jacana - a touch of class

speaking of kate bush

Charlie does her best Heathcliff it's me Cathy I've come home I'm so cold let me in your window while I am TRYING TO WRITE DAMN IT

something I may have already said before

This isn't it: what a wonderful moment it is when you see light at the end of the tunnel of a journal article you've been fretting over for aeons - I am actually going to get a kind of admittedly largely empirical in content draft finished tonight, and I am going to send it to my co-author, and it'll be their turn to hum and hah over the damn thing for a while. And I will feel like progress is occuring while I do nothing.

What I wanted to say, and writing about Ray Burgess reminded me, I may already have said it, but I just wanted to say, as a cautionary tale, and those of my generation will likely mainly agree with me, that there is a central flaw to a lot of writing about culture's recent past, and when people talk about the 70s or 80s it is so easy to generalise, because really, I always thought Gary Numan was shit, even in 1980 when the Kiss fans suddenly became Gary Numan fans (I hadn't been a Kiss fan either). And when I watched Countdown in the 70s with my brother (4 years younger) and sister (5 years younger), we didn't suck it up like vacuum cleaners, we ridiculed a lot of it. I specifically recall ridiculing the following:

Daryl Cotton's 'Same old girl'
Kim Wilde 'Kids in America' (this is a little problematic as my sister ridiculed the set, and my brother and I ridiculed the way she phrased her ridicule, but whatever)
M-maybe Mi-Sex's 'Space Race'?

We-e-ll I can't remember any others but when I do I'll add them in and take this sentence out, and put some in, or I'll just make a phew up.

ray burgess' album not so pretty

I really like Ray Burgess' album Not so Pretty. That in itself is fine except I am starting to worry that perhaps I like everything except Meatloaf, and what happens when one day I start liking Meatloaf? But the Burgess album has a cracker of a Vanda/Young song on it, 'Love Fever' which is kind of glam rock which, had it been kept in a dark room a few more days, would have turned into Suicide, and the song 'Sad Rock 'n' Roll' which I remember at the time being absurdly hilariously bad, now sounds pretty great. Sure, his reading of 'Little Boy Sad' is just OK, but the rest of the tracks - most of them written by Gunther Gorman, I guess just after he had his little tenure in Sherbet, are fab. I hope that, if you're not familiar with it, that one day you get to hear Ray Burgess' album Not so Pretty.

sweet buns arrived

Yep, the korean dvd series i bought on Ebay (with help from Steve - thanks Steve) showed up in the mail yesterday. And it's a doozy, well, I've only watched one episode but I have enjoyed it greatly and even managed to translate one word (the word for 'bread') via my Korean-English dictionary, which incidentally is a pain in the arse because it transliterates all the Korean words into the roman alphabet, which is one alphabet I could really do without, but on the other hand I suppose in the immediate present that's a good thing because it forces me to learn the hangul letters.

And anyway it has rough English subtitles on it, which I knew it did, I really only wanted it so I could hear Korean being used and maybe figure out some street signs or whatever, I actually know absolutely NO Korean and of course it's virtually impossible for someone in their forties to learn another language particularly a notoriously difficult one like this but gee, live for the pain I say.

The DVD is not hassle free and in fact the second episode for some reason not only repeats a scene from the first but it seems compulsory to watch this episode with a dubbed chinese soundtrack, which wasn't my preference, and I can't seem to change it back to Korean.

The original Korean title is not, as it happens, Sweet Buns but Ring Shaped Bread. It seems to be a love triangle story so far, or a hate triangle perhaps, as it is two girls and a guy who went to school together, and the girls lovehate the guy, who they call Ring Shaped Bread, for reasons I am not going to go into here, or anywhere, ever.

1983 i was there

So was Jack Bruce, making his extremely obscure album Automatic. Jack was going through something of a fallow period commercially I suppose, as this record was only issued in Germany, not that I am saying that's a bad thing in itself, if I was releasing a record, I'd like it to happen in Germany probably more than anywhere other than Korea, or Australia. I have listened to two tracks so far and let me tell you it's much better than Jet Set Jewel, the album that was supposedly too magnificent to be released after the dismal performance of the How's Tricks album. GREAT cover too. The song 'The Swarm' - a pretty full on bit of grim electro blues - is definitely going to be part of DJ Getshaneoffthedancefloor's plan of attack at Olivia's 30th. Oh, I see the song 'Encore' is a song off Jet Set Jewel too, but with more electronic booming drums on it, it actually sounds quite good now, a bit Kate Bushy. Now I have turned it over and am playing side one. I guess when it comes down to it, it's one of those records that would have sounded incomprehensively dated five years ago, but now sounds unbelievably contemporary, because it is all drum machines, synths and vocoders.

Jack is one of those people who presumably made all the money he ever needed to make in the late 1960s with various hits Cream had which get played on the radio, or covered, or whatever, all the time, so the fact that he replaced John Entwhistle in Todd Rundgren's Beatles tribute band (I am so glad I know nothing more of that than that it exists, even that knowledge is a little much) was presumably not out of financial necessity but because who wouldn't want to play in a band with Todd Rundgren, even if it was something that weird. I mean, I read on Wikipedia that Jack once owned an island off the coast of Scotland... how does one own an island? I'll have to look into that. Not for myself, but out of interest.

Funnily, the second track on side two sounds like Todd Rundgren, crossed a little with, um, Billy Joel or someone. And there is a cool solo on a keyboard version of something that's probably supposed to sound like a real instrument but sounds so much unlike it that you can't tell what it's a bad imitation of.

By the way DJ Getshaneoffthedancefloor is not going to emerge at Olivia's party, it would be too cruel. A 30th birthday is supposed to be a happy time, and young people aren't that into irony. Although they are probably more into it than me, these days.

great train art

I'd like to see this again and examine it in more detail.