trophy for trying

I suppose there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can get satisfaction and those who can't get no satisfaction. I must have decided sometime in my teens (?) (or earlier?) that the only way to live was to be suspended somewhere between not being lowest common denominator and striving for what is actually entirely attainable at least 'on paper' or in theory, and yet which dumb shit / self-thwarting would always make impossible. I am sure there are people who get up in the morning deciding they will get something done and then go to bed at night having done it. I can't imagine that life, although of course, every day I imagine doing just that. I presently have to write a complicated, fact-packed, eloquent chapter and I have about two weeks to do it in to show that I can do such a thing in a timely fashion. I also have to write other chapters for another book (and there are other things on my plate). After vowing to write the first mentioned thing day after day and only really scratching the research surface, I achieved 200 words (of a projected 4500) yesterday. The prep - not just the research prep but the clearing a workspace in the spare room prep - was extensive, though you'd barely notice much of a difference, as you aren't me. In the last 12 hours since I stopped working on that paragraph I have come to the appreciation that the central premise of the chapter is unsustainable, or at least, it can only be one element of the whole, not its backbone. (Without wishing to go too much into detail this is because the original premise came to look, in part like a justification for urban segregation on ethnic or class lines, which of course it was not: it was acknowledgment merely that this has been at the core of a lot of human history. However, consciously or otherwise, I had framed the whole work, for purposes beyond or extra to the purposes of historical argument, in terms of 'progress'.) 

But my point is I embrace this kind of wayward, directionless, unrealisable striving, and have done for as long as I can remember having adult thoughts, really. Nothing can be perfect and everything is a melange if not a morass. I realise that I never really thought about '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' but of course it's more of a boast than a gripe (I admit that the 'girl reaction' bit, if that's really what he sings, is potentially a little gripey, but in the main it's saying 'I'm better than all of you shit', and 'you are a vapid pack of satisfaction-getters', than anything else.) To be honest, I'm not usually down with Mick Jagger, but in this case I probably am. 

Tonight between 7-9 I am doing a one-hour fill on RRR, and for the first time possibly ever I have actually gone some way towards planning what music I am going to play. I have produced a chart with timings and I haven't done this yet but I will sequence them and - this is the bit that really freaks me out - I am going to note some things I might make comment on between the songs. Crazy!!! I am crazy. I have always sought spontaneity in my radio shizzle. It was never a great formula but when it worked, which it rarely did, I got a buzz from it, just enjoying my thoughts. A structure might be liberating in one sense, but all it will most likely do is give me more time to fret about potential mistakes. As if they matter. 

Update next day: The fill was OK but just OK. Having a plan and sticking to it was not the revelatory cure-all I thought it could be. 

A propos of something above, I came across this in an old Mayo Thompson interview (from 1996). I don't know whether I am in sync with Mayo or he has just been too much of an influence on me:

I never read a self-help book, and I won't.  I just don't give a damn about that stuff.  I just think that the world is a set of fairly consistent problems, because we have certain functional things which have to be satisfied--gotta eat, gotta sleep, blah blah.  Comes to entertainment, maybe people want things they can go back in and feel at home with, and comfortable, and sort of things like that… I don't mind a bit of insecurity.  I don't mind a little of instability, don't mind a little quicksand.  I like it.  More fire, more danger, please.  Because otherwise I get bored to death…I can't imagine what people like.  I don't even know what I like.  I hate what I like every day.  I think to myself, why in the world do you like these tiny stupid pleasures for?  Life's supposed to be hard and edgy and all those kind of things.  This is a stupid romanticism, of course… It's also a challenge to find out, am I irrelevant?  Has history passed me by?  I don't think so.  I think I'm still ahead of the fucking curve! (laughs)   

100 reviews # 9 - Shotgun Wedding. Mayo Thompson with the Sven-Ake Johansson Quintett

First of all, the question has to be asked, htf did this record release pass under my radar? I thought I was a magnet for all Mayo Thompson-related releases. Perhaps I was just guilty of imagining that Drag City was the only label with the expendable income (?) and good taste to release MT things, so I only looked at the DC site to see whether there were new Red Krayola releases (there hasn’t been one for a few years now, but the last one was freaken awesome) and didn’t delve further afield. Well, there was this, apparently and it came out a few years ago totally secretly. And the internet and any informants I thought I may have had just didn’t know either or in any case failed to let me know.

It’s one of those reinterpret-my-hits albums, with no new songs. Apparently Albert Oehlen was given the job of choosing which of MT’s back catalogue would be good to reinterpret with a freeform but pretty bangin’ Swedish/German jazz ensemble. Being a bigger MT fan than anyone in the world makes me judgmental in the extreme, and I have to say I wouldn’t have chosen most of these songs. There’s a trio from God Bless the Red Krayola, and good ones too – ‘Ravi Shankar Parachutist’, ‘Save the House’ and ‘Coconut Hotel’, but then everything on that album’s unbelievable, so hard to go wrong really. Then there’s a couple from the Corrected Slogans/Kangaroo records (I think they’re both on both albums), ‘Born to Win’ and ‘Plekhanov’. Always liked ‘Plekhanov’, not so sure about the other (since writing that originally I have come to greatly enjoy this version of the song; particularly the slightly atonal piano that tweets throughout). The others are random – nothing from Corky’s Debt, and the newest song is about thirty years old – it’s ‘The Sloths’, probably the weakest track on Black Snakes and probably the weakest here, too (also the longest).

So, we get a mix of interpretations of trippy sixties psychedelic art-rock; interpretations of overly verbose leftwing early seventies transatlantic Art (yes capital A) rock; and some other even less categorisable works that even fall outside ‘80s indie’, remade by a very sympathetic and vibrant group who most definitely have a strong pop sense. Johansson himself is a stupendous drummer – Thompson only works with the best from Jesse Chamberlain to Epic Soundtracks to god, you know, the others. Um, George Hurley. And more.

But in truth I think the most honest thing I could do is leave this review here for now and, in a few months when I have more insights from frequent listening to this incredible record, come back and scrub it all and write something with depth. If I still can.

Update: I didn't/couldn't