A bitta culchaw

We went to a concert last night. It was the sort of concert I've been to quite a lot - a chamber orchestra cranking out Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart crowd pleasers. The sort of thing that's pretty much always happening if you're in a big town, so if you feel like some music and there's nothing else happening, there's that, and it's good. Here, of course, it was probably pretty much the music event of the year.

Well, that's fine, I guess. In the sense there's nothing I can do about it. But it took me most of "Spring" to reconcile myself to that. You see, not even North Bay is like that - the NBSO pushes the envelopes it can - and I was getting a little upset about how isolated I was feeling, and how the scope for musical discoveries had shrank for me so remarkably - not just from Europe, but from Toronto too.

Anyways, I snapped myself out of it. Somebody who likes classical instrumental music and doesn't like Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi etc. is just being a cunt. It's like not liking kittens. I really relaxed into the Vivaldi and everything was fine. What helped was the music quite practically guiding me through the idea of four seasons. People had warned me I'd miss having four seasons, and I think my stock response was always that they were probably right, but that I thought it was worth checking. Well, it turns out I miss the crap out of having four seasons. Our life here isn't uneventful, you know, but the weather not being frightfully extreme sort of feels like you're tumbling toward the grave without any way-markers. There are seasons here, but they're subtle. A little too subtle for me. And so for me, winter ends up being the season when I'm atrociously cold at night, and summer the season where I get heat rashes.

I shouldn't write any more today. I'm in a pisser. We got our written Chinese exam sprung on us for Friday and I have this shitload of other things to do, while I try to resuscitate my other computer no less. Feeling a little victimized by my first world problems. I probably need to go back to India for awhile.

Retro ranting

Some fucker of a friend of mine on Facebook put up a vid of Sheena Easton singing that fucking "9 to 5" song because they'd had a flashback to being a kid listening to the Minipops singing it. (Hey, fucker? I can't remember if I told you about this blog, or if you read it, but if it's yes and a yes, you fucking fucker, you have burnt my fucking balls with annoyance over this). Sometimes I worry that the kids these days are getting fed anti-feminist, overly-sexualized narratives and expectations in their pop music, and maybe they are, but I can't think of one more pernicious and disgusting than Sheena Easton's "9 to fucking 5".

Some bint stays at home in a state of zombiefied boredom while her wage-slave meal-ticket goes and pisses his life up the wall at some crappy job for some cunt somewhere controlling the means of production,  and then she only blossoms into something like existence after he commutes home, blows his salary on her material desires, and gives her a good fucking. As if, in real life, a man can consistently work a nine to five job, come home, and be in the mood for blowing his paltry salary on his woman and then maintaining a boner for anything like enough time to actually satisfy her physical needs. And as if, in real life, a woman can spend her days sitting around in a mingled state of utter boredom and high sexual tension without losing her fucking mind or, I don't know, actually going to find something to do that doesn't involve waiting for her nightly ration of pampering and cock.

Honestly, I have never fucking heard a more blantant combination of capitalist and anti-feminist propaganda, in song form or out of it. And then the fucking Minipops singing it. Oh, fuck. I mean adults are dumb enough to buy into that shit; how the fuck were children supposed to figure out that 9 to 5 jobs kill your emotional existence, let alone your sex life, and that women should do things besides waiting around to be spoiled and nailed by a meal-ticket to get some happiness out of life? The 9 to 5 dynamic is evil. It's repugnant. It's exploitative. In fact, it's everything Dolly Parton says it is, in her own, vastly, IMMEASURABLY superior "9 to 5".


PS I mean frankly I can't even fucking BELIEVE that both of these songs qualify as the same category of THING, the fucking Dolly Parton song is so much better that it shouldn't even be from the same planet as Sheena Fucking Easton's song. It seems utterly bizarre to be caught calling them both "songs". That is all.

Having protested too much

The F-word is having some Pink Floyd moments these days, which I can stand better than his Frank Zappa moments, which he's not really allowed to have anymore now that I work at home, poor guy, although I will let him play the symphonic music, which I'll go into my office and drown out with J-Pop if I get annoyed. I'm not substantially a J-Pop fan but it turns out it's the antidote to Frank Zappa overexposure. Especially this version of "Ice Cream Meltin' Mellow", which is the first bit of music since I was young and depressed and enjoying Massive Attack which has made me want to visit the country the people who wrote it came from. I've also got a massive jones on for sushi (see past comments about the whiteness of this town, and the attendant shittiness of the cuisine) though I can probably take care of that just by going to some part of the nearby Queensland coast whereof Australians have spent the last 20 years being half-scandalized, half-titillated (and very open to being completely ripped off in speculative real estate 'investments' - this is the country for shysters, I tells ya) about the Japanese invasion.

