know, experience. However, The Empire Strikes Back had even less impact on me than Star Wars and neither meant as much to me as an actual Star Wars t-shirt. The whole Star Wars shizzle is as interesting to me as pork sausages, billiards, horoscopes, pegging, hockey, hunting, and a million other things are only interesting to me because I'm interested in things people are interested in, like, why would anyone be interested in something so freakin' boring.  The Laughing Clowns, on the other hand, are one of the greatest bands of the 20th century in any genre, they reign fucking supreme, and the day this record was released should be a national holiday, Laughing Clowns Day, and only Laughing Clowns music should be played on the radio, instead of what is played on the radio now, Rumours and Tango in the Night 24-7.

screens

Yeah this might be a comment/protest regarding the parlous state of streaming services and/or free to air tv during a pandemic (or during the third decade of the C21) but what intrigues me more is that three households (presumably) decided all at once to get rid of their televisions - ??? Or maybe something else happened that meant three big tvs had to be got rid of all at once and dumped behind some flats in Parkville (and stomped on/smashed with implements). Just one of those sweet little mysteries I guess...

helmi has opinions

I have never known a cat to be as dog like as Helmi is in this regard: she runs a commentary on the outside world, at least insofar as what she does not like. Last night there was quite a wild storm going on outside, and Helmi took the opportunity to growl up a storm of her own.

I have noticed this in Nancy to the extent that she will sometimes get a scare if there is something coming from outside that perturbs her (people in the street, etc) but Helmi is less panicking about attack and more like - under her breath - 'fuck you, you fucking fuck'. 

I'd respect it more if I thought it wasn't needless bravado, since she is really just a small, frightened cat who can't shit in her litter tray properly, but I guess she only knows what she knows about the world - not much. 

She also miaows a lot because she wants something but what on earth could it be? Unknowable, possibly even to her.

Incidentally, slight thaw between her and Nancy - slight. 

*21/5 update: this evening I was making the bed, and had stripped it but had only put the top sheet on the bed without actually fitting it. The people next door had visitors and they were talking on the stairs as the visitors were leaving. Helmi - who I now appreciate has not seen or heard any person except me for about two months now - hated it, and was growling very deeply, then disappeared. I found her bundled up in the fitted sheet. So I guess - she's terrified of other people, and things generally, and so that's why she hides all day. That doesn't explain why she comes out at night. 

the forthcoming graphic novel

The top frame has been deleted because the perspective on the seats was just de trop. The bottom one is salvageable I think. It will do for now anyway.
Can you tell how it ends? Lol

good news

I just got some fb messages from an old coworker seeking to dredge my memory for details on one of our bosses, who like most if not all bosses was by the way scum, but that wasn't what she was digging around about, just some dates and employment details, I don't even know why, it was relating to the late 1980s. I can barely remember that time but sort of patched together some answers based on some venn diagrams of 'well, I was working there in early 88, because it was the bicentennial...' etc. Anyway...

I was just in the cafe up the road and Abba's 'Money, money, money' was playing, and I was like, 'I remember the first time I heard this - it was when my father was in hospital with sciatica that required surgery to fuse some vertebrae'. Now, I always thought that happened in '75, leading to my (and everyone else's) major Abba love affair of '76 but I just looked 'Money, money, money' up on Wikipedia and it wasn't released until '77 so it was probably 'Mamma Mia' which I saw. So the fact that I vividly remember 'Money, money, money' on TV in that private hospital where my father was either about to have, or recovering from, the operation which might have rendered him paraplegic or dead, is a false memory.

The good news is it makes absolutely completely no fucking difference to anything at all in any way!

animals are the worst

It's half past twelve at night and I have a possum (I assume - maybe a person) in the roof, and it sounds like someone is walking around the apartment, but I'm pretty sure it's in the roof. If they're in the apartment kudos to them for hiding so effectively when I get up to look around. But additionally Helmi is a demon - she sleeps the entire day and then by this time of night she is wound tight and continually jumping from place to place on no pretext. At least Nancy is dependable (asleep on her bed). Animals are the worst (except Nancy).

what a beautiful day

Nancy and I are just hanging out, I'm trying to write a book chapter and she's wringing the last of the enjoyment out of the receding sunlight. My feet are blocks of friggin' ... I guess I mean fuckin'... ice, and I'm about to have a second coffee.

