Life Is A Malign Fiesta

BLURT MEANS BLURT - Blurt, The Fox and Firkin, SE13 28.05.11

2011-05-29T18:16:00.021+01:00

It's Saturday night and the nipper is off on her very first sleep-over, thus gifting my lovely and long-suffering wife and myself our first free night together for damn near eight years. What to do with this golden, as rare as your proverbial hen's teeth, well nigh priceless opportunity? Blurt are playing the Fox and Firkin in Lewisham, my manor ... one of my favourite ever bands, a pub, a mere five minutes walk ... I'm tickled pink. We're in South East London and the weekend starts here.

Arriving (unfashionably) early we are treated to a soundcheck - a fascinating glimpse into the nuts and bolts of how the Blurt entity is assembled. Ted Milton has a commanding presence even in such informal circumstances, instructing the engineer ... dry on the more aggressive numbers, a little dub echo would be welcome on the dancier ones. My wife reckons she gets a Milton smile while I get a double-take. Whatever can she mean?

Ted Milton, long-serving lieutenant Steve Eagles on guitar and Dave Aylward on drums - a very tight and disciplined unit. Plenty of space, very inventive. Once the gig starts they are straight into business -well-drilled, this band. Angular noise, lop-sided tunes, rock-hard clattering beats.

Songs from the new(ish) album Cut It! (go and buy a copy now, a fine album) such as the title track, 'The Bells' and 'Pure Scenario' stack up nicely against Blurt classics such as 'Enemy Ears' and 'Amour De Ma Vie' (the latter a particular favourite of mine ... I always detect an Afrobeat influence there .... but then again that's the way I am) and the mighty 'The Fish Needs A Bike', a song as loved by my nipper as myself. A quick, guitar-free run through 'Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hit' while Mr Eagles changes a string (truncated by Milton just as Eagles is ready to come in on the beat - got to keep them on their toes), too. "Were you just about to start playing guitar?" asks Milton.

Now, I take Milton seriously as a sax-player ... melodic invention and rhythmic nous, energy and attitude; your jazz purist may turn up his nose and Milton himself may be diffident about his abilities but I love his stuff. Didn't Don Cherry once express his admiration? That's good enough for me. Too much melody gives you a sugar rush - far too sweet at the time and very soon leaves you feeling nauseous - Milton's sax gives you melody in shards, along with enough dissonance, enough noise, to spice things up. Too much technique becomes sterile, wit and attitude will always trump empty virtuosity, and Milton's playing is very witty indeed. In fact, his technique, at close quarters, is all his own and when he gets down to blowing with no hands it's enough to give some jazz snobs palpitations. Which is a good thing.

And what goes for Milton goes for Blurt as a whole (as above, so below, very Hermetic) -tunes, driving rhythms, noise - no indulgence, no flab. It's just what you want.

Hats off, too, for Steve Eagles - a man for whom the word 'laconic' might well have been invented. His guitar work is consistently inventive, challenging and propulsive. Minimal effects but a wealth of tones and textures .... and Dave Aylward really hits those drums. It's perfect for the Blurt sound.
Mr Milton's stage presence, too, is inimicable - theatrical, dangerous, slyly funny, a hint of menace; and one of the great lyricists - you can quote Milton lines all day long and there aren't many you can say that of. He's as close to Max Wall or Charlie Chaplin as he is to your average pop singer; little dance moves, grimaces ... a one off -I've never seen Blurt give a mediocre performance and tonight was no exception. Expressionistic and romantic, and off on a frolic of their own. We'll not see their like again.

Alas, poor Yorick!

2008-02-15T08:14:00.011Z

The death mask of Laurence Sterne

("Authenticity not verified" ... how very Sternean).

The death mask of Jonathan Swift

Bloody Groundhog Day

2008-02-02T18:10:00.000Z

Diary entry for 2nd February, 2008.

Celebrated Joyce's birthday in by now time-honoured fashion.

Went out to celebrate; got pissed on white wine; misquoted Ulysses in slurred tones; insulted two bully beef squaddies who, while I was searching for just that right bon mot, fetched me several blows about the head; staggered home, much the worse for wear. That's another pair of trousers beyond repair.

Can't wait for next year when I get to do it all again.

Joyce looks down from Heaven (he's very good about it, he lets God back on His throne on Sundays), shakes his head, smiles and whispers edjit.

Ten Guilty Little Secrets

2008-01-23T07:40:00.001Z

Responding to the gauntlet insouciantly thrown down by Dominic Zero to confess to "ten records that hide at the back of your collection that no grown man should own" ... oh dear, it was a struggle to get it down to a mere ten.

1)Something Happened On The Way To Heaven - Phil Collins Actually, I put up a post on this very song, 24.1.07 - he may be a Tory-voting shitehawk, but I insist this is a wonderful and poignant little ditty. And the keerazy video, complete with dog shit, is still a kitsch classic.
2)King Of Pain - The Police The dreadful Mr Sumner, sucking up to any passing Amazonian Indian while treating his domestics like shit and indulging in, um, congress with that harpy for ten hours at a time ... what a tosser.
3)Synchronicity II - The Police Fuck me, two Police songs? Oh my God, am I a closet fan and never actually knew it? This was designed to appeal to my deep-seated pseudness, referencing as it does Yeats and Jung.
4)You're A Lady - Peter Skellern The dirty bastard.
5)Candy Girl - New Edition It's a thinly disguised rip-off of 'ABC', and it features Bobby Brown, who is, officially, an utter wanker. Nice little song, though.
6)Chasing Rainbows - Shed Seven Chronic indie under-achievers, with a lead singer more convincingly simian than Ian Brown could ever be. Be afraid, they have reformed.
7)Radio Africa - Latin Quarter The missus was once righteously appalled when I insisted on singing this in a dreadful cod Jamaican accent for the best part of an afternoon. Loudly. And, for a long time, I thought it was by Toto.
8) Hand Held In Black and White - Dollar As with (4), I was dubious about putting this down, coming perilously close as it does to 'guilty pleasure' style kitsch indulgence, but it's a Trevor Horn production and a lush old piece of Spectoresque pop.
9)Friends - Bette Midler Heard this on the soundtrack of The Last Of Sheila, a wonderful little oddity of a movie, written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim (the movie, not the song). I even went out and bought a Midler greatest hits album just to get a copy of this song. And I don't care who knows it.
10)Who Made Who - AC/DC Has there been some kind of Led Zep style rehabilitation for AC/DC, or are they forever safely beyond the realms of good taste?

Tiny Cinema 5

2007-11-21T07:07:00.000Z

The pedagogue in me offers major and definitive statement of filmic praxis. We intend to move on all fronts - the Gesamtkunstwerk is the building that must be built.

Diagetic vs non-diagetic - Eisenstein's horror of the merely anecdotal; the re/de/composition of the image/sound gestalt. Filmic space as privileged site. We are non-homogenous. We prefer to move vertically.

Montage is what films are. Films are what montage is. Is montage what films are? Are films what montage is?

No, really.

Tiny Cinema 4

2007-11-14T14:14:00.000Z

... the old movies ...

Tiny Cinema 3

2007-11-01T13:14:00.000Z

Tiny Cinema 2

2007-10-14T16:29:00.000+01:00

Tiny Cinema 1

2007-10-12T13:45:00.000+01:00

Someone Must Have Left It Underneath The Carpet

2007-09-24T16:22:00.000+01:00

What do the critics know? A Certain Ratio, often dismissed as Joy Division copyists, as perennial under-achievers, were something far more rich and strange than that.

Well, anyway, there is a good case to be made for ACR both sounding and looking (what is the more important, I wonder? I mean, in the ripe old context of pop? Paul Morley once congratulated Edwyn Collins for apprehending the significance of Simon Topping's haircuts) like Joy Division before Joy Division did (or, at the very least, developing an early sound contemporary to and independent of Joy Division, a sound that operated in similar areas.). The grey and black palette (both aurally and visually), the demob clothes and hair-cuts, the post-punk drone and buzz, the mono/baritone vocals, the lyrics wittily dripping ennui and despair? ACR looked and sounded like the uber-Factory act while Joy Division were still sporting leather trousers and 'taches. ACR got there first ...

(Actually, they got to New York and into the clubs before New Order did too ... and isn't it the case that David Byrne first picked up a taste for funk when ACR supported Talking Heads over here? See? They got there first).

The earliest incarnation, one sadly unrecorded - a duo featuring Simon 'Dream' Topping and Peter Terrell on guitars and noise generator. Eno (obviously), Kraftwerk and Wire are mentioned as influences. By the time of the first single , the mighty 'All Night Party'/ 'The Thin Boys', the band is a four piece - Topping on vocals, Terrell and Martin Moscrop on guitars (used as rhythmic rather than melodic elements) and electronics and Jeremy Kerr on bass. That's right, no drums. And they didn't need them - listen to 'All Night Party' and you can hear, already, the skeletal funk influence they would develop, carried by the fiercely scratched and pummelled guitars. Wonderful stuff.

And they found their spiritual home in Factory ... even catching Tony Wilson as manager (it was down to A Certain Ratio's good offices that he got himself a halfway decent haircut). He, for a while, loved them very much. Is the myth about him rubbing fake tan into their thighs true? "But best of all I liked the white shirts. The Thin Boys. Even profoundly heterosexual managers have love affairs with their charges", he wrote. They coulda been, they shoulda been ... up there with Joy Division. Treated like royalty.

And then they asked Wilson to find them a drummer, a real life funk drummer. Enter Donald Johnson and, for a while, ACR had it all. A perfect collision of pop and Krautrock and post-punk and funk and anything else they fancied. Precision and discipline and wit and sex and style. Fucking perfect. Before the dread spectre of 'musicianship' threw a spanner in the works they were, I insist, perfect. For a while, just a moment gone as quickly as you like. Then technique set in, the desire to get real, get authentic. It's been the death of many a great pop band, and it did for ACR.

Of course, any Ratioer is more than entitled to tell me to keep my opinions to myself ... they did what they did and, I assume, made the music they wanted to make. And made some music I love along the way. Who could ask for anything more?
(And, having said that, there is some wonderful music on every subsequent ACR release ... their Latin grooves, for instance ... stick some of their stuff on an anonymous white label 12" and give it to some trend-setting DJs and they would be raving about the wonderful rare grooves they'd just discovered).

Where does the first album proper, To Each ... , stand now? Generally regarded as a missed opportunity, by the band as much as anyone else. I love it, actually. Recorded in New Jersey and brought to perfection by Martin Hannett only for his settings to be zeroed by a hapless studio engineer (described by Tony Wilson as "that fucking six foot five hippy") just before the final mix, it is now a critical commonplace that the spark was lost then and there ... hmmm, not sure about that. The Twilight Zone funk of 'Felch' and 'Forced Laugh', the percussion epic that is 'Winter Hill' ... they all stand up today.

Of course, with the arrogance and assurance of youth, they'd already released some of their best material on a series of singles - the aforementioned 'All Night Party'/'The Thin Boys' 7"and 'Shack Up', the 'Flight' and 'Do The Du(casse)' 12"s. Who cares? They were young and talent is for burning.

'Flight', perhaps ACR's finest achievement (one of Factory's finest, too and a perfect argument for just how necessary it all was)... six minutes of transcendental hypnotic funk as James Nice called it .

Well, they looked so perfect. That means a lot - the Hungry Thirties Factory chic, the military look (all WWII khaki shorts, camouflage gear and fake tan ... it went with the trumpets, see?) that was appropriated double quick by Echo and The Bunnymen ... (if memory serves, the music press went overboard for the Bunnymen then, everyone thought it so witty), the sports gear. Trend setters every time.

It was an idea very much in the air at the time - white musicians who had been inspired by (or borrowed an impetus from) Punk bending an ear to various black musics, dub and funk and what have you and giving it a special twist. The individual stamp that comes from not playing the music in the 'right' way. ACR were among the best ... The Pop Group tried too hard, The Slits not hard enough, P.i.L. were too lazy, The Gang of Four too macho. ACR were separate ... unlike many of their contemporaries, they had a vital dash of sex, they were young and sharp, they had spunk in their funk ( I mean, they always looked clean, whereas The Slits ... they more often than not looked as if their knickers would be soiled (which, admittedly, has its own attractions)). They, also, lacked the smugness prevalent in the scenes around The Slits (The Pop Group or New Age Steppers or what have you) ... ofays sporting dreads and talking in cod Ja accents. What did Mark E. Smith say? "The grim reefer ... The Kensington white rastas run for cabs/This I have seen."

In Topping they had the perfect frontman. Why did it have to end? The same damaged choir boy looks as Barney Sumner, for a start, the wonderfully baritone vocals, an interesting lyrical stance ("My heart was just an open sore/Which you picked at 'till it was sore" ... it's a love song!), the anarchic trumpet technique, that little noise box he wielded, just the two settings, on and off. Brilliance in every moment.

But something had a hold of Simon Topping, and maybe he knew exactly what it was. Topping's gradual self-effacement from his own band, his long slow retreat into obscurity ... a power struggle with Johnson for the soul of the band? ("He retreated behind the trumpet and then behind the timbales and then behind a girl singer called Tilly" wrote Wilson). Actually, Wilson had a Romantic notion that Topping never quite recovered from the death of Ian Curtis. Who knows? Were Topping and Curtis as close as Wilson asserts? They certainly played a lot of gigs together. In any case, Topping, in his own style, wrote himself out of the picture just as surely as did Curtis, if in less dramatic fashion.

He later played with Quando Quango, appeared on a Durutti Column album and released a good (though not, perhaps, essential) Latin tinged single 'Prospect Park' ... he moved to New York, he turned up at the soundcheck for a New Order concert there (causing Barney to exclaim:"fucking hell, Simon, great haircut or what!") and then ... what? Where did he go? What does he do now? Anyone know? (Rumours, rumours ... he started a degree at Loughborough University, he became a piano tuner, he did this, he did that). I'm looking for a certain Simon Topping.

Day In, Day Out *

2007-09-17T07:13:00.001+01:00

*or 'oh no, not another bloody piece about Joy Division'

It is always a fairly dubious experience when one's obsessions, particularly those most internalised, most personal, become public property; become, my God, spread all over the newspapers. I am happy, in the main, pottering along with a little set of interests few others care about - or, certainly, no one in my immediate enviroment, in my (God help me) peer group. As a young man, being very taken with Louis-Ferdinand Celine or, say, Kenneth Anger wasn't the best way to make friends - it wasn't, let me tell you, the quickest route to getting the girls interested.
I recall the release of Cronenberg's provocative but very flawed adaptation of Naked Lunch - suddenly you had poorly informed articles about William S. Burroughs appearing in the mainstream press ... shocking, that was, to me. I had thought I was on pretty safe ground with Uncle Bill, here was an interest of mine, surely, never designed for overground consumption.