Anyways, I don't mind the Pink Floyd much, because 30% of it is nice and the other 70% is funny, and if the whole thing hadn't been ruined for everybody by Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals I might even enjoy it. Also I've noticed that when the F-word has his Pink Floyd moments it's a pretty clear indication he's generally happy, and that's nice. We're both quite happy - my constant complaining is, well, constant, and even in heaven I'll probably be bitching about something. My idea of heaven is not absolutely mutually exclusive of looking down at earth and doing this sort of thing:



Things are generally pretty decent - the job is good and is paying for my Mandarin lessons, the F-word is painting and sculpting and getting up to such shenanigans like a lunatic, and it is awesome to have a house, even if I suspect there are rats in it, and I know there are great big tree frogs in it, because I'll have to catch them and let them out a few times a week so that we don't step on them whilst stumbling to the bathroom at night - the tree frogs being more of a feature really, because they are fricking beautiful. And L---'s fucking whiteness is getting easier to take because I have two trips to China planned before the trip to Canada this southern-hemisphere winter, and one of the trips to China will be to deepest-darkest-most-industrial China, which will be exciting and will no doubt provide some strange, strange food that I never would have thought of eating before.

Sitting naturally high on a well-saddled horse

I used to think that when it came to don't-do-drugs songs, it was pretty much equivalent to wear-a-condom songs - there was only one good one. That's right, "2 Become 1" totally gives me a lady-boner. I can't believe I miss the Spice Girls, but in these degenerate times, I do. Not only did they have personalities, if pre-fab ones; I just can't see any modern pre-fab nympho pop productions singing about putting on a condom, certainly not so convincingly.



But I understand I'm a bit gay for the Spice Girls, mostly because of listening to Spice on headphones at the dentists whilst tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide and getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and it just being superb. Of course the reefer is my true love even if we're taking a break - moving to a country where it's illegal again after it having been such a casual, simple thing in Europe has just made the whole thing sort of sad and pathetic somehow. But reefer aside, now that my non-reefer drug days are probably more or less behind me (at least until I spend my old age tripping my ovaries out) I have to say I think tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide whilst getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and listening to Spice was the best drug experience I've ever had, and I've had some really nice ones. I need to get my hands on some more nitrous oxide. I hear that's the first drug pain relief when you give birth . . . hmm . . . maybe time to ignore "2 Become 1"'s contraceptive message. People have kids for dumber reasons.



Anyways, speaking of drugs, Curtis Mayfield's "No Thing On Me (Cocaine Song)" is the don't-do-drugs song that I used to reckon was the only good one, though then the F-word started bringing all these great reggae albums home and I realized I was wrong. It's still fucking good though.

The sound of gratitude chuffing up

I wish there was some way for me to personally thank the Arcade Fire for remaining awesome in a universe governed by entropy and in a society so tolerant of shitty pop music. The Suburbs is so sweet and pretty whilst avoiding treacle, and as an exploration of middle-class vide it has no parallel I can think of. And as an exploration of a deeply annoying thing, it's not annoying, which is a trick you rarely see in any art form, and to see it in pop music. . . well, fuck me. That is beautiful.

And it looks like Régine Chassagne remembered how to sing, too. For me her voice had always been the worst thing about the band but now I'm into it. On "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" she sounds like a gloriously cranked up Deborah Harry, or the song sounds like a cranked-up version of "Heart of Glass", that actually fucking means something - if crank makes things way better. From memory, it does, but I may have been partial. Anyways, listen for yourself:

Auf Wiedersehen, Deutschland

You know, I honestly think I'm going to miss Germany more than Belgium. Seems strange but of course it's not strange at all, as Germany has been nothing but the scene of a series of pleasant holidays, undemanding, over-subsidized conferences and escapist weekends, all healthily soaked in reinheitsgebot beer. Whereas Belgium has been the scene of all of my travails and an embarassing abundance of incidences of alcohol poisoning as I kept refusing to understand the sugary, extremely strong beer was not intended to be drunk in the sort of quantities I'd previously considered satisfying. And we've been going to what is apparently one of the least charming bits of Germany at that - Dusseldorf - a sterile yuppie town, they say. Well, maybe considering how damn filthy Brussels is, the sterility was more welcome than it otherwise would have been.

We went to Dusseldorf last weekend - probably for the last time, as our friends there are likely to move to Brazil before the F-word and I can afford jaunts back to Europe, and when we make a jaunt back to Germany no doubt we'll prioritize and spend our time somewhere awesome like Berlin. That makes me a little sad. There are lots of nice things about yuppie towns, one of which is the fucking awesome international richness of their cuisine, and when those yuppie towns are in Germany there's the pleasant corollary of them not being overpriced. We had tapas and it was grand but we could have had any number of other things there and it would have been grand. Mind you the food in Berlin is fucking awesome too.