My biggest gripe of this week has been coffee. When I went to woolworths a few days ago they had the big pack of the brand I usually buy reduced by 50% (to $15) or the half-size pack for $16... great! Except there were none of the big pack left on the shelf. So I went to another woolworths the next day and no luck at all. When I came back to the first one (Arden Gardens) the deal was off. So I'm stuck with another brand, which I bought a cheap packet of a few weeks ago as an experiment, which tastes like metallic medicine. I can only drink it with soy milk and sugar. Weep for me.*

*Update 18 May: I was very pleased to find the half-size pack for $8 in Coles Barkley Square, and bought three. What the economics is of occasionally making this product half-price I don't know but what I do know is that it makes me unwilling to pay full price and resentful when I'm asked to. 

the penguin book of comics

So the Krazy book I read a while ago got me thinking about what Krazy Kat meant to me as a young child, when I was reading the copy of the Penguin Book of Comics my father bought for me at age 7 or 8. As we all know, being a grown up means you can spend your hard earned fossicking through the planet's junk for replicas of that which you knew at a younger age, so, I bought another copy of the book online (though in truth my original copy is probably still around somewhere - I certainly wouldn't have thrown it away). 

The original book came out in 1968. This is a 1999 reprint with a new introduction by George Perry, who by the way I discovered died earlier this year. Perry was a very productive author, writing primarily (it would seem) on film, and working for a lot of his adult life at the London Sunday Times. This book - according to Perry's intro - was a late outcome of the brief florid period when Alan Aldridge, as a young and exciting graphic artist, was brought in to spruce up Penguin Books generally - he didn't last long (1965-67?) and I think this book came out after he'd left the company - at least - Perry's introduction suggests that it came out primarily because it was too far gone to be withdrawn, but it emerged to be published by a company that probably regretted commissioning it. 

This morning I had a look at some newspaper reviews of the book from the late 60s, and I note that plus ça change, all reviewers really want to do is (1) regard it as a kind of catalogue of memories and amusements, rather than any kind of phenomenon in its own right (2) talk about what's not in it, rather than what is. It was reviewed extensively in the US and, assuming all editions were the same, I cannot imagine what the Americans made of all the British comic material in there...or the weird, weird (yes, it's still weird) fact of British comics like Film Fun which featured Hollywood stars as though they were ordinary British idiots (notwithstanding that quite a few famous Hollywood comics - Stan Laurel, Charlie Chaplin, Bob Hope spring to mind - were actually British. But that doesn't mean they were ever working class fish supper fools the way they were represented in these comics.)

Being self-obsessed I wanted to look at this book again and see if there was anything that had particular significance for me as a child, were I can examine the impact on my emerging brain. But not really, actually. That said, every page was familiar, and I'm sure I pored over the whole (including the text). This scenario from a Ben Turpin and Charlie Lynn story in Film Fun 24 April 1920 (p. 77 of the book) really resonated for me as a child. Ben and Charlie lure some 'hearty roysterers' who had popped their balloons (sigh - it's a long story) into a tent they've previously painted a face on, and then tie a rope around their collective wastes and make pots of money entertaining other roysterers ('And didn't the populace pop up!' says the caption, 'Well, just look at the art engraving!'). 

One thing that is perhaps curious, and I suppose a little disappointing, about the book is the poor quality of some of the imagery. Surely, this is a book for browsing, yet a lot of the text and images are less legible surely than they could be. That said, the colour section is pretty sumptuous. Towards the end of the book there are illustrations that show where comic art and modern/real art interrelate or blend; I had not thought about this bizarre work for a long time, although like everything I suppose when I was 7 or 8 I took it in my stride:


What shocks me now is to discover from reading the caption that this is actually the work of Phillipe Mora, described herein as 'a young artist and filmmaker born in Paris in 1949 and educated in Australia' (p. 237). I didn't know Mora painted, let alone that he'd made this contribution to the shaping of my psyche. Speaking of which:

There's quite a bit of bawdy material in the book as well, and I do recall regarding this storyline - in which Jane for no good reason (except who needs a reason) is bathing behind a screen in a cafe and then reveals herself to all the soldiers when she knocks over the screen. See you later boys indeed. I had to go to wikipedia to find whether this strip was actually in a mainstream newspaper (it was) and perhaps that's a failing of Perry/Aldridge's text - they seem to assume a lot of knowledge on the part of their readers. 