Now here we go again - a sudden flurry (I originally wrote, parapraxis-wise, slurry) of Joy Division related activity; the imminent release of the Ian Curtis biopic Closer, a documentary about the band currently picking up awards at international film festivals, the repackaging (again!) of the back catalogue, the recent , very sad, death of Tony (that's Anthony H. to you and me) Wilson - all these conspire to push the lads back under the beady eye of Grub Street ... the one place Joy Division doesn't belong. Jesus, I even picked up a copy of The Observer yesterday to be confronted by another lengthy article about the film and the group - the second in a month or so (albeit one penned by Paul Morley and featured in the Observer Music Monthly glossy magazine ... still, it sits awkwardly between the adverts for booze, expensive sound systems and James Blunt's new album). The mainstream media, it seems to me, is particularly ill-suited to dealing with pop music - one glance over the album reviews in The Guardian, say, is enough to convince one of the futility of (in the main) Oxbridge-educated snobs struggling to get to grip with the gnarly soul of pop music - an art form both too trivial and far, far too important to be left to the mainstream.

Joy Division, and this seems such an embarrassingly obvious thing to write, was always the obsession of the loner. Every performance of theirs I saw, I saw alone - playing a copy of 'Transmission' to some friends (doctrinaire punks, in the main) to complete incomprehension, watching them perform on the TV programme Something Else to a background rumble of guffaws and laughter ... these are moments designed to make you love them all the fiercer, but alone. Joy Division's music seems to inhabit a peculiar interzone between community and solitude ... they made the sort of records designed for hunching over the stereo, alone in your bedroom. Of course, at the gigs, it used to be a shock to see others dressed in the Factory style ... wasn't that just me?

Going home on the Tube after seeing them, for instance, at the Electric Ballroom (A Certain Ratio supporting ... is this the gig I saw Simon Topping take a Coke can full on the head? "Fuck off!" he said) , who could you tell what you had just seen? No one else I knew would have cared, and it would have been hard to put it into words in any case. Was it a great gig, by conventional rock standards? I don't know, I couldn't care less ... I do know that seeing Curtis perform in that way was nothing to do with entertainment.

Factory workers taking a break

Joy Division's music, it seems to me, always sounds so bloody archetypal ... the songs sound so right, so inevitable, almost as though they had always existed and were just waiting for someone to actually hear them, to pull them out of the air and give them form. Every song, every album seems carved in stone (not, I think, merely a response to the Factory predilection for tombstone imagery) - one can hardly imagine a note, a word changed now we have them in their final, their canonical forms. As they went on (during their sadly truncated lifetime) they, unlike my beloved A Certain Ratio, seem to become more and more like themselves. The music became more and more Joy Division. Every element of Joy Division seems absolutely integral to the overall design; not just the contribution made by Curtis' lyrics and performance style but Stephen Morris' drumming (surely one of the most under-rated musicians in pop music? Up there with Moe Tucker and Klaus Dinger), Hook's bass, Albrecht's/Rubble's/Dicken's/Sumner's angular guitar ... every element fits.

The young men in situ

(The whole Factory set-up, the ethos, appealed to me; it was exactly what I was looking for - serious young men in grey and black demob clothes and Hitler Jugend haircuts, the sly sense of humour, the unapologetic high-art gloss, the groups creating a way out of the morass music found itself in after the initial charge of Punk had burned itself out, leaving us with the ludicrous and lumpen likes of the U.K Subs.
Factory artifacts were so tactile, so beautiful; the heavy paper sleeve of A Certain Ratio's 'All Night Party'/'The Thin Boys' 7", Lenny Bruce dead on one side, Tony Perkins on the other; the plastic wallet and insert of ACR's tape release The Graveyard and the Ballroom; the mysterious image adorning the textured sleeve of Unknown Pleasures; the sandpaper sheathing The Return of The Durutti Column (designed to destroy your record collection!); even the embossed sleeve of the Crawling Chaos 7" 'Sex Machine';

(and I never think of Joy Division as morbid or death-obsessed, rather as life-affirming and uplifting. They made, for my money, the most human, the most vunerable music. Paradoxically, the more electronic, the more machine-like they became, the more human. They were, for me, the real Northen Soul. I believe Curtis genuinely meant it when he sang "love life, makes you feel higher." Even now, listening to their music (and that of New Order) makes me feel alive and responsive, makes me feel moved, engages my heart and guts and brain. Isn't that what art is supposed to do?);

(and I hate all those awful rock'n'roll cliches, "live fast, die young" and all that claptrap. Joy Division was so unrock'n'roll - it was so perfect that they looked like weird bank clerks from some science fiction 1930s that never existed. They struck me as four young men who worked hard and achieved something of real and lasting value. The admirable thing about Joy Division is the honesty; they just got on with the job - playing live, practicing, recording. So much 'entertainment' these days has palpable designs on you, on your money, on your attention, on your sense of worth ... Joy Division didn't clamour for your love, didn't bully or cajole, just got quietly down to work. Art, real art, stays with us, long after the people who made it or the conditions that obtained have disappeared - stays and exists on its own terms. That's art, that's music, that's life);

(and I love Barney's description of his response when he got the phone call telling him of Curtis' suicide - "I put the phone down and went and washed my face with cold water. Then I got back on the phone and took it like a man." I like that, they had real courage, the men of Joy Division, real spine. it makes me feel very proud of the lads);

(and it's none of my business why Curtis did what he did ... perhaps, at the end, he was too tired. What is enough, for me, is that he had a hand in creating something of definitive value and meaning, music that inspires and exorts. Something that had an impact on me in ways that I can only guess at. I grew up listening to the music of Joy Division and New Order, is it absurd to think it had a part in making me (for better or worse) the person I am today? Tony Wilson wouldn't have thought so. That's good enough for me)).

Lady Godiva's Operation

2007-08-18T07:45:00.001+01:00

When I heard the doctors standing over my hospital bed discussing my massive subarachnoid haemorrhage and how I was now in a persistent vegetative state, I laughed. I then tried to climb out of bed and soiled my hospital gown.

My brain enjoying it's haemorrhage

It was with some chagrin that I realised I had not, while comatose, been subjected to any violent and humiliating sexual assaults. What am I, chopped liver?

I am told my anal wink response is unusually highly developed.

I recall, filtered through my post-anesthesia haze, the sneering, insinuating tone of my doctor as he discussed my case bedside: the human nervous system ... what is to be done with it? Reduce it to a compact, abbreviated spinal column whatnot. The brain ... reptilian, mammalian and upper primate ... surely evolution demands it goes the way of the appendix and the adenoid? Redesign, gentleman! Redesign, retool, reboot! Wire the mouth directly into the anus! Dispense with all this antiquated plumbing!
I can, even now, recall the ribald sounds ... it seems there was quite a commotion as he was led away, still declaiming.

The operation was a success but the patient will never play piano again.

While I was under sedation some wag had tattooed a yellow Star of David on my forehead. Laugh? I could have choked on a ham sandwich ... kosher, of course.

untilted post

2007-08-17T16:23:00.001+01:00

Jean Genet Is Dead

2007-06-26T07:20:00.001+01:00

The Spanish Cemetery, Larache, Morocco

Bloomsday Comes But Once A Year

2007-06-16T07:24:00.000+01:00

Bloom with careful hand clutched his flower.
Smell the almost no smell. Language of. Yes. We are here to read. Sweets of sin, old sweet song.
Sighing, he peered out into the gathering dusk.
I am a. I am a.

THIS IS A FINAL WARNING. CLEAR THE PARK. DISPERSE

2007-06-14T07:57:00.001+01:00

Ancient history, this - but one minute ago is history and yesterday a thousand years gone.
The Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968 - significant both for the brutality with which Mayor Daley's police force/stormtroopers and the National Guard attacked the assembled ranks of civil rights campaigners and peaceniks gathered to protest and for the attention concentrated on these events by the media ( not least of which because of the indiscriminate beatings handed out to a large number of journalists and reporters).

An interesting enough series of events in and of themselves (many echoes of today, how we got here, what happened along the way), but where my obsessions really come into play is the decision of the editors of Esquire magazine to employ three certain individuals to cover the convention - namely, get this for a rum old crew, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs and Terry Southern. Add to this the presence in Chicago of Allen Ginsberg leading a carnival of freaks (distributing acid-spiked honey to the crowd a speciality) and you have a recipe for real chaos. Ginsberg chanting his "Om" and handing out flowers to the police, Burroughs walking around recording ambient sound in order to make a series of tape cut-ups and bring about a profound disruption in the Convention process itself, Genet pugnacious and alert, Southern turning a cynical eye on all around him.
"I can't wait for this city to rot" opined Genet, "I can't wait to see weeds growing through empty streets."

Genet, Burroughs and Ginsberg man the barricades

The legend of Genet ... in the U.S. illegally, he wound up the hippies by expressing his sexual attraction to the jackbooted, helmeted riot police; at least twice he stared down a cop about to billy club him. At one point, he later recounted, on the hoof from the police violence in Lincoln Park he ran into an apartment block and rang a doorbell at random - to be greeted by a young man in the middle of writing a dissertation ... on the ouvre of one Jean Genet. Or a beautiful young black woman, depending on how the mood took him.
Genet later said of the police (speaking from a considerable experience of police behaviour, as Burroughs pointed out) that he'd never seen such expressions of blood lust on human faces.

Burroughs and Genet - neither capable of joining movements, neither in favour of a policy of non-violence - their intervention in any debate a very poisoned chalice. If the young people, Genet would later tell Burroughs, ever achieved their aims he would no longer be with them.

Reality TV

Burroughs, Genet and Ginsberg together - my heart lifts when I see these photos ... three such valiant old buggers - each off on a frolic of his own.

Southern and Burroughs

Two Sgt. Pepper's cover stars ... I always used to say, buy the album, keep the sleeve, throw away the record.

Genet and Ginsberg had two very different conceptions of flower power

TOPLESS MODELS

2007-06-07T18:46:00.000+01:00

WILD BILL

Boyishly sexy 45.

Did somebody call the doctor?

Your fantasy is my business.

Always horny and ready to schlupp.

Willing to travel.

WILLY THE PIMP

Horny 55.

Bubblebaths and immaculate body service.

Very well equipped.

Eager to please.

My place or yours.

Signed W.B.

2007-06-03T16:13:00.000+01:00

I've always had a soft spot for Wilfred Bramble - his elegant performances in the great Steptoe and Son are matched only by his iconic and extremely moving appearance in Terence Davies' majestic Death and Transfiguration, playing an aging gay Catholic facing death.
For me, also, there is the added frisson of a marked resemblance to William S. Burroughs - which is always something guaranteed to snare my attention and fire my imagination. Whenever I see a photo of the Steptoes I reimagine it as an image of Burroughs and fellow Beats putting themselves about, on and off the road. Two down-at-heel totters from Shepherd's Bush are magically transmuted into low-life adventurers in Tangiers or Mexico, or speeding along the highways of the America of their dreams.

William S. Burroughs showing Jack Kerouac the biggest load of horse he ever did see

Albert Steptoe on the lookout for junk

William S. Burroughs facing down the critics

Steptoe and Son ... purveyors of fine old tot

Burroughs explaining to a distraught Kerouac that the Naked Lunch ms will have to be retyped

There are a few beguiling points of intersection between Burroughs and Bramble - the facial congruity, the air of the dignified aging queer going gently to seed, the shabby gentility, the sense of a gay identity formed before Stonewall and Gay Lib, even the brief intersection with one Paul McCartney and The Beatles (Bramble as Macca's grandad in A Hard Day's Night (what on earth did he make of Beatlemania?), Burroughs featuring as a Sgt. Pepper's cover star and being loaned the use of a recording studio by the aforementioned Macca). Both occupied an odd and incongruous position in the "swinging Sixties". What a funny old world it is.

Looking For Mushrooms

2007-05-28T08:02:00.000+01:00

Nice photo, this - two people I admire very much; Bruce Conner (standing) and Terry Riley. Conner is an extraordinary artist - films, paintings, sculptures, collages, assemblages, you name it; all his works are possessed of a sly wit and political consciousness. As an experimental film-maker, I regard him as the only serious rival to my beloved Kenny Anger, particularly in terms of imagery and editing, and manipulation of found footage. Like Anger, he is an obsessive craftsman, honing and honing his films frame by frame.
Riley - one of the main originators of Minimalism (and so much more, of course) and one of the very first people to start experimenting with tape-loops. Did he also invent the hippy 'happening' with his all-night concerts and all-purpose love-ins? He produced a couple of wonderful soundtracks for Conner's films, too.
They are both still around and producing great work - it's nice to see two old Beats still grooving away.

Three Prophets

2007-05-24T11:22:00.001+01:00

Three extravagantly bearded Biblical Patriarchs - Riley, Wyatt and Flaherty.

Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano And Friends

2007-05-13T15:57:00.000+01:00

Paul Flaherty - Whirl Of Nothingness (Family Vineyard 2006)
Dream/Aktion Unit - Blood Shadow Rampage (Volcanic Tongue 2006)

Every now and again, just when you think it has been exhausted, noise music experiences a power-surge and reminds you that there is life in the old workhorse yet. Two albums from last year have caught my attention - both featuring Paul Flaherty, a veteran free music saxophonist. For a number of years now Flaherty has been playing and recording with demon drummer Chris Corsano in what you might term a power duo (as well as being integral parts of other combos) - there is a lovely affinity between the pair, both employing a safety-net free approach to their playing. Call me a sentimental old cove, but there is something about the relationship between Corsano and Flaherty (who is old enough to be his father) that I really like.
Flaherty has been around for years honing his skills - intense ecstatic screams and cries with little sparkles of melody rising out of the roar every so often. He has set Fire Music alight again. What interests me is his willingness and open-mindedness in playing with musicians from other disciplines; there is a snobbishness and prissiness about many in even the free jazz scene - odd in a music dedicated to total freedom. Corsano plays with a bewildering number of bands - notably Sunburned Hand Of The Man (or are they just 'Sunburned' now?) and Six Organs Of Admittance. He is part of an extended scene (not the right word, more like a loose circle of friends) that includes people such as Wolf Eyes, Burning Star Core and Thurston Moore. Noiseniks all. Like Flaherty, Corsano plays free jazz and noise and avant rock and everything else he puts his mind to because free minded musicians disregard labels, right?