We also went to the track, which got old - I'd been expecting the vast and delicious buffets they offer in North American racetracks to keep the punters in - and we went to a couple of open air concerts in the Hofgarten, the memorable one of which was Oquestrada, a nice Portuguese band with a lot of flavours. You can listen here.

Not much else that's fit for print today. We saw Wolfman last night, a film I'd been excited about seeing. I know I don't read entertainment magazines or anything but I'm really shocked I hadn't heard about how bad it was. Not just garden variety bad, either, it was really atrocious. I've never borne witness to such a revolting waste of a big budget, fantastic acting talent, and concept, via an excruciatingly poor script and really indifferent direction. And what makes me angriest, I think, despite all the love I've got for Benecio del Toro, Hugo Weaving and good scripts, is the waste of a concept. I mean, fucking werewolves, they're awesome. And now that that turkey has came out and been all shitty, nobody's going to make another big-budget werewolf movie for a decade or two. Fuck.

Men Who Stare at Boston

In a naughty world, I take perfection where I find it, and Boston's "More Than a Feeling" is perfect. Of all the genres of music I dislike yacht rock is probably close to the top, and of all the instrumental conceits I dislike big, jerk-off guitar solos are certainly on top, I honestly can't think of anything that annoys me more. Earlier this week I was trying to listen to Ritual de lo Habitual again and kept getting annoyed with the solos, and considering when it comes to Jane's Addiction you're either listening to the whiniest voice in rock or the guitar solos, that's fatal. But I actually really like the big jerk-off guitar solo in "More Than a Feeling" and I can't think of another that doesn't turn me off, although that probably has more to do with marijuana brain than another not existing.

Anyways. It is a fucking ace song. I can't think of another pre-1980 song that is so meticulous and tidy, up to true true yacht rock standards, while still having some sort of emotional effect and aesthetic beauty, outside of Motown properties. Or that window of time when the Beatles had figured out how to play their instruments and work with good producers but hadn't started taking all those sloppy lovely drugs yet. I've hitherto resisted loving it because of the horrible wankery of the yacht rock era, which I feel it paved the way for. But that's like hating on Van Gogh and Gauguin for all the art school dweebs who think just because those two weren't great technical painters they don't have to learn a damn thing about formal composition.

Also I have a weakness for dedicated autocratic fruitcakes and it looks like Tom Scholz fits the bill.

The song resurfaced on my consciousness due to watching Men Who Stare at Goats, one of about ten films I sat through on the way to Shanghai and back. Probably the best of the bunch. Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes was in there too and that was kind of dumb though Robert Downey Jr is a real testament to how the drugs keep some of us young, and, erm, what else? It's Complicated . . . that was pretty shitty . . . some kung fu movie about Wind and Rain and Old Uncle Pervert, or something . . . well anyways, it just goes to show you how memorable it all wasn't. Oh yeah, there was another George Clooney film, Up in the Air, that was also kind of shitty. Men Who Stare at Goats was at least cute . . but facile, I thought . . . begging for the Coen brothers really, and considering they've been begging for some decent material it's a pity they missed each other. Also, why does Ewen McGregor keep getting wasted by his directors? I'm not just talking about the schlong not being got out. I totally remember him being this super-good actor a decade or so ago and he keeps failing to convince, these days.

Pastiche ma biche

I've been a big fan of Benjamin Biolay, although haven't listened to him that often since the F-word moved in, because the music makes me very melancholy, which is all very good when I can hang around mopingly by myself getting high like a Curehead with Peter Pan syndrome, and not so hot when I'm trying to maintain an adult relationship. But one day I was PMSing and all pissed off anyways, so I was listening to Rose Kennedy, and the F-word pointed out that "Les cerfs-volants" was basically "My Way". I shrugged. Must be a tribute, right? Everybody knows "My Way" (even if French people like to pretend what they actually know is "Comme d'habitude"). That'd be like plagiarising "Happy" Fucking "Birthday", I mean Sid Vicious sang it for fuck's sake.





Then his new album La Superbe came out, got an avalanche of good reviews, and won a bunch of Césars or whatever the hell the French call their version of the Grammys, and I ignored it, because I'd made the mistake of reading some interviews with the man before listening to it and he came off as the worst kind of champagne socialist , of a kind that isn't even produced outside of France. Not even Guarniad readers come up to this standard. It's the sort of thing where you can arrange the strings on