OK, I'm going to keep dipping in. Even just flipping through the book then, I found a lot more things to think about. 

London Guardian 23 November 1967 p. 8

Melbourne Age 9 March 1968 p. 11

the subtle art of not giving a shit

So I did walk the beagles today, and we went all the way round the lake, which was a rare treat for them (usually out of deference to Barry's age I probably give them about 1/3 as much of a walk, crossing the bridge to the Gladstone Park side but then coming back over the slipway; but because it rained so heavily the day before it was either turn around on the Gladstone Park side or do the big haul; I figured neither they nor I had walked much in the last few days). Just near the Western Ring Road I heard Ferdie barking; they were both behind me and they had got into an argument with a big, young dog, I think a boxer, which its owner, a fat prick with a beard, was having trouble handling. Fat prick said to me something like 'you're lucky your dog is so timid...' I wasn't going to have a discussion about how lucky I was in the context of someone who can't control their own dog, so I just called the beagles (who came) and shrugged and walked away 'Oh, so you don't give a shit' said the prick.

I kind of did, actually, because I wanted to say something about how despite being beagles, Barry and Ferdie are actually pretty well under control (Ferdie has a tendency at the end of a walk to go AWOL, it's more a political statement than anything because he doesn't go far - though it's still pretty bad behaviour) and will come on command, etc, whereas the prick's dog, a very handsome and healthy looking specimen, was obviously giving him a full time workout on the end of a rope, because he hadn't trained him properly. But it was loud under the Ring Road, and also I think he is probably still stewing over my nonchalance whereas, while I am currently venting I agree, I didn't think about him at all for about 12 hours, until a minute ago. So I think I won.

Also, buying into idiot arguments with idiot strangers is what idiots do. Still, it continues to grind my gears and I would like to turn into a superhero and take him a kilometre into the air until he turns blue and threaten to drop him unless he says sorry then take him all the way down and throw him in the lake, and fly away laughing.

pissiest complaint ever

Get in early, I reckon, it's not even 7:30 but I might be able to manage the pissiest whinge of the day. It comes in three parts. First part is, I was going to walk the dogs but I think it's going to rain heavily. Part two is, I bought too much food yesterday. 3: I had a third pissy complaint but I can't even remember what it was. 

Tell you what, if it comes back to me I'll let you know. I'm not sure if spreading out your pissy complaints invalidates your entry. Or should that be a 4th complaint? 4: Aw geez I don't know if spreading out your pissy complaints invalidates your entry...

Update: it was way too wet to walk the dogs

just complaining, ignore

Right so every time I go looking through Netflix to see what I might watch, I am like 'I really have to get rid of Netflix' (so I'll get rid of Netflix, I'll get rid of fb, what will I actually have?). Seriously, there is fuck all on Netflix, or at least, there's a lot but it all looks gruesome. By different definitions. As I write this, I am watching a Jerry Seinfeld special, I think it's called 23 hours to kill or similar. I didn't exactly expect to enjoy it but I expected to be interested in how JS connects to the world in 2020. I did like his special of his old pre-fame material, which is a little like the way I enjoy Tony Martin's unplugged Sizzletowns, though it has to be said, Tony Martin is about a hundred times funnier than JS at any time. JS has a joke in this special where he talks about 'great' and 'sucks' as being the same thing, and as proof he offers the fact that when we lose something - which sucks - we say 'oh, great'. (I'm paraphrasing, he does it more skilfully than that). But saying 'oh, great' is sarcasm, Jerry, it's saying the opposite of what you mean. That is proof that something sucking is the opposite of something being great.

Tony Martin is a meta comedian in the way Seinfeld wants to be but can't be because he's Jerry Seinfeld. He's part of the world (he does make a mention of how he is essentially famous as a tv comedian from the 90s - fair) he is parodying.