Flaherty and Corsano

Flaherty's Whirl Of Nothingness, though, finds him in that most unforgiving territory - solo. Just him and his sax, nowhere to hide. Eight pieces, improvised in one evening, of raw but structured chaos tempered with moments of intense prettiness. The album is explicitly spiritual in intent, dedicated to "all the victims yet to come" (that's all of us, Flaherty points out).

Comparisons between Flaherty and other free jazzers are perhaps inevitable, but bandying around such descriptions as 'post-Ayler' or 'post-Brotzmann' tend to miss the point - this music isn't "post" anything, it is right here, right now. Flaherty himself has used the term 'freeform abstract music' to describe the sound that comes out of his horn and that'll do for me, straight from the horse's mouth.

Dream/Aktion Unit

Dream/Aktion Unit, on this occasion, comprises Flaherty and Corsano with Thurston Moore doing his guitar thing, Heather Leigh Murray and Matt Heyner. The Flaherty/Corsano axis really kicks things along here, and of course, Moore isn't too shabby. Flaherty's sax gells with Moore's guitar work brilliantly - they have performed as a duo before (there is a wonderful video on the dread Youtube of them playing together, Moore's feedback dueling with Flaherty's blurts) and the whole thing is an exercise in controlled chaos and aggression; again, the flickers of melody, when they come, mean all the more for being embedded in good old dissonance. Too much sugar is bad for you, see? I don't know if this particular incarnation will reform again - but there is such a large scene featuring these people that it is inevitable that one or another combination of said reprobates will rub up against each other at some point.

KWA meets SME

2007-05-09T07:32:00.000+01:00

Spaced Out, We're Spacing In

2007-05-03T09:50:00.000+01:00

The Isle of Wight Festival, 1970 - Jimi Hendrix, in his last performance on U.K. soil, dedicates a number to "the cat with the silver face", a character at the front of the stage ... said cat was none over than Hawkwind's Nik Turner. Unlike Hendrix, Hawkwind had a good festival, playing a number of free gigs outside the festival proper and cementing their reputation as the people's band. Turner, in fact, wandering around with his silver countenance, flute and star spangled trousers actually made the pages of Vogue (including the front cover) and Paris Match. Not bad for a stoned space rocking hippy peacenik. The Nik Turner case - or, he's a bit of a case, that Nik Turner, isn't he?
Once dubbed the 'conscience of Hawkwind', due to his propensity for agreeing to free and benefit gigs, and his adherence to the peace and love hippy ethic, Nik Turner remains, for me at least, the very heart and soul of Hawkwind - part of the magic of that band during their glory years springing precisely from the very fertile dichotomy between Turner's acidhead hippy ethos (frog costumes, Egyptian drag, make-up and all), Lemmy's speedfreak biker heaviness (iron crosses and Nazi eagles), Calvert's manic personas and of course, Dave Brock's s(t)olid stage presence.

There was obviously something in the water in Margate in the mid-sixties - Turner, Robert Calvert, Dik Mik, there they all were, sniffing the air, sensing a wave about to crest. Turner had a job selling kiss-me-quick-hats and suchlike to the tourists, as well as joss sticks and psychedelic posters and whatnot to whatever passed as hipsters down on the South Coast. Didn't Calvert work as a deckchair attendant? What a bunch.

A bit of a one off, Turner - some kind of glam-hippy-psychedelic whatever, full of positive vibes and a desire to play free jazz sax in a rock band ... that's 'rock band' as in freewheeling acid experimental science fiction spectacularly unstable counter-cultural rock band. With a sideline in serious speedfreaks, rather well-endowed naked dancers and head-bending light shows.

The cat with the silver face, Isle of Wight, 1970.

Turner's first, er, ejection from Spaceship Hawkwind - as Julian Cope pointed out ... it's 1977, punk is gathering pace and you've just been booted out of your band, so what do you do? Simple, if you're of a Nik Turner cast of mind - you head off to Egypt, inveigle yourself into the Great Pyramid at Giza and record yourself playing flute while sprawled out in a stone sarcophagus in the King's Chamber. Just to make sure the whole project sticks out in the contemporary pop landscape very like that crashed spaceship on the front cover of Hall Of The Mountain Grill, you then bring the tapes home and enlist various members of Gong to create a musical backdrop for your flute sounds ... and if that wasn't perverse enough, you then read sections from The Book of Coming Forth By Day over that.

Heavy metal psychedelic fighter pilot. Or something. Circa 1973?

I love the classic Hawkwind template - open-ended riff-heavy jamming with added electronic noise, Brock's rhythm guitar, Lemmy's thunderous bass and Turner's vocals and sax and flute; some of the most exhilarating music of the Seventies can be found here - classic songs/improv frameworks (albeit a very monomaniacal idea of improvisation ... something akin to the Velvet's live workouts) such as 'Master Of The Universe' and 'Brainstorm', more acoustic-based songs such as 'We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago' or the proto-punk noise and Turner's sax riffs of 'Urban Guerrilla' and 'Brainbox Pollution'. Witness the way the heavy-folk of 'Space Is Deep' shifts into Krautrock motorik - so good, that.

The Magus, 1978.

What I like, very much, about Turner is his willingness to have a go - he keeps active and, just as importantly, keeps engaged; busking, playing with younger musicians, guesting with a multitude of bands (most of a pronounced space rock bent) as well as keeping a number of his own outfits together ... jazzy combos such as Galaktikos or the Hawkwind revisited that is Space Ritual ... and if the latter outfit ("more original Hawkwind members than Hawkwind!") is something of a autotribute band, well, various ex-Beatles and The Rolling Stones have been doing just that for over three decades.

I like this photo a lot - Turner and Moorcock, 1975.

Credit where credit is due - right at the almost-very-beginning of the story, it's not everyone who would have cast an appraising eye over the unlikely lads Turner (likes:acid, pot, Eastern religions, messing around with saxophones) and Dik Mik (likes:speed, not going to bed for a week, messing around with circuit boards) and saw them as suitable bandmate material ... but Dave Brock had the genius to do just that. God bless'im.

The Harmolodyssey

2007-05-02T11:12:00.000+01:00

To prove that I don't spend all of my time listening to long-haired white geezers from 1973 (Jeez, sometimes I'll even listen to a green-quiffed ... er ... white geezer from ... um ... 1973), consider the singular talents of Ornette Coleman - over half a century since he blasted out of Texas to turn the jazz world upside down, he's still making music at the cutting-edge. Indeed, so single-minded has been his pursuit of Harmolodics that even the straight world has had to take notice; his latest album, Sound Grammar, has just pulled down the Pulitzer Prize.

And he did it all with a plastic saxophone - although, I notice, these days it's a plastic saxophone made by Selmer. But nothing is too good for a genius.

A restless, relentless innovator, a snappy dresser, a philosopher, a metaphysician - and , important this, a saintly individual; we'll probably not see his like again.

It's The NEU! Thing

2007-04-23T16:24:00.000+01:00

At around, roughly, the same time some of the long-haired loons I've featured in recent posts were, um, getting down here in Blighty, over on the Continent a number of equally hirsute troublemakers were helping to stoke up their very own musical insurrection ... in the main, these were German. I mean, I ask you, the Bosch rocking out?
What has become known as Krautrock was a very broad church indeed - the music of Can tempering their early Velvet Undergroundisms with something akin to the Canterbury Scene sound, whereas Kraftwerk were busy creating forms that would, in retrospect, be seen as providing the language of electronica and techno; Faust started out in a vaguely Zappaesque direction before bringing in more drone and noise, whereas the extended Amon Duul family were heavier, more psychedelic.

Most significant, for my money, were NEU!, formed when multi-instrumentalists Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger left the early incarnation of Kraftwerk they had both briefly graced (and left an indelible impression on), taking with them the germ of a radical new sound (so radical, indeed, that Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, the main architects of Kraftwerk, milked it for all it was worth - if 'Autobahn' isn't directly influenced by/ripped off from NEU!'s patented motorik sound, I'll eat my hat, I'll eat my head, fuck it, I'll eat my NEU! albums) - a hypnotic, perpetual-motion beat, courtesy of Herr Dinger coupled with Rother's drone/ambient guitar noises and the most beautiful melodies filtering through from the haze of electronics. Dinger is, with Moe Tucker, my favourite drummer .... the constant, autistic beat - it could go on, trancelike, forever and never get monotonous. I love NEU! more than almost any music I can think of.

NEU! - Rother and Dinger together (seconds after this photo was taken, Dinger probably threw a punch and shouted a lot).

NEU! only made three albums proper in their lifetime, recorded between 1971 and 1975, every one a monumental achievement - 'Hallogallo', from the first album, is so perfect, so sublime, you want it never to stop; it is NEU!'s default sound, the motorik beat, the virtual absence of conventional song structure, Rother's wonderful guitar and treatments. Not that NEU! didn't have other strings to their bow, the raw experimental noise of 'Negativland', for instance, or the proto-punk (the buzz guitars, Dinger's sneered vocals, his spiky hair in the inner sleeve photo - it's The Sex Pistols to a T, a year or so early) of 'Hero' and 'After Eight' from NEU! '75.

Michael Rother - the nice one

Of course, something this perfect, this wonderful, couldn't last forever - there had already been a kind of interregnum (Rother off to Krautrock supergroup Harmonia) in NEU! after the second album, due to basic personality differences between Dinger and Rother; Dinger being rather an acerbic individual, Rother a bit of a peace'n'lovenik. It was a wonder they stuck together long enough to make three pristine albums. But in their beginning was their end - NEU! '75 is an album pulling so obviously in two (at least!) different directions that it could only spell the terminal road for the entity that was NEU! ... but endings are rarely so brilliantly achieved as this.
They were gone, then, both - off to pastures new, their recorded legacy exerting a bigger and bigger influence the more it recedes in time. I won't bore you with a list of everyone who has copped an idea or ten from the dynamic duo - it would be too long, and anyway, you know the names.

Klaus Dinger - the nasty one

It makes perfect sense that United Artists asked Dave Brock to write sleeve notes for NEU! when they released it here - listen to parts of Space Ritual ... if it doesn't sound like some great lost Krautrock experiment, I don't know what does. Both shared a fondness for those electronic seagull noises, which is always nice, and isn't 'Opa-Loka' (from Warrior On The Edge Of Time) supposed to be a NEU! homage? The great double bill that never was - Hawkwind and NEU! - could one's nervous system have taken it?

A fly in every ointment ... the two stunted brothers of the Ubermenschen that are the three albums proper - NEU! '72 Live! (it's not live, it's an ok but hardly essential rehearsal tape) and NEU! 4, a shoddy collection of outtakes and substandard songs recorded between 1985 and 1986 and not released until 1995 ... it's so bad that the best track on it is 'Nazionale', a take on 'Deutschland Uber Alles' played backwards. Elsewhere, 'Crazy' could be The Knack, for Chrissake.

The second album, NEU! 2; having recorded about one side, they promptly learnt the budget had run out - what do they do? Simple, cobble together the rest of the album by pissing around with the tapes, including sticking fingers into the tape mechanism while rerecording. Did NEU! inadvertently invent the remix? Felix culpa - it's brilliant and totally in keeping with NEU!'s aesthetic, both pop and avant garde.

NEU! '75, of course, also boasts the contributions of Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe on percussion, both of whom would follow Klaus, post-NEU!, into La Dusseldorf - a band that could give NEU! and Harmonia a run for their money.

Rother and Dinger's fraught relationship - for years, they weren't even on speaking terms, indeed the albums couldn't get an official CD release until the pair buried the hatchet a few years ago. One can, now, hear the albums as they were meant to be heard. Of course, therein lies the genius of NEU!, the differing temperaments of Rother and Dinger combining to make this beautiful thing. And witness the end of NEU! '72 Live!, which appears to terminate with the sound of smashing glass and Dinger (I assume it's Dinger ... it's got to be Dinger) losing his temper. It says it all, it's great.

And They All Fit Together In The Same Machine

2007-04-17T16:15:00.000+01:00

Equipe Out, Paris 1984

What a line-up ... L to R: Sophia Domancich, Pip Pyle, Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and Didier Malherbe.

Just the presence of a couple of Soft Machiners and a Gonghead or two would make this a marvellous photo - and Domancich too? Cor! Of course, the Canterbury Sceners (yes, I know, an inexact and very loose term for a huge and proliferating approach to making music ... not so much a sound as a frame of mind) interacted with each other on such a grand scale that one could pick an infinite number of photos of an infinite number of groups that featured one or another combination of these reprobates, but I like this photo a lot; they all look happy (apart from a slightly pensive looking Mr Pyle) and it's always nice to see Dean and Hopper together. Didn't they grow to resemble each other?

Sad to say, very sad actually, Elton Dean and Pip Pyle are no longer around and making music - both passed on last year.

Nice picture, though.

Jaxon

2007-04-15T15:08:00.000+01:00

David Jackson ... known to aficionados as Jaxon - another extraordinary saxophonist, flautist, composer and performer - one of the great driving forces in the history of Van Der Graaf Generator, as well as a solo performer. A singular man, playing alto, tenor and baritone sax as well as flutes - often simultaneously. He has pioneered the use of electronically-treated sax sounds, developing his own equipment to get the range of sounds he was after.
Live, Jaxon was one of the great focal points of Van Der Graaf ... blasting away on two or three saxes at once, great walls of sound alternating with beautiful and delicate passages - usually in black and sporting an odd looking German train-driver's hat. Even Peter Hammill had to be on his mettle to stop Jaxon stealing the show.

Over the last few decades, he has also worked both as a maths and a music teacher, and has done a lot of work developing new technologies allowing people from a wide range of musical prowess and widely differing physical abilities to make music and take the stage ... the Soundbeam, for instance. He does this, I should point out, without a great deal of fanfare, just quietly getting on with the job - very different from the archetypal ego stroking associated with rock musicians doing charity work.

I understand the reformed Van Der Graaf will be continuing without Jackson ... no! Can it be the Generator without Jaxon? Is this wise? Your classic VDGG line-up is Peter Hammill, David Jackson, Hugh Banton and Guy Evans ... so sad to see that wonderful unit broken. But nothing good lasts forever, I suppose.

He's The Mighty Thunder Rider

2007-04-13T18:49:00.000+01:00

Catweazle, say I? Lemmy reckoned Turner always looked so great that it was like being on stage with a Viking beserker ... whether getting down with some prime space rock, communicating with the folks on Venus via the Great Pyramid, busking in Wales or just generally exuding good vibrations and peace and love, he's The Mighty Thunder Rider, yes he is.

Gilbert and George, Tate Modern 11.04.07

2007-04-12T18:26:00.000+01:00

I was lucky enough to attend a private tour around the Gilbert and George exhibition at Tate Modern yesterday, hosted by the artists themselves. Excellent stuff ... as always they were extremely polite, courteous and engaging.
Part of the frisson I get from G&G, I'm sure, is the incongruity between their appearance, their personal deportment on the one hand and the ripe old content of their art on the other. There was a similarly hilarious disjunction involved with William S. Burroughs - the well dressed, well brought up elderly gentleman who happened to write and say all those rude things.
There they were, calmly and politely showing us around all those huge pictures showing them full frontal or bending over showing their arseholes, or full of various bodily secretions. Bravery and honesty ... rare these days.

With the Time Out arts editor, G & G lead us around the show and talked about their work and their history ... very illuminating, very funny; in person, they embody some of the most interesting aspects of their work - a nice dry wit allied with a determination to look at the world and to engage with it, including all those bits some may find shocking, ugly or obscene, but which are (of course) vital parts of life.

The Sun In A Bottle

2007-04-11T15:38:00.000+01:00

Catweazle, an 11th Century wizard lost in the 1970s, believer in magic and electrickery, off with the fairies.

Nik Turner, saxophonist, flautist, composer, ex-member of Hawkwind and Inner City Unit, believer in magic and electrickery, off with the fairies.

The Universe Is Something Like A Spider Or A Blob Of Spit

2007-04-04T17:36:00.000+01:00

There's a lot of kerfuffle about Surrealism in the media presently ... a big show at the V&A, for example, lots of double page spreads in the 'quality' press. In the way of these things, all the cliches are rehearsed ... Dali's lobster phone, the soft watches, the usual suspects. (How quickly it was all co opted by advertising ... now you can buy a rubber Dali lobster for £3 in the V&A shop ... a tea towel featuring Man Ray's Cadeau Audace will set you back £5).
Much of what gets passed off as Surrealist could be more profitably seen as the art of the fantastic ... what attracts me is a far darker take on Surrealism, a strain typified more by Georges Bataille than Dali. Bataille (the enemy within, according to Breton), in the essays he wrote for Documents, and the photographs they accompanied mined a far more interesting area - found objects and images, chance operation, elements ripped and magnified radically out of context.

Jacques-Andre Boiffard. Untitled. 1929

For Bataille, Surrealism always contained a strong element of realism, however distorted. The ethnographic, the scientific .... how disquieting when placed in other contexts. The photographs of Boiffard, for example, investigate a materialism highly uncomfortable for Breton ... the big toes, magnified and isolated, an attack, according to Bataille, on "idealist deceptions of human activity."

Eli Lotar. Abattoir. 1929

Real life is totally Surrealistic, the photos above are examples, on one level, of hard social realism, but are, on another, shockingly, deliriously Surrealist. Lotar's photographs of the slaughterhouse are beautiful examples - linked, in Bataille's accompanying essay, to religion, to the temple. Furthermore, Bataille slyly suggests, such sites are subject to a quarantine .... but the victims of this quarantine are not the butchers or even the animals, but the people who cannot stand the sight of their own ugliness.

Lotar and Boiffard were true geniuses, true Surrealists - may there come a time when their images replace the tired lobster phone as the quintessential Surrealist icon.

Just Say Yes, Kids

2007-04-02T12:11:00.000+01:00

This is Nik Turner ... after a lifetime of playing with Hawkwind and sundry other nutcases and no doubt enough hallucinogens to send his brain into permanent orbit around Jupiter, this is not a costume - this is what he actually looks like now.

The Night Ted Milton Blew Me A Kiss - Blurt, The Montague Arms, New Cross 23.03.07

2007-03-24T09:00:00.000Z

Blurt in New Cross on a cold Friday night. There's Ted in his white zoot suit and hobnail boots get-up, going mad in his inimitable way. There can't be many acts where you can see a mohicaned savant in his 60s spouting anarchic poetry and avant garde sax licks ... Blurt - number one in a field of one. I've said it before, but what makes Blurt work so well is the discipline. Steve Eagles on guitar and Bob Leith on minimal drum kit create a very tight, thrilling musical backdrop for Milton to operate against ... Ted's vocals and lyrics are in a class of their own - wry, sarcastic, Dadaist; his incandescent sax playing, too, left any notion of the conventional behind years ago. Displaying a dissonant but melodic inventiveness lost to most jazzers these days, one thinks of Beefheart and Ornette, one thinks of Albert Ayler. Over the years Blurt music has evolved in an interesting fashion; starting out as our very own answer to No Wave, the original template has been twisted in subtle ways to bring in elements of jazz or Afro Beat for example without losing the original impetus that made me love them in the first place. I even detected a trace of rockabilly here and there. Blurt make a fragmented, jerrybuilt noise, experimental but visceral.

He has a very striking stage presence, does Milton. Theatrical, manic, he gives the impression of a man hanging over the edge, shouting back over his shoulder what he can see out there. Holding up my little digicam, he fixes me with a beady eye at one point and blows me a kiss. Ted, I'm charmed.

Ted blows me a kiss.

They run a through a good representative set of Blurt songs, including the classics 'Cherry Blossom Polish' and 'Enemy Ears' ("I will soon come to power!" ... well, I'd vote for you, Ted) and get the crowd dancing. Move your arse and your mind will follow? Blurt have been doing it for years.

I think the final word should go to Ted:

I am an empty vessel

And I make a lot of noise

And I looove to do, and I loooove to do, and I looooove to do

The washing up.

I am not one of the boys!

I Only Live On The Surface, I Don't Think People Are Very Pretty Inside

2007-03-18T14:59:00.000Z

The music of James Chance has stayed, stubbornly, fiercely, with me since the day I bought a copy of Off White by an odd bunch calling themselves James White and The Blacks in a second hand record shop when I was a teenager ('79 this would be, the year the album was released ... obviously someone had really liked it) - bought it entirely on spec, having no knowledge of the band or what kind of music it might produce but having had my attention caught by the wonderful sleeve; a retro 50s affair with some louche oddity in a white tux and a big greasy quiff (and, wonderful detail this, a Luger tie pin).
Elements of jazz and funk and Beefheart and Voidoids-like punk chopped and channeled into something new; the peculiar vocal and lyrical approach ... I wasn't sure if this music was very beautiful or very ugly, I wasn't sure if I liked it or hated it - but I couldn't stop listening to it. Reader, I was hooked.
James White, I learned quickly, was also James Chance (of whom I had heard); when I bought a copy of Buy, the Contortions album, I was sold. Chance's lyrics - the sarcasm, the spite, the humour, the unerring ability to hit a target where it hurts; his spastic, manic sax-playing (the whine of an angry hornet or a dentist's drill); the oblique song structures; the visual presentation - everything about Chance's approach tickled me.
A sick, skinny white (very white) boy channeling the spirits of James Brown and Ornette Coleman. How could you not love him?

The music of Chance - the sense of dislocation was utterly perfect, the disorientation so right. His lyrics expressed a strangely life-affirming mix of misanthropy, nihilism and self-hatred - they are very, very funny - along with an attitude to black culture (and white attitudes to black culture) both rancorous and envious.
His approach, his lyrical stance, had an unerring ability to show up fault lines in the supposedly liberal mindset ... the titles of the Blacks album raise more questions than they answer ('White Savages', 'Bleached Black') about white liberal attitudes to race and colour; the lyrics to 'Almost Black' ("Well,he's almost black/That nigger's white/Well,he's got some moves/Yeah, but they ain't right") are an astonishing portrayal of what Mailer had termed the White Negro. Chance's reputation for violence (hitting audience members), his misanthropy and penchance for controversial statements got him labeled a bit of a racist and something of a trouble-maker in the small over-heated New York scene he inhabited. I would point out the multiracial and gendered nature of every band he led, in a scene overwhelmingly white and male; I would point out, also, the awareness, in his bands, of musics (jazz, funk, disco, Afro beat, etc.) other than rock in a scene noticeably lumpen.
In his personal life, Chance was said to be a nice, quiet, polite young man, introverted even - his public persona was, perhaps, an opportunity to set free his inner Mr Hyde; the nicest thing a former band-member could find to say about him was that he was "vile-tempered and dictatorial". Which is some distinction. Someone once described him as 'bilious beyond his years'. Which is another.

What, with Chance, snags my interest is his utter contrariness ... his song 'Bedroom Athlete', for instance - "I'm not a bedroom athlete ... you better use a pump!", it's a work of genius and a brilliant upending of the usual macho braggadocio found in rock and funk (Jesus, let's not even start on rap); his theme song 'Contort Yourself' replaces the good time/chill out vibe of disco and funk with a nihilistic hymn to ego-extinction - "Once you forget your affection for the human race, reduce yourself to a zero, then you're gonna fall right in place", indeed. The music nags and whines, his sax screeches and squeals, the lyrics chip away. What strikes me about everything Chance has produced is the utter lack of ingratiation.

I remember Chance's first ever British performance - his band had quit, or had been fired, at JFK airport so he assembled a scratch band, including PiL's Keith Levine, and tried to teach them the rudiments of a set on the afternoon of the gig. An hour or so late on, the band would lock into a basic riff while Chance screamed and cried and played sax and squirmed all over the stage ... it remains one of the greatest concerts I've ever seen.

My long-suffering parents had become inured to The Stooges, The Velvet Underground and The Sex Pistols ... only two records ever made them bolt upstairs screaming "take that off!" - Cabaret Voltaire's Three Mantras and Buy The Contortions.

Chance's music, like that of his No Wave contemporaries, seems to consist of nothing but middle eights. Paradoxically, to a certain extent, the sonic area it inhabits cuts out the middle ground - the bottom end filled by the rhythm sections, the top end by niggling guitar and Chance's atonal sax and shrieked vocals.

Ian Penman loved Chance's music, Paul Morley couldn't stand it.

Someone, God help me it may have been Robert Elms, offered the quite savvy analogy that Chance's music is what Richard Hell would have made had he been obsessed by James Brown instead of Lou Reed (a similar career arc to Hell, too ... early impetus stalled by critical neglect, drugs, paranoia and sheer bloody-mindedness).

'Flip Your Face' was cited by Steve Albini as his favourite song.

The Flaming Demonics album shows something of a Fela Kuti influence, shared (in a weird and minimalist fashion) by late period Blurt ... so Fela was obviously something of a favourite with post-punk atonal anarchic sax-abusers.

It's a crying shame, but Chance's sax playing will never be given due respect by the jazz community - blistering chromatic runs and free-form solos and a melodic but discordant inventiveness. Like Albert Ayler, Chance reunited the avant garde with the simplicity and rawness of folk music ... in Ayler's case, the Negro spirituals and Pentecostal hymns of his youth, in Chance's, punk thrash. Chance's humour and brash attempts at bringing disparate forms together got him thrown out of the jazz club ... although certainly, John Zorn took everything he could from those old Contortions tracks.

David I. Masson R.I.P.

2007-03-11T09:08:00.000Z

David I. Masson 6 November 1915 - 25 february 2007

Unwelcome synchronicity department ... I mentioned David I. Masson in a comment to a post over on Kid Shirt only a few weeks ago (25.2.07, the pedant in me (which makes up approximately 87% of my personality) impels me to point out) and now I hear Mr Masson has passed on ... on that very day, spookily enough. One of the most interesting contributors to 'New Worlds' during Michael Moorcock's wonderful editorship, when the New Wave in science fiction was challenging notions of what genre fiction was and could achieve. For a short, heady period in the 1960s, some of the most vibrant avant garde writing around was being published in a funny little SF magazine out of the hippy hinterlands of Notting Hill - and foremost amongst this work was David I. Masson's. He published seven brilliant, provocative short stories in 'New Worlds' and that was that.
Maybe he had said what he wanted to say, but apart from a very small number of stories (three, all in all, I think) in SF anthologies, that was the sum total of fiction he chose to publish. In addition, a few poems and some highly praised studies of sound patterning in poetics make up Mr Masson's entire ouevre. A small but perfect body of work - Masson's short stories are dense, metaphysical, intelligent. He published the 'New World' seven in a wonderful collection titled The Caltraps Of Time; there is now, I believe, an edition available with the extra three stories rounded up and included. Well worth reading, and a reminder of a great talent.

Richard Hell, The Dolls Redux - (And So On)

2007-03-09T10:12:00.000Z

The trouble with the Dolls: their flirtation with chaos - like all high wire acts carried out without aid of a safety net, at some point someone is going to slip and fall and get hurt.
The trouble with Johnny Thunders: the bad habits he learned with The Dolls - a junk habit, a truculent attitude, a disinclination to practice his art. All of the foregoing amplified within The Heartbreakers.
The New York Dolls - they coulda been, they shoulda been the biggest, the greatest.

Richard Hell: Johnny was really lazy ... I was pretty lazy but Johnny was really lazy.

Thunders, in a career spanning some twenty years helped create only four albums proper (or three and a half if you're nitpicking ... his first solo album was stitched together from a number of disparate sessions); the rest of his oeuvre consists of shoddy collections of shitty live cuts, outtakes and studio floor sweepings. Post Dolls, he wrote perhaps two or three half-good songs.
'You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory', though, if you like that sort of thing, is an absolute classic.
Hell, for his part? From the early-to-mid 1970s (on and off), a professional (more or less) musician (more or less), and three albums to boast of - two with the Voidoids, one with The Dim Stars. Where, he once asked, did those years go? A few sessions with The Neon Boys/Television - forever buried (apart from three or four songs) due to Verlaine's intransigence, some demos with the Heartbreakers (again, only some of which have seen the light of day).