Before this show I got about three episodes in to Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave. A kind of comedy of embarrassment sketch show. I grew up on shit like this and now, being grown up, I don't need it anymore. There are some slightly good sidesteps and twists but otherwise it's comedic fantasy about adults acting out like six year olds in adult situations. Imagine. I'm not saying I don't conceive of a lot of adult situations in this manner, definitely, but that's another reason why I don't need to see it. It's childish times two, because it's about adult anxiety, but it's also just that thing you think one day when you're a child and you think 'this is fake! break the fourth wall!' and you think you are the first person to have ever thought that. There are good comedians in the show but the format - by which I mean the concept of each sketch - is obvious.

I have to get away from Netflix. I am not interested in Netflix. I keep getting messages from Amazon Prime telling me I have a credit or a membership or something. I think I should probably dump them all and start again.

'joan armatrading' (1976)

Oddly enough while I have expanded my Joan Armatrading LP collection from 0 to 10 albums in the last six months, her second, self-titled, album has eluded me until now. The weird part of this non-story is that this is the one that somewhere in my head I really know, as we had it in our house in the 1970s, probably roughly around the time it came out. So, while I was nominally aware of Joan's (yes we are on first-name terms) singles up until the mid-1980s, this is the album I have almost certainly heard in full over and over again at the time my tiny mind was forming, like a little transistor. It's the album with 'Love and Affection' on it, which I imagine was probably her first hit, and I always thought it was good.

Listening to it again now, I am having that weird response where it seems just that much richer and more resonant, because somewhere in your head you're going 'yes, that's right, that is how it should be'. Either that, or it's just the right kind of slightly jazzy 'smooth' rock-folk-pop that has regained respectability after a long, long time in the wilderness occasionally peering at the lights of Good Taste through the parted-back branches and thinking 'is now the time to reveal myself?' But it never has been.

I can only know how I reacted or responded to music when I was 10+ by a process of elimination. So there's pedal steel on a song on this album* which probably meant nothing to me whatsoever at the time - I would have just taken the track as a whole, all components, let it 'tell the story' or whatever, fitting into the category of 'this is a pop song, it comes in sequence' no real understanding of individual instrumental contributors to the track, and so on. The slide guitar now makes me wonder whether there's a commentary involved. I mean surely there isn't. I mean maybe there is? Young black woman working in popular music in the early to mid 70s. Does slide guitar (U.S. country rock) have a subtext to it? If Sam Prekop (completely random artist I pulled out of the air) put a slide guitar on a song, there'd be a subtext, but he's already American. I am only guessing that Joan A. had to endure a lot of being-told-what-to-do in the studio early in the piece, that she had enough shizzle going on maintaining her privacy and creating a public persona for which there were few precedents - who knows, maybe someone put the slide guitar on after they'd sent her home for the day (no disrespect to her, but I bet there was plenty of disrespect to her at the time). (Or maybe not. I have heard from a few women who were young and prominent in the 1950s-60s that they were always made to feel welcome and valued in their chosen sphere - I'm imagining when they weren't so much of a threat to the status quo, but more a novelty showing how enlightened everyone was). (Let's face it, I don't have a fucken clue).

So now when I finally get ahold of the first JA record, I'll have a complete run of albums up until, um I think Secret Secrets (christ what a name) not that I'm a collector or anything - they are scum.


* On 'Down to Zero'. It is played by B. J. Cole, whose first album a few years earlier was The New Hovering Dog, which I am drawn towards because of the name only. He has also played with Björk and Scott Walker, which is more than you can say (about yourself).

as if I had anything interesting to say about facebook

I have nothing to say about facebook that no-one else has said before, but the current shizzle about the coronavirus app and privacy concerns is interesting to me, not least because of the ridicule accorded people who don't want to trust the government with anything as mundane as their meanderings around their safe little circles when they/we all willingly offer up our every little detail to organisations like fb. This makes me feel not like signing up to the coronavirus tracking app but to limiting my information to fb. There are probably really easy ways to thwart fb but I can't disconnect myself enough from it to imagine what they might be. The other thing of course is you wonder what sinister thing fb could possibly do with your 'information' other than try, ineptly as it almost always does, to sell you things.

I say ineptly but weirdly, in the last week for some weird, weird reason, a few days ago fb decided to start marketing unto muggins (i.e. me) a 6-CD box set of recordings by the Revillos.