Hell (of course) was a, perhaps the, pivotal figure. A founder member of The Neon Boys/Television, and The Heartbreakers - he would suffer the indignity of being turfed out of both bands by singer/guitarists jealous of sharing the limelight. Certainly, with Television, Hell was responsible for the conceptual/visual side of the group ... which made up a good 50% of what made that group interesting (a rough analogy can be drawn here with Hell's beloved Eno-era Roxy Music, although one would obviously argue percentage points). The banks of televisions onstage. The look, customised, grafitied thrift-store, chopped-up hair, old geezer's clothes, was a million miles from both the glam fag-end and trad rock image prevalent in the rock scene as a whole and, more importantly, in their little corner of New York.

Not musical enough for Verlaine? Hmm ... I always found Hell a good solid bass-player, a lyricist of rare distinction and, on a good night, a fascinating, febrile performer. Is it true that Verlaine gradually sidelined Hell, progressively cutting down the number of Hell-penned songs from the set and forbidding him to jump around on stage? What Hell possessed, mostly absent from Verlaine, was a fine, sly sense of humour. What Verlaine didn't want was a rival.
Insecurity can be so ugly ... Television may have garnered more critical kudos but for me The Voidoids always had the edge ... far more visceral while at the same time more oblique ... Hell's lyrics and preoccupations, the wonderful twin guitar attack courtesy of Ivan Julian and Robert Quine (gone but not forgotten, Quine).

The Blank Generation - blank as in tabula rasa, a space where one could write one's own persona, one's own demands (not as in vacant ... the productive misreading by The Sex Pistols, 'Pretty Vacant' an attempt to come up with their very own little 'Blank Generation').

A tale repeated so (so) many times, one is sick of hearing it ... but Hell really did invent the punk template; the spiky hair, the ripped-up and customised clothing, the provocatively nihilistic demeanour.
His music, though, was always far more interesting than three chord punk thrash - lyrically, too complex, too romantic and poetic, musically too grown-up. (This is all so obvious, it barely needs stating. Which is why I'm stating it). The Voidoids? They coulda been, shoulda been, if not the biggest (too stubborn, too individual for that), at least not reduced to supporting The Clash.

The genius of Hell: that nom de guerre ... alienated, smart, Romantic, bitter.

The genius of Hell: his comment that he formed the Voidoids because he was lonely.

The genius of Hell: the Voidoids gig when he went onstage with a dog on a lead.

The genius of Hell: the vocal style - an impassioned yelp, untutored but capable of expressing contempt, yearning and ennui ... all within the same song.

The genius of Hell: the lyrics ... take 'Love Comes In Spurts'- "And it murders your heart/They didn't tell you that part". Has anyone ever better articulated the danger and desire of love and sex and death and all that crazed Bataille-type stuff in a pop song?

The Hell visage - the two thousand yard stare (brilliantly reduced to, erm, blankness in the image on the back cover of the Sire 'Blank Generation' 12", the eyes cut out), the provocation, the ugly/beautiful dichotomy, the bitterness, the hurt, the vunerablilty, the toughness.
Enigmatic, a mirror looking back at you. Fragile and bruised, Poe and Rimbaud.

As Gilbert and George were asking at around the same time - are you angry or are you boring?

... In The Powder Room Where You Chit Chat With Diana Dors

2007-03-06T09:47:00.000Z

I'm getting nostalgic again - prompted by a weekend viewing of New York Doll, a strangely moving little documentary about Arthur "Killer" Kane, New York Dolls bassist, Mormon convert and the most hilariously unconvincing transvestite in rock.

That slim volume by Morrissey, have I got it still? Remember Babylon Books? Crudely printed by contemporary standards, but in an age before the internet and plush CD reissues, packed full of information impossible to find elsewhere. Morrisey's little Dolls book was wonderful ... some very nice writing, lovely photos and archive material. He, of course, left his true metier behind when he decided to form The Smiths.
I had been an enthusiastic listener of the Velvet Underground and The Stooges for some time, but my exposure to The Dolls had been contemporary with the early stirrings of what was being (inaccurately, unimaginatively) termed 'punk' ... yes, all the cliches, the influence on The Sex Pistols, the McLaren connection, the (ultimately poisonous) presence of erstwhile Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan on the Anarchy tour.

The wonderful thing about the Dolls was that their New York was as much Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island as Manhattan ... genuine proles in from the outer boroughs. Were they patronised by the self-styled rock intelligentsia that hung around the NY club scene? David Johansen never claimed a Rimbaud influence in his lyrics, Mr Johnny Thunders didn't think his guitar playing the equivalent of a Coltrane solo. Like The Stooges, however, their lyrical and musical presence, while sneered at in their day turns out to have been a damn sight wittier and weightier than some of the more critically lauded and self-consciously intellectual rock scum you may care to mention. The Dolls' lyrics struck me as very funny, self-aware and political, without ever having to resort to channeling dead French Symbolist poets.

(Richard Hell, in a wonderful essay about Thunders, writes that he always thought Thunders was smart like Elvis ... there are two basic types of intelligence, like Wittgenstein or like Elvis; now, you can get to be smart like Wittgenstein just by thinking hard enough, but smart like Elvis? That was innate, it couldn't be learned, it was a type of grace. He also said that people tended to condescend to Thunders because they thought they had him nailed but he constantly surprised people with his wit .... oh, and Hell loved Thunders' guitar playing because it sounded sarcastic).

The ultimate Dolls paradox ... how could a group that had stolen a large part of their musical template and the whole of their visual impact from late 60s/early 70s Rolling Stones generate so much more excitement and adrenalin than the Stones ever had? Of course, the Dolls exaggerated certain aspects ... the androgyny, the glamour, the self-destruction.
The way Johansen and Thunders exploded the Mick'n'Keef act to a Surrealistic degree, a Hans Belmer dream of the Stones.

What I loved about the Dolls was the pure pop influence ... doo-wop, Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley, girly groups, old-fashioned R'n'B. The genius of getting The Shangri-Las guru Shadow Morton to produce the second album Too Much, Too Soon. (What was it Thunders said about them never having stood a chance, in having an acid head produce the first album and a drunk the second? Unfair, that, both records stand up very well).

What I loved about the Dolls - the grace notes ... lyrically, the reference to Diana Dors in 'It's Too Late' or the "someone's in the kitchen with Dinah"! refrain at the end of 'Subway Train'; the sax solo at the end of 'Human Being' (courtesy of the Fantastic Buddy Bowser ... what was it Morrissey wrote, the sax mysteriously becoming the concluding Dolls sound on record?); the utterly individual way they had of dressing (check Sylvain Sylvain's beautiful androgynous gangster chic below), so much edgier and wittier than any of the poodle-haired idiots that followed in their wake. Witness the six or so inches of hairy leg Johansen exposes between the satin keks and the platform mules on the cover of the first album ... hard now to appreciate the extremity of the visual (as well as musical) impact the Dolls had then. Look, in certain places out in the boondocks, you could actually get lynched for looking like that.

What I really loved about the Dolls was the haplessness but courageousness of their career; the missed opportunities, the chaos, the recklessness in going along with McLaren's insane idea to relaunch them in Commie chic (yes, just the way to get an encore in the Midwest ... drape yourself in a Hammer and Sickle flag).

Apart from The Sex Pistols, almost every group who filched an influence or three from the hapless Dolls where/are irredeemable, appalling rubbish of the worst kind. I ask you - Kiss, Aerosmith, W.A.S.P., Motley Crue (give or take an umlaut or two), Hanoi Rocks, Guns N'Roses ... should I even mention Dogs D'Amour? The exception that proves the rule ... Bowie and his magpie tendencies; the difference between the essentially updated 60's palate of Ziggy and the flashier, more contemporary edge detectable in Aladdin Sane (witness the Billy Murcia reference in 'Time') and Diamond Dogs ... by that time Bowie had been to New York. Always a smart cookie when it came to grabbing influences, our Dave.

A dream union, 1973 - Andy Mackay and Marc Bolan guesting on a New York Dolls album, produced by Mick Ronson. How wonderful would that have been? One of the great pop meets that never was.

The New York Dolls - The Apocrypha

(Tales that are probably inaccurate but, Jesus, how we wish they were true).

Johnny Thunders claiming to be the bastard son of Eddie Cochran ... chances are against this being true (Cochran being true WASP (but thankfully not W.A.S.P.), while Thunders being of obvious Italian extraction) but let's not be too hasty; where was Cochran in 1951 ... anywhere near Queens?

David Johansen and his pre-Dolls history - including appearing in a few, erm, spicy films ... how does Bike Boys Go Ape grab you?

Johansen being arrested for impersonating a female in Memphis, while on tour with the Dolls. Would you, legend has him demanding, do this to Elvis? We'd love to get him, came the reply.

That's either a large baguette stuffed down the front of Johnny Thunders' trousers in the photo adorning the back cover of the Dolls' first album ... or he was very pleased to see David Johansen (or Sylvain Sylvain ... he was prettier).

23 Skidoo Over And Out

2007-02-28T08:36:00.000Z

William S. Burroughs prepares to draw a bead on film "funny" man Jim Carey - that's see, ay, arr, eee, why? Because he's a gurning, rubber-faced, hopelessly unfunny, gormless arsehole messing around with things he hasn't a hope in Hell of understanding.

Captain Clark welcomes you aboard ... 23 years without an accident ... until tonight ... straight to the bottom with 23 dead. The soccer scores are coming in from the Capital.
23, whether in the I Ching, Morse code or Crowleyian magick indicates a breaking, a sundering. Once you start to notice the preponderance of the number, it is startling how often it turns up ... this may be synchronicity or a clue to how your perception works, when you point it in a particular direction. As Burroughs suggested , you can't tell anyone anything, but merely show them what they already know.
The Qabala, numerology, Jungian myth, magick, physics, mathematics, biology - the number 23 turns up again and again in occult systems and 'real' science. Even a cursory search across the Internet throws up an infinite array of information centred on 23, here for instance. Like many others, I first became aware of this phenomenom due to it being one of the elements swirling around in Burroughs' nexus of obsessions (along with Venusian lizard boys, the hanged man's orgasm, the viral nature of language, guns and narcotics).
The power of 23, known to such arch conspiracy connoisseurs as Burroughs, Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson - now reduced to a vulgar fucking joke of a horror movie by two of the dullest little simpletons in the business - 'wacky' Jim Carey and 'camp'n'kitsch' Joel Schumacher. Isn't there some kind of law we can invoke to stop this? Can't members of 'The Legion of Dynamic Discord' at least hunt them down and give them a good thrashing?
I remember a few years ago when all this featured in the papers ... something to do with David Beckham, of all people. And now the lazy hacks that run the media are dragging it all out again to publicize a dreadful piece of Hollywood hokey ... some workshy little researcher, straight out of Oxbridge, can't even be bothered to do anything but supply said hack with the same witless articles ... this time dressed up with a few publicity shots of our boy Carey.
Truly, one could weep.

Folded Away In The Memory Of Nature With Her Toys.

2007-02-20T09:57:00.000Z

The Gilbert and George show at Tate Modern ... a massive, indeed comprehensive, exhibition featuring the work of perhaps the the most relevant and provocative visual artists working today. Humorous, moving and enlightening, a stunning parade of great images, a veritable cathedral of art.
But even more heart-lifting, for me, was the gift shop. Quite apart from the intellectually respectable stuff like the exhibition catalogue, signed posters, a massive two volume retrospective and DVDs, there is a cavalcade of memorabilia designed by G&G ... stuff that I didn't know existed but now can't live without. The G&G swear box (PAY UP OR F*~k OFF!), the G&G Rubik cube, the G&G plastic bag, G&G ties ... and perhaps best of all, the G&G Singing Sculpture wooden toy - press the button in the base and they move, jerkily (very life-like). How desirable is that? A thing of beauty and a joy forever.

I am a sucker for this sort of thing ... my great regret in life is the serious dearth of James Joyce memorabilia ... I am the proud owner of a couple of Joycean mugs, but this in no way assuages my hunger. If it was out there I would buy it ... Molly saw a website this weekend featuring famous figure finger puppets and fridge magnets ... including Joyce - it was love at first sight. You can go into a million museum and gallery gift shops and see the usual suspects again and again ... Virginia Bloody Woolf, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare ... their drearily predictable visages reproduced again and again and again on bookmarks and notebooks and tea towels. Where's the Joyce tat? I'm a captive audience, I've got money to burn on tosh like this. I feel my life is not complete without a house chock full of Joycean detritus ... the J.J. action figure (press a button and he dances a jig, cracking obscene jokes in Latin); the J.J. snow globe (snow falling softly, softly falling); the J.J. board game - throw the dice and move a collection of tiny figurines (I bagsy Bloom) around a two-dimensional Dublin, June 16, 1904; J.J. perfume (the smellow melons of Molly Bloom's rump or a fine tang of faintly scented urine); the J.J. wine collection, each vintage carrying a Joycean image and quotation; J.J. spectacles, hats, canes, comedy ties ... the possibilities are endless and intoxicating.

Molly and I saw a James Joyce tea set in Bewlay's in Dublin once, and I foolishly didn't snap it up there and then ... do you know, there hasn't been a day since when I haven't thought about that tea set.

I'm thinking of going on that awful TV programme Dragon's Den and pitching this as a business proposal to the hatchet-faced capitalist scum that run the show ... after all, you've got to speculate, they do say, to accumulate.

Tell The Children That We're Off The Beach

2007-02-16T06:49:00.000Z

Pop will eat itself? We've taken that as a given ever since Elvis went MIA in Las Vegas ... but did we realise it would regularly regurgitate itself and enjoy the meal again and again? The surest infotainment these days is guessing which pop dinosaur, long thought extinct, will be staging a Lazarus - The Police, Genesis ... what brings these ghosts of Christmas past back? Not the money, surely; these swine were inordinately rewarded for the ability to sing falsetto in a cod-Jamaican accent or reduce musical complexity to an easy-listening aural warm bath. So, if not the elusive spondoolics, what? It can only be the adulation of the crowd. How pathetic ... such ego, such hubris. Like a long-retired boxer, hauling the flab back into the ring one last time ... don't these punch-drunk popsters realise that they had more than their allotted slice of fame and wealth the first time round? Certainly more than idiots bereft of talent, wit or charisma could reasonably have expected ... the dread possibility suggests itself ... these fools actually believe that they, and even worse, us, deserve it.
More interesting to me are those performers who didn't get their just deserts in the first flush of youth ... people who didn't salt away a fortune or were never accorded the critical respect lavished on lesser talents ... who would deny them a sliver of pie?

The Cravats ... keep death off the road

I saw, recently, a Myspace site dedicated to the Cravats and , my God, that took me back. The late 1970s to the early 1980s ... when was that mad weekend at the ICA ... 80? 81? The saxophonist with his little noise boxes ... were the lads punk's very own Van Der Graaf Generator? Imagine 'Fiery Jack'-era Fall jamming with Ted Milton, then you would have a rough idea of the unique Cravats sound - Dada lyrics, toy town rhythms, elements ripped willy nilly from rockabilly, punk and jazz ... The Cravats were always too eccentric, too wilful to essay a lengthy career; scratchy guitars, thunderous bass, screaming saxophones, shouty vocals ... they exerted, in their short career, quite an influence on subsequent developments.
A brace of singles and a couple of albums (including a rewarding relationship with Penny Rimbaud and Crass Records) and they were gone ... mutating into The Very Things and the proliferating madness of the Dada Cravats Laboratory umbrella organisation.
But why didn't they sell more records, last longer, inspire more teeny boppers? Well, as said, they were too odd, too angular ... and also, in an industry remarkably forgiving of wife-beaters, child molesters, rapists, murderers and what have you, The Cravats committed the one cardinal sin ... they didn't take themselves seriously. Their very stage names give the game away ... The Shend, Svor Naan, Yehudi Storageheater ... why, the suspicion goes, people that ready to laugh at themselves may be just as ready to laugh at you ... and we couldn't have that in a business founded on overweening ego.
They have had an odd kind of afterlife ... many more bands (anticipating the revival of interest in pop psychedelia, some of them), and The Shend, bassist, vocalist and man-mountain, has turned up on your TV screen in a number of guises - background heavy in Eastenders, or caged psycho killer in Torchwood ... and now, they have a new single out - (after a fortuitous meeting in Brighton, a collaboration with ex-Orbital genius Paul Hartnoll - it's called 'Seance' and it sounds rather good) - and a compilation CD, The Land Of The Giants ... an excellent career retrospective, packed full of quirky tunes and Surrealistic lyrics - marvellous stuff and well worth a listen. The Cravats ... I hadn't realised just how much I'd missed them.

A Design For Living

2007-02-12T06:30:00.000Z

The Crow Man

Architect, urban theorist, interior designer, painter, sculptor, poet, essayist, philosopher, film-maker, Hermeticist, Renaissance man.
Le Corbusier is another in that long line of Modernists who hymn the rational and the scientific, only to find the irrational and the ecstatic increasingly welling up in their life and work (Joyce, Eliot, Eisenstein, Jung) - throughout his work, a gnostic code can be traced. There is a theory that Papa Corbu deliberately ended his life in an Alchemical ritual, swimming towards the sun (an act saturated in so many layers of Alchemical and mythical meaning it would take pages to explicate them all). All a long way from the discipline and rigour, the white purity of the International Style - but that was only one facet of the most protean builder of them all; he also created two of the few meaningful examples of sacred architecture in the Twentieth Century - the Notre Dame-du-Haut chapel at Ronchamp and the monastery of La Tourette - the spiritual expressed in stone and steel.

Of course, I like to remember him best as the designer of a rather spiffy range of spectacles, available exclusively from a high end Venetian optician . I currently sport the style modeled by the old boy in the photos above. They send them to you in a nice corduroy case ... it's the cloth of kings, you know.

Chemical Gardens In Rusty Shit People

2007-02-05T10:40:00.000Z

It's all go this time of year ... no sooner has one (just about) recovered from the Joycean Saturnalia and, what do you know, it's time to strap it on and celebrate the birthday of William S. Burroughs.

... Wild Bill Burroughs ... what did Ballard call him , the hit man of the apocalypse? Amid the sex and violence, amid the hard-core cut-ups and fold-ins, amid the hipster and narcotic vernacular, there is a wonderfully nostalgic, elegiac strain in Burroughs (for all that you have to wade through pages of green lizard boys from Venus getting fucked while being hanged to savour it) ... the more interesting for being found in the work of a man who, to the casual observer, may be deemed to have left his human side behind. Few seem to realise how moving his writing can be.
Renegade from a background of money and privilege, self-described queer and junky, noted wife-killer, eminence grise to the counter culture for some five decades, life-long adversary of the Ugly Spirit ... the public mask existed quite apart from the serious and dedicated writer ... the greatest master of the Word since Joyce, the man who made literature come alive again.

Birthday Felicitations For James Joyce

2007-02-02T10:18:00.000Z

And lo, 165 years ago, a star was seen in the West and a saviour was born. And they beheld him, even him, our Messiah, clothed upon in the glory of his brightness. And there came a voice out of heaven crying James! James Augustine Aloysius!
Birthday greetings for James Joyce, writer, son, husband, father and, it's been scientifically proven, the greatest man who ever lived. Born on Candlemas, Joyce was always a comedian ... entwining our arts with laughters low. So raise a glass or ten and wish the old boy a very happy birthday.

All stills from Joycean Avatars, a short film by Anthony Osborne.

outraged aesthete (slight return)

2007-01-29T10:08:00.000Z

...the ballet is positively gauche this season ...

Five Things About Wonderful Me

2007-01-25T13:37:00.000Z

you want some?

I've been passed the Black Spot courtesy of Doppleganger, so have to think of five interesting things about my lowly, miserable existence. Hmm, maybe I'll just invent things in a futile attempt to make myself look terribly mysterious and interesting. No, I am gripped by a lemming-like urge towards total honesty ...

1) I do, as said elsewhere , believe in my absolutely encyclopediac knowledge as regards pop music, movies, literature, philosophy, world politics ... exactly the kind of infuriating poseur that really, really drives me to distraction. But then I very often find arrogance and pretension incredibly funny if presented with a modicum of self-awareness and irony. He said, self-justifyingly.

2) I have thought about death and dying every single day since I was around four years old.

3) I am an incurable hypochondriac ... Molly Bloom informed me only yesterday that, during the time she's known me, I have believed myself to have a brain tumour, testicular cancer, lung cancer, spina bifida, ME, MS, TB, motor neurone disease, thrombosis, kidney stones, neuralgia, sciatica and several congenital anomalies I won't go into here. Furthermore, I am one of those even more annoying hypochondriacs too lazy to phone the doctor. I should add an apology to anyone who has personally (or have/had a loved one who has) suffered any of these ailments. I have no defence, other than my neuroses.

4) I suffer from excruciating, crippling shyness and self-consciousness which, over the years, I have compensated for by the aforementioned arrogance. In fact, so ingrained has the arrogance and self-belief become I can't actually remember a time or a persona without it. But, since I am so wonderful, why the hell would I?

5) I've mentioned this before ... is that bad form? No matter ... when I was three, I bit my tongue in half. Fell over, tongue between teeth, bit straight in half. The parents rushed me to hospital and then had to turn around and go straight back to pick up the half-tongue from the garden path ... whereupon the surgeons were able to stitch it back together (assembled cries of "boo!", "poor play, that man!" and "quick, rip it back off!" fill the air).
Family legend has it that I never really spoke until after the accident ... so it's my theory that, get this for a load of reheated old cod-Lacanian bollocks, it took a deeply traumatic experience to forcibly inscribe me into the social order, into the field of language.
Or perhaps I had nothing of interest to say until I fell over and bit my tongue in half.

Right, that's me done ... now, I shall pass the poisoned chalice on. His mission, should he chose to accept it, will be for Doc A., of Murmurists fame to give us five facts about himself.

It's rather like being on the analyst's couch, this.

Phil Collins - His Part In My Downfall

2007-01-24T10:09:00.000Z

Some are damned and some are unconditionally elected - and those happily of the latter can do anything they want and get away with it ... steep themselves in sin, walk among the afflicted, sink as low as they wish and come out the other end smelling of roses. When one is in a state of Grace, the book is already written.
University, circa 1994 ... I had only been going out with the missus-to-be a month or two when one of those relationship-defining moments arose - while browsing through the vinyl in a charity shop, I saw a 7" sleeve graced with a picture of Tony Hancock, the lad himself. I picked it up and found, to my horror, it was a Phil Collins single, 'Something Happened On The Way To Heaven'. On reflection, I remembered I had heard the song on the radio a number of times over the years and had actually liked it ... what to do? It was 5p, if memory serves ... who could quibble?
Subsequently, I would become an object of ridicule - amongst my limited social set, which was bad enough, but worse, to my girlfriend, too. Being in possession of a Phil Collins record was a social liability somewhere beyond galloping halitosis ... people have asked me to leave their house for less.

I offered then a variety of defences, which I shall rehearse here ... not the least important being the fact that, as her beau, it was the girlfriend's duty to offer support to anything I did; loyalty is a cardinal virtue and, no matter how stupid, objectionable or downright ludicrous my actions, even in, especially in, public, it was her duty to regard my every word as Holy Writ and maintain that I could walk on water.
I appealed to no less an authority than James Joyce ... as he has Stephen Dedalus say: a man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Furthermore, Phil Collins, for all his manifest drawbacks, had, at least, graced the records of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, officially 'The Brainiest Men In Pop Music', and therefore never wrong. Look here, if it's good enough for Bob and Bri, it's good enough for me.
Further furthermore, this was not part of that spectrum of behaviour now deemed "guilty pleasures" ... despite despising Mr Collins, I genuinely liked this particular song ... something about the tune seemed quietly moving, something about the lyrics (How can something so right go so wrong? ... I'm not leaving unless you come with me) I found rather poignant. Indeed, not to buy the record (only 5p!) out of some misplaced and inverse snobbery would be hypocritical. The song itself, no matter written by a Thatcher-loving, Tory-supporting dwarf with a face like a potato, had something about it I liked. As I appealed to the jury, as a wise old man once said (it was Duke Ellington to Miles Davis, actually): "if it sounds good, it is good."
In parenthesis, the promo video for the single is a kitsch classic in its own right ... good old Phil sings, conducts the band, tickles the ivories and indulges in some 'comic' play with a lovable mutt - including sequences shot from the pooch's eye view, thus joining a small, select genre populated by the likes of The Hills Have Eyes II ... Collins goes one better than Craven by including a canine fantasy sequence and gets some low comic mileage out of someone stepping in dog shit ... how excellent is that?
But most importantly, I had impeccable avant garde credentials, right across the aesthetic board ... not just unassailable taste in literature and film, but music? I wrote the goddamned book, mate ... I had a room bursting with Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman records, I had been listening to the Velvets since I was ten years old, I listened to Metal Machine Music for pleasure, I knew my way around Krautrock, I liked Steve Reich and Terry Riley, I used to listen to Coltrane's Ascension while eating breakfast (oh no, wait a minute ... that was Lester Bangs) ... anyway, you get the picture. I knew what was what, musically speaking ... if I say it sounds good, by Jove, it must be good. I had form, credibility, great taste ... a man to be trusted, in short. And they were mocking me? Ingrates, one and all.

But we overcome, we move on ... I rested, secure in the knowledge that I knew my musical onions, and time, tide and the Rolling Stone Book Of Rock would prove me right ... and eventually the opprobrium attached to my name faded away, to be replaced by a new and hard-won respect.
Wish I still had that single, actually ...

Joycean Way / Proust's Wake

2007-01-19T12:16:00.000Z

Three stills from Joycean Way / Proust's Wake, a film by, well, me actually.

Outraged Aesthete

2007-01-14T11:12:00.000Z

Outraged aesthete

observes street furniture

like a patient etherised upon a table.
Street furniture wins.

You Watch Me Walk Away ... Taraa .. Taraa ...

2007-01-06T07:32:00.000Z

I wanted to say something else, something more, about Roxy Music, the people involved, the milieu they moved in and through. In life, in art, there is, always, something else, something more, to say. There remains, always, something unsaid.

I have a passion for a particular area of pop - not a genre in itself, perhaps not an identifiable sound ... something akin to an approach, a techne, a way of looking at and listening to things ... I call it (do forgive me the vulgarism) posh blokes who (avant)rock. Public school types ending up at art college and getting into music ... terribly civilised English chaps throwing off the shackles of their upbringing to plunge into art rock. Roxy, of course (not withstanding Ferry's working class Newcastle roots ... hasn't he reinvented himself all too successfully as an upper class twit?), King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Wire ... no one can (colloquially speaking) rock out in an avant garde manner quite like an English toff.
A conceptual rather than instinctive or 'authentic' approach to music, an interest in other media such as literature, film or the visual arts, a willingness to embrace experimentation, a lyrical approach beyond rock's usual scope ... all of these are typical of the work produced. I think English people have (or had ... now we're nothing more than a minor state of the Union) a very productive conceptual distance from the idea of 'rock'n'roll' ... we don't, thank God, have an innate predisposition to 'boogie' ... leave that to the Yanks (notwithstanding such luminaries as Pere Ubu or Talking Heads).

Bryan Ferry, God bless him, almost single-handed, kick started the Seventies ... the Biba gloss, the Futurist-retro kick, the congruence between advertising and the avant garde, the determined collages of eras (was that made four decades or four minutes ago?), the uses of irony and quotation, the idea that glamour wasn't a dirty word, the Modernist obsession with detail and design, process and product. He had been schooled by Richard Hamilton, he dug Otis, the Velvets and a well-cut suit ... he knew what was what.

Richard Hell, a man of acute (if intermittent) discernment, during his first visit to our little island, advised all the fledgling punks to listen to the first two Roxy Music albums. Not many agreed ... irony, sex and glamour were out of fashion and punk, even then, was in the process of codifying itself into a rigid and intolerant set of prescriptions. The loss was theirs. Certainly, though, the people in at the inception of punk had had their ears opened to this music ... John Lydon, I'd say; I would be willing to bet Howard Devoto had a Roxy album or two at home; the men of Wire ditto; the loose group of friends and hangers-on known as the Bromley Contingent had been firm Roxy and Bowie fans; contrary to the Stalinist stricture that the only music, pre-punk, that mattered was the Velvets/Stooges/Dolls triumvirate, a whole raft of interesting sound had fed into what would be reduced to 'punk rock' -
Peter Hammill, dub, grownup glam,
Kevin Coyne, Roxy, Neu! and Can.
It is poetry ... and the music was poetry.