I'm not against the Revillos exactly, they were certainly not part of my teenagehood so to get that engaged with their oeuvre would need a big extra prod of my imagination. But what I wonder is why CR, or fb, decided I would be in the market for something like this.*

What also intrigues me is why fb, presumably the most skilled and agile social media producer out, is so freakin' boring so often. My feed is so samey and stale, and while obviously I only know that because it is my default distraction so I am frequently going to it and realising 'hmm, this stuff was dull the first time around' (and therefore perhaps reinforcing to the algorithm either that whatever it shows me I will scroll for a while, or perhaps suggesting I like it that way) I can't see this as sustainable, perhaps for my own (this is overstating it, but I'll just say it) sanity I should wean myself off this 'feed'. 

* I fully concede that I am more likely than most fools my age with my types of interests to take on something like this on spec. But three discs are live shows and two are iterations of the same album... sure, great, sounds good, I dunno... 

arab strap's elephant shoe / tracey thorn's another planet

Why did no one ever tell me how much I would like Arab Strap, a band whose third album Elephant Shoe sounds to me like proportions of American Analog Set, American Music Club (I can't help it if those two groups have similar names, I'd say Mark Eitzel but you'd know I was just trying to get out of saying 'American Music Club') and, er um already forgotten (I'll come back and fill in the other bits next time I listen to it). Anyway back to my core complaint - why didn't anyone ever tell me how much I would like this band, and why, when I bought this CD probably over a decade ago, didn't somebody call me up or put a note in the letterbox saying 'now you've bought that Arab Strap album for 50c or something, why don't you actually play it because you'll really like it! WHY.

Also, I'm about half way through Tracey Thorn's memoir of suburbia, which is really good so far and a tad more self-aware than Lol Tolhurst's Crawley meanderings. Thorn grew up in Brookmans Park, an apparently nothing place which she describes as having status of a private new town and/or garden city (well, all garden cities were 'private' i.e. funded by individual investors and new towns did not come into being until 1946, twenty years after the establishment of Brookmans Park, but look... the wikipedia entry on the place does not even cover any of its creation history apart from the original buildings/families which were present in the area before the 20th century, so hats off to TT for uncovering anything). (I guess that wikipedia page is another for my 'dumb things I gotta do' list). 

Meanwhile, pretty decent book. I am enjoying it anyway. TT is three years older than me but watched all the same crap on TV I used to watch, particularly when we lived in Britain 1974-75, so I guess one of us was super advanced or one of us was a little bit of a giant baby, not sure. I'll come back to this when I've finished reading it.*

*If I don't, I'm really, really sorry. Also, the book is not this blurry - unless I look at it without my glasses on.

cold snap

Nice to see the entirely reasonable personal opinion of the state's Deputy Chief Health Officer caused so much fake affront to the Liberals, etc yesterday, if only because, while it was COVID19 related at least it had a little bit of the essence of the old battles of (as many commenters on the article in the Age pointed out) the right seeing freedom of speech as stunningly important unless it is something they don't agree with.

I have gone from knowing nothing at all about AVD or even being aware of her existence to feeling positive about everything I know about her. 

The 200th anniversary of Cook's visit was of course when I was 5, I and my cohort might have been encouraged (I had just started primary school) to engage with the legend but I don't remember that, though I do remember the ephemera of the 1970 visit hanging around for a while, most significantly when we moved to Hawthorn in 1973 there was a translucent Captain Cook sticker on a back window. I also remember the following piece of folklore, which by the way in my child's mind I always imagined happening in Captain Cook's Cottage:

Captain Cook done some poop

Behind the kitchen door

He told his mum to lick his bum

Then he done some more.

So much to unpack, but of course although the immediate assumption of the listener might be that his mum (Grace, 1702-1765) did lick her son's bum, although in fact the story does not make a firm statement on that one way or the other. It might have been a kind of 'kiss my ass' kind of pronouncement. 'Lick my bum, mother, I'm going to sea. I have one more thing to attend to first.'  

Since writing the above I have found out something absolutely perfect about Cook's mother, who of course I had no knowledge of whatsoever until I looked him up on wikipedia and still don't really have any knowledge of, of course, but I now know, and so shall you at the end of this sentence, that her maiden name was Pace. Grace Pace. Fucking hell, you could make a hell of a feminist (or otherwise) epic of the obvious pun from that name. I love that so much.  

rabbit rabbit