The role of the saxophone in pop .... it has been the best of sounds, the worst of sounds. The brazen stupidity of smoochy or yakety yak ... the idiot drift of 'Baker Street', the crassness of a Spandau Ballet or a George Michael, a million aural lobotomies from America ... truly, the saxophone has been responsible for some of the most pointless moments in pop history. I am thinking of an alternative reading - the King Curtis meets Steve Reich swoop of Roxy's Andy Mackay; the atonal/melodic electronic treatments and fractal improvs of Van Der Graaf's David Jackson; Bowie's wonderful, underrated sax-playing, the beautiful avant pop sound he gets on Pin Ups ('Sorrow', it's quite lovely), the keening bridge between 'Candidate' and the reprise of 'Sweet Thing', the motorik of 'V-2 Schneider'; Mel Collins' work for King Crimson; Elton Dean's playing for Soft Machine; the iconic baritone solo at the end of 'Walk On The Wild Side' by Bowie's old sax tutor,Ronnie Ross; Ted Milton's and James Chance's free jazz screeches; Lora Logic's raw squalls in early X-Ray Spex. There is a case for the saxophone as the great hidden secret of rock.

The visual lingua franca of rock, in the early Seventies as now, has never progressed much beyond the template laid down by the Rolling Stones ... all bad shirts and leather trousers, the classic snake-hipped cock rock lead singer and the crow-haired guitarist, the hoary old Mick'n'Keef act ... when I was a kid (then as now), that meant nothing to me. I believe I've mentioned my Andy Mackay fixation ... that, to me, is what a rock star looked like; the silver and white jumpsuit and multi-coloured quiff he models on the inner sleeve of For Your Pleasure, his drape jackets and platforms, a Clockwork Orange vision of a Teddy Boy; Bowie in the publicity shots for Pin Ups, cradling a sax, and that beautiful suit (bum-freezer jacket and all), his bright red Ziggy/Aladdin/Diamond Dogs haircut and black nail varnish; Eno looking less glam than convincingly alien, all long hair, balding pate, feathers, lurex and mascara; Lou Reed's brief glitter phase, an almost pre-Raphaelite vision ... stars were stars in those days, pop was coming over all polymorphous perverse and glamour and flash and intelligence weren't mutually exclusive.
Pop music invokes Proustian moments, fugitive glimpses of seconds that measure out a lifetime.

The Sphinx and Mona Lisa, Lolita and Guernica ...

2007-01-04T08:04:00.000Z

Tired of the tango? Fed up with fandango? Why not take a trip to future past and clean out your synapses with some of the sharpest pop music ever made? I give you Roxy Music - a love song about a blow-up doll that could have been written by J.G. Ballard ( "I blew up your body/But you blew my mind"); a new dance that promises "A danceable solution/To teenage revolution"; ten minute free jazz and Krautrock workouts; hypersmart hit singles ... this band had an almost indecent array of talents. Some fool once wrote that The Doors were the first rock band that could read and write ... so, so wrong. If The Velvet Underground were the first such band, Roxy were certainly the second. I had an older brother, a Bowie obsessive, with a sideline in Roxy and Reed ... this stuff turned my head around and upside down at a young age. There's a picture of Bryan Ferry in his late teens, white suit and quiff ... this is the mid 60s; his heroes were Otis Redding and Marcel Duchamp (subsequent song and album titles would reference Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, among others). While Bowie was still a bepermed hippy troubadour, all flared denim and acne, Ferry was immaculate ... indeed Roxy were formulating their unique sound while Bowie was still bothering with sad folk and Tin Pan Alley ... it's too damn easy to take Roxy for granted these days ... they were, at the time, the best thing I'd ever seen or heard. Ferry, the ringmaster and song writer; Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay, guitars and saxophones,experimental music buffs; Eno, the conceptualist and technician.
When I was young, being the sax player with Roxy Music seemed the best job in the world ... you got to sport a green quiff and were paid to wear fabulous clothes and duckwalk on stage, you got to hang out with Bowie and Mott The Hoople and beautiful women ... your life was unimaginably glamourous, witty and amusing.
Noel Coward and Terry Riley jamming with The Velvet Underground; music as hard as anything being produced by the heavy rockers; 20s and 30s crooning, doo wop and 50s rock'n'roll, prog and art rock; avant classical and glam pop; literate, arch, multi-layered lyrics and complex arrangements ... often all within the space of a single song.
Roxy Music had everything I look for in pop - they had wit, intelligence, humour, irony, cynicism, glamour, danger, sex; they were pop and avant garde simultaneously; they were retro and futuristic, they were science fiction; they were cruel, they were heartless in the best sense.
No one before or since looked or sounded like Roxy - a singer in tiger print or tuxedo, sporting a louche quiff; a balding ostrich-feathered androgyne teasing an unearthly range of sounds from his synths and tapes; a 23rd century Teddy Boy playing sax like King Curtis, oh and that very unrock'n'roll instrument, the oboe; a guitarist in insect shades playing experimental, psychedelic, prepunk riffs and white noise. They were beloved of both glamkids and grown ups. They had, I repeat, everything.
They stood out from the dandruff and denim morass of early seventies rock music like a diamond in a mud bath. Roxy were disliked, they weren't trusted ... there was a sneaking suspicion that they hadn't paid their dues, as if that counted for anything. Roxy's first public performances were at art gallery soirees, they had a management and record company prepared to sink a fortune into fine-tuning the band before they ever appeared live. Instead of spending years in a transit van playing the less salubrious venues of the gig scene, Ferry decided to start at the top - this alone made them a target for the puritans and fundamentalists of the music industry. Spurious notions of authenticity were to be disregarded, Roxy valued distance - even the love songs contained a shard of ice in the heart.
(And yet, and yet ... take '2 H.B.', a lovely punning play on words, a paean to romance and Humphrey Bogart - the way that "fade away never" drifts off, the poignancy of the keyboards ... it can bring tears to the eyes ... I tried to describe it to my wife recently and had to stop, a lump in my throat. Actually, I was nine years old the year the debut album was released (16th June, Bloomsday, 1972 ... a pleasingly Joycean congruence) and that song and the rest of the lyrics struck me as wonderfully clever ... I have experienced three decades since then of heavy literary and academic reading and art appreciation ... I've read Finnegans Wake five times, and do you know what? That song still strikes me as pretty damn clever).

Of course, something so precious was fated not to last ... tensions between Ferry and Eno couldn't be contained; as Ferry suggested at the time, two non-musicians in the band was one too many.
Rumours that Eno left to take up the role of Riff-Raff in a second-rate production of 'The Rocky Horror Show' touring the provinces are cruel and unfounded.
Ferry subsequently began to inhabit his lounge lizard persona a little too diligently; the tuxedo had become a straitjacket - what was once presented with wit and distance began to seem increasingly humourless and restrictive.
The Roxy purist will consider only the first five albums , the pre-split ones, as truly part of the cannon; indeed, the purist's purist will accept only the first two as the genuine article ... post-Eno, the band began to lose something of that experimental edge that had made them so significant in the first place. Let me be clear, there are some very great moments on the next three ... some of the best music of the seventies can be found there. And, indeed, there are some fine songs on the albums made after the 1979 reunion. But what might they have done had Eno remained with the band? It's one of the great pop imponderables, second only to what could the Velvet Underground have accomplished had Cale remained ... well, one can but dream ... just imagine the third Roxy album with Eno still on board ... it would have been stupendous, thrilling, so, so glamourous.

No Glot ... C'lom Friday

2007-01-01T09:41:00.000Z

I hate to see the evening sun go down
Show you something
I hate to see the evening sun go down
You got the sickness?
You is coming right wouldn't you?
Copulation precincts the
Galaxies sniggered
Dinner of dead languages
Come alive screaming
See the Cut-Up Kid never returns
In life in death nuclear winds
Of St Louis and Johnny's
So long at the fair

Compass of cold stars
We landed Lake Huron 1920s
The subway swept past
Black blast of iron
Over the hills and far away
Old Bill Smiled

Soul Brother Number One, Resquiat In Pace

2006-12-27T08:07:00.001Z

It seems that this season of cheer, goodwill and peace on Earth is always marred by the bad things in life. This year, the bloody great black cloud massing over our tattered little thread of silver lining was the announcement of the passing of one of the towering geniuses of twentieth century art and culture.
Soul Brother Numero Uno, the New, New Minister of Superheavy Funk, the hardest working man in showbusiness has gone to that great gig in the sky.
So have a glass in your hand and a kind thought in your heart ... Charlie Drake is dead.

Nowhere Man

2006-12-27T07:04:00.000Z

It occured to me, while reading the comments to my post of 20.12.06 that Kek-W and Doppelganger were really on to something ... and just maybe the whole sorry collection of actions and 'policies' the entity known as Tony Blair has visited like a plague of boils on this country and the rest of the world have actually sprung from a cursory listen to the lyrical 'genius' of Paul McCartney.

Take the plea Blair has made to the rozzers currently investigating the cash for honours scandal:
I've been on the run since the Good Lord knows when,
And the day I die,
I'll still be runnin' then,
Runnin' from the days when I would lay me down and cry.

Baby, won't you let me have a little time to hide.
Baby, won't you let me have a little time to hide.

Or the cry of pain Blair has flung in the face of the British electorate (and which, Lord knows, we can only scream right back at him):
I've had enough
I can't put up with any more
No no no no no no no
I've had enough
I can't put up with any more
No no no no no no no

Or who could forget the declaration of passion for Dubya when dear Tony was caught carving 'Tone Heart George' into the antique oak fittings in Downing St?
I can wait another day until I call you
You've only got my heart on a string
And everything a'flutter
But another lonely night might take forever
We've only got each other to blame
It's all the same to me love
'Cause I know what I feel to be right
No more lonely nights
No more lonely nights
You my guiding light
Day or night I'm always there
May I never miss the thrill of being near you
And if it takes a couple of years
To turn your tears to laughter
I will do what I feel to be right
No more lonely nights (never be another)
No more lonely nights
You my guiding light

Then there is the warning Blair has delivered to the inner circle, advisors and sundry other thieves and scoundrels connected to the cash for honours farrago as they decide to save their own skins and sing like canaries:

Win or lose, sink or swim
One thing is certain we'll never give in
Side by side, hand in hand
We all stand together

Well, I think there's only one appropriate response when faced with Master Blair and all his works ... Help!

Cunts Are Still Running The World

2006-12-20T07:12:00.000Z

The Big Fight

2006-12-15T10:40:00.000Z

'The Killer' - fast fists, flashy footwork!

'Slugger' - powerful, puissant, pugnacious!

The Big Fight – a round by round analysis.
The superfight of the year, unquestionably. James ‘The Killer’ Joyce versus Marcel ‘Slugger’ Proust, two undefeated, undisputed heavyweight champions going up against each other for the first time. This bout had to deliver, other recent big fights failing to live up to the hype … Pynchon offering only token resistance to Burroughs and suffering a knock-out due to a vicious right hook in the third round, Hemingway talking up his chances against Celine pre-fight, only to quit on his stool at the end of the fifth, having taking a one-sided drubbing.
Two great champions, two fascinatingly different styles – Joyce renowned for his fast footwork and lightning fists, Proust a byword for stamina and power, both men possessed of a devastating knockout punch.

ROUND ONE.
Both fighters out of their corners fast, Joyce moving around the ring, Proust coming straight forward. No feeling their way into the bout, both men let fly with iconic opening sentences; Proust leading with a vicious -Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure. Undaunted, Joyce comes straight back with -Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay. Joyce, master of the multilingual, follows up with Eerre-revie, pass’Evant notre Adame, d’erre rive en reviere, catching Proust on the back foot and wobbling him. Proust covers up as Joyce looks for an opening. The ref looks on as Joyce flails away, trying to end it early. The bell finds Proust trapped against the ropes.
ROUND TWO
Proust out first, straight forward and throwing big lefts, Joyce using the famous ‘Joycean shuffle’ to skip out of the way. Proust, using his superior weight, presses forward, Joyce using his feet to stick and run.
ROUND THREE
Joyce gets in the first really big shot of the fight, hitting Proust with a sharp -Enigmas, me boyo, who was M’Intosh? Where was Moses when the lights went out?
Proust hits back with –Is Je Marcel? Is Marcel me?
Quick as you like, Joyce returns with -What the bloody bleeding hell is the Wake actually about? Proust hits the canvas and is saved by the bell.
ROUND FOUR
Proust keeps coming forward, it’s the relentless accumulation of minute detail and the extended philosophical digressions that wears his opponents down. Joyce, the protean ringmaster, employing a dazzling variety of styles to bamboozle the other guy, keeps out of trouble and uses his fast fists and tongue to keep Proust off-balance. A shaken Proust is forced to take heavy punishment as Joyce pours it on. Proust’s bulk proves more of a hindrance as Joyce dances around him. The bell finds Proust barely hanging in there.
ROUND FIVE
The tide of the fight turns with Proust using his weight and the steady accumulation of pressure to bully Joyce around the ring. This is how we expected it to pan out, Proust’s one man war of attrition against Joyce’s ring generalship.
ROUND SIX
It’s Joyce’s turn against the ropes as Proust bores in with heavy shots, throwing a stunning series of uppercuts and hooks, but Joyce is famous for his strong chin. -They told me you were finished. Jim, grunts Proust. –They lied to you, champ, they lied to you, comes back Joyce.
ROUND SEVEN
Joyce faces oblivion as Proust catches him with a cracking – Young girls in flower, my flower girls, so fast they move! Only willpower keeps Joyce on his feet and in the fight, but he’s tiring fast.
ROUND EIGHT
Never count Joyce out, his stamina and courage are unquestioned. He is out like a shot from his corner, leading with –My seven rainbow girls, every colour of the spectrum! Issy, the face in the mirror! Proust is caught flush and has to retreat under a hail of blows.
The bell finds both men centre ring, toe to toe.
ROUND NINE
Joyce, the master tactician, moves in. – The most fully realised female characters in literature … Gretta Conroy, Molly Bloom! While you, Mlle Proust, practice a peculiar form of literary transvestitism, Albertine merely a stand-in for the chauffeur whose trousers you want to get into!
Proust is floundering. – No, no, my good Joyce, Mama would never allow! Poor Mama! Proust can only hang on and wait for the bell.
ROUND TEN
Both men are winded, and circle each other warily. It is here that the corner men prove their worth. Proust’s Swann and Marcel are the best in the business and shout instructions to their man. In Joyce’s corner, Dedalus and Bloom are deep in conversation, discussing tactics. Both fighters score with big lefts.
Proust proves he is a technician of, the highest order. –Time, my dear Joust, du dessin, de l’architecture, de la pensee!
Joyce is a master counterpuncher. – Your genus it’s worldwide, your spacest sublime! But, my dearest Proyce, why can’t you beat time?
ROUND ELEVEN
Proust gets in an early shot. – The madeleine, a cup of lime blossom tea, Proustian recall! Joyce stands his ground. – A jar of yellow dripping scooped out like a boghole, a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy. Feel the mustard haunch on y’. The seedcake! Proust is wobbled once more as Joyce steams in. -Joycean wordplay!
ROUND TWELVE
The final round. Both men touch gloves centre ring, each acknowledging a worthy opponent. As Proust moves in, looking to end it, Joyce demonstrates some fancy footwork. – Float like a gracehoper, sting like an ondt, Proust m’bucko! Greekjew is Jewgreek! Proust staggers but stands his ground. -The little phrase, my special music. Just a little patch of yellow!
There is nothing to separate the two fighters as the final bell sounds. It’s chaos as both corners invade the ring. Marcel winks at Dedalus, who mutters to Bloom – more Greek than the Greeks, that one. Both fighters circle the ring, each lost in his own thoughts.
Both men are spent and can now only await the counting of the votes and the verdict of the judges.

The Boys Are Back In Town

2006-12-13T16:50:00.000Z

The conversation centred on underwear and good cigars.

William's Welcome

2006-12-13T12:52:00.000Z

The Fish Needs A Bike

2006-12-12T11:51:00.000Z

How did they participate in congress?
Initially they urinated on each other, the act colloquially known as golden showers.

Then what happened?
Then, as Aquinas might have it, he introduced the male member into the unnatural female orifice (posterior).

Then what did he do?
He introduced his tongue into the aforementioned orifice.

And then?
He then introduced the male member into the unnatural female orifice (oral) and experienced the ejaculation of semen.

What followed this operation?
He later expressed dissatisfaction, petulantly, peevishly, upon finding a hair in his food.

To what conclusion did he arrive, upon calm reflection?
He reckoned that that Andrea Dworkin may just have been right in her proclamations upon the male gender, to wit: some men need to be shot/castrated/ put in a cage.*

*delete as applicable

Shadows By The Film Folk - A Meditation On Joyce

2006-12-07T08:47:00.000Z

Stills from Shadows By The Film Folk, a film by Anthony Osborne.

BLESS THIS BLAST THAT

2006-12-02T13:12:00.000Z

Bless Wyndham Lewis for inventing the blast.
Bless St Derek Jarman, patron saint of the cinema of small but significant gestures.
Bless the vulpine.
Bless J.G. Ballard for following his obsessions to the end of the road.
Bless Terence Davies for a cinema that aspires to the condition of music.
Bless the lupine.
Bless English humour, bless Arthur Askey, Tommy Trinder, Reg Varney.
Bless Ted Milton for his sly poetry and abandoned sax.
Bless Peter Greenaway for his deadpan humour and unashamed erudition.
Bless the sceptic.
Bless William Blake for seeing the angels.
Bless Humphrey Jennings - a rare bird of a double feather, English polymath, English Surrealist.
Bless Denton Welch for discovering the world by staring in the mirror.
Bless the porcine.
Bless the truly romantic.
Bless our Albion.
Bless B.S. Johnson, the prole art threat.
Bless my endless stream of bile.

Blast the mugwumps at Channel 4 for stealing my work.
Blast Thatcher and Blair, may they rot in Hell.
Blast all politicians everywhere, from all directions of the political compass.
Blast all priests and gurus.
Blast all censors.
Blast the humourless.
Blast Ken Livingstone, a liar, a dog, a conservative pretending to the status of the radical.
Blast the cynic.
Blast the lumpen bourgeoisie.
Blast Nicholas Serota and the stranglehold his dead hand exerts.
Blast the exploiters of the lowest common denominator.
Blast the purveyors of fake sentimentality.
Blast the merchants of kitsch.

Denton

2006-11-30T15:19:00.000Z

Denton Welch - he lived a very short life but produced a small but brilliant body of work. Hailed as the favourite writer of both William Burroughs and John Waters. Quite a reputation.

A Testimonial

2006-11-29T05:18:00.000Z

He do public lewdness.
He wail, he gnash teeth.
He storm Heaven, he protest.
He very bad fellow.

"Who, me?"

Wanted: dead or alive

2006-11-28T15:52:00.000Z

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
£1000, 000 REWARD
For information leading to the arrest, assasination or otherwise disposal of Anthony Osborne, aka The Cut-Up Kid, aka Tony The Rat, aka Champagne Charlie.

Wanted for grand lacerny, grievous philosophical arrogance and insurrection against the soul.

If spotted, approach with caution, this character is known to be dangerous.

I've got the horn.

2006-11-28T14:49:00.000Z

some image

2006-11-27T10:45:00.000Z

some images

2006-11-27T10:42:00.000Z

Jazz From Hell

2006-11-22T15:01:00.000Z

So I said to this man

I said

That horn spits acid

That's what I said

Yes he said yes yes

He just punched me in the face

He said

But what does he do for an encore?

I said

Perpetual Motion Machine (excerpt from a work in progress).

2006-11-20T13:15:00.000Z

James Chrome: Psychology as Artwork, the Artwork as Psychology
The Journal of Aberrant Psychology, vol. XXIII (Autumn 2005) 204 - 220
(excerpted from)

During this period, Frankie Zorn, while initiating no other contact with friends or colleagues, began to put together a series of constructs made up of miscellaneous elements. Much study remains to be carried out on these works, not least of which for the fact that, while doubtless each construct holds a variety of meanings for Zorn, the import remains extremely fugitive for any commentator. They represent a rich field of hermeneutic enquiry and the sheer density of association is likely to keep the critics (and psychologists!) busy for some time to come. Zorn is perhaps the most highly allusive artist in any medium since his beloved James Joyce and the critical enquiry into his work is still in its infancy.
The constructs would arrive at irregular intervals, each addressed to and clearly created for, a particular individual.
One such work, entitled Perpetual Motion Machine, delivered to Celia Crescent,consists of the following elements:

A) Pair of scuffed brown brogue shoes, identified as having been worn by James Joyce, Paris 1922-23.
B) Green silk scarf.
C) Sealed clear glass vitrine, apparently empty, bearing label stating: burning leaves, Autumn, 1997.
D) Audio tape, bearing label stating: NASA computer breakdown, the music of the quasars.
E) Strip of 35 mm film, identified as infamous section excised from Zorn's Dallas Impromptu, the so-called pornographic section colloquially known as Monroe's Revenge.

In parenthesis, it should be stated that Ms Crescent herself is clearly in possession of more information than the average Zorn commentator, but insists on playing her cards close to her chest, so to speak. To date she has volunteered little insight to any prospective interpreter. Given her closeness to Zorn, and considering the virulence of his oft-expressed opinions of critics, this is not surprising.

Posterity is silent, like the dead, and more pathetic.

2006-11-18T09:28:00.000Z

For Percy Wyndham Lewis 18th November, 1882 - 7th March, 1957

Alas! necessity for big doll's show
in front of mouth
Visitation of Heaven on
English Miss
gums, canines of FIXED GRIN
Death's Head symbol of Anti-Life

BLESS the solitude of LAUGHTER

Neu Labour

2006-11-17T08:03:00.000Z

The ship of state sails in a Westerly direction ...

but Tony Blair can't sustain an erection.

"New" Labour

2006-11-16T10:03:00.000Z

retail therapy

the black economy

jazz from hell

2006-11-14T08:08:00.000Z

This man once played a leech in an underground remake

of The African Queen directed by this man.

Let X = A :(the elements of) -

2006-11-10T10:33:00.000Z

State

+

x

=

Five things about me

2006-11-10T08:25:00.000Z

I have been tagged by Mr Cultural Snow (www.culturalsnow.blogspot.com) , so I have to think of five things about me ... right, I'm such a fascinating, multi-faceted chappie, that should be easy ... um ... let me think ... um
Right.
1)When I was three, I bit my tongue in half. My parents had to rush me to hospital, and then rush back home again to pick up the other half and rush back to hospital so the surgeons could sew it back on. The operation was, more or less, successful.
2)I got my nose broke in Staines town centre late one night many years ago, by some aggressive normals, for wearing bondage trousers ... I was a very early punk.
3)I play a mean alto sax ... a very mean alto sax.
4)My brain functions have been irreparably warped by intense and prolonged exposure to William Burroughs at an early and impressionable age. Thankfully.
5)I have delusions of omnipotence followed by bouts of intense self-loathing.

PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL POSTS
'Remember that it isn't always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it.'

King For A Day

2006-11-09T04:45:00.000Z

I was peeled,
Skinless.
They found me at the city dump,
Looking for eternity
In an empty tin can.
(The intoxicating residue
of tomato sauce
and one squashed baked bean.
Empires have tottered
and fallen for less).

Here I stand,
My reeking, rotting
Kingdom.
Life is good
When you're a man of substance.

Licenced fool,
Lord of Misrule.
I shall sit here
All the day long
And drool.

The algebra of need

2006-11-08T14:22:00.000Z

Does

+

=

?

Sunday morning

2006-11-06T16:07:00.000Z

And on the seventh day she rested from her labours.

Paging Dr Benway ...

2006-11-03T08:44:00.000Z

This is an x-ray of my left lung.

This is what they found inside.

And this is me after the operation, lookin' good and feelin' fine.
I'm going to beat this thing.

That obscure object of desire

2006-10-30T10:00:00.000Z

MR PUGH WANTS TO PLAY

2006-10-28T11:15:00.000+01:00

Puppeteers of the world unite, Don't make love, make war.
Puppeteer: a song by Blurt
Mr Pugh we salute your obscenity and verve. Mr Pugh wanted to return theatre to its roots. Mr Pugh wanted to lay a turd at your kid's birthday party. More years ago than I'd care to remember, I'd see as support at various gigs here and there, an act going by the name of Mr Pugh - a Punch and Judy show with a difference. This one entailed more expletives than your average Lenny Bruce performance, the spilling of bodily fluids and some maximum violence. It wasn't for the kids. If you can imagine a Punch and Judy show mounted by Alfred Jarry, you'd be close - Papa Ubu goes panto. The crowds would usually let their displeasure show after ten minutes or so - but by then, the mad puppeteer had done his job. Time passed and in the salad days of 1980 I got interested in a wayward band called Blurt - an interest spurred by the name of their first single - 'My Mother Was An Enemy Of The People'. Buying it to find a free jazz/punk type collision bursting out of an innocent looking 7" was a joy. Shortly, reading their press, it hit me that the leader, one Ted Milton - the singer and saxophonist, was the very maniac behind Mr Pugh. This man Milton has been around the tracks. Poet, lyricist, player of wild sax and a performer of singular genius. He's been touring and recording with Blurt and solo for some quarter of a century now and shows no sign of letting up, in addition to collaborating with like-minded musicians and giving poetry recitals (as far back as the early sixties) and getting involved with multi-media events. You'll find his work in the famous 1969 anthology 'Children of Albion'. He dragged Mr Pugh's Blue Show, to give it its full nomenclature, around for fifteen years or so as an affront to the civilized sensibilities of the liberal theatre-goers of Europe before calling it a day, tired of the prissiness and smugness of the audiences. Mr Pugh had looked them in the eyes and found them wanting. He seems to have approached it as a fight to the death. One audience, having sniggered through the violence, sexual content and dirty words, apparently balked at the sight of a Union Jack being regurgitated. One can only assume they were unaware of the event's carnival, Antic roots. Chalk one up to the poet Milton. Blurt has had a floating membership over the years, but all incarnations have in common a very disciplined post-punk sonic attack over which Milton lets loose with an atonal, abandoned (his description) squall of noise from his sax and a lyrical approach more Dada than pop. As Zappa once said of John Cooper Clarke, the man has exquisite diction. Having studied book-binding, he also creates marvelous little hand-made volumes of Beat Dada madness. Blurt are still patrolling the margins - the audiences have never been huge and he remains a prophet without honour at home but there are still people out there interested in tracking down the mavericks. Every now and again Mr Pugh peeps out from the linaments of the Milton physog. And he came from Stroud, you know.

++postscript
Ted Milton, as Mr Pugh, played some very respectable fringe venues, too, I should point out. The Bush Theatre, for instance, and the Roundhouse (I've got some wonderful publicity material for his Bush appearance, performing a show entitled 'Operation Wordsworth'). Mr Pugh's Velvet Glove (to give it the alternative soubriquet) got around. Mr Milton also took the Pugh experience onto television, appearing on an episode of the first series of the seminal 'So It Goes' in 1976. I've never seen it, has anyone out there got any footage?

The Poet Milton

2006-10-28T10:18:00.000+01:00

This was a piece I posted back in April, before I kamikazeed the site - since then, it's been widely disseminated ... well, it's on Ted Milton's website, and posteverything.com (both excellent sites, have a look) so I decided to put it back up.

Blurt: Rhythm Factory, Whitechapel, 13.4.06
Sticking to the classic Blurt template, Ted Milton on sax and vocals, backed with guitar and drums, live the band lack nothing in the way of noise and attack. I've seen bands twice the size unable to whip up such a storm. The secret to Blurt, something many performers should take on board, is the discipline and precision of the execution - Blurt songs tend to cut out the flab, creating hard but concise structures and giving Mr Milton the necessary space to go mad. Think of a fusion between Ornette Coleman and Kurt Schwitters and you would be close. Freebop Merz, anyone? Sporting a natty white zoot suit and two-tone shoes, Mr Milton cuts quite a figure on stage - there's a pleasingly theatrical but threatening edge to his persona... stalking the stage, taking the occasional nip from a half bottle of whisky, he gives the impression of a man you wouldn't want to cross. There is a suggestion of barely suppressed violence bubbling away inside the Milton skull - he's ready to blow up at any time. The band ran through a good mix of Blurt material, none of which sounds like anything else on the market - in a musical landscape dominated by the anodyne and the anaemic, this band are to be cherished. Milton coped with monitor problems with good humour and multi-lingual sarcasm, and demonstrated his very particular vocal and saxophone techniques. What more do you want? The gig was, in part, a promotion for the release of the new CD, 'The Best Of Blurt, vol.2 - The Body That They Built To Fit The Car' - not only does it contain 16 tracks of prime Blurt, you'll also find a couple of wonderful videos - everybody should run out and buy a copy. In fact buy two copies and give one to a friend.

2006-10-27T09:14:00.000+01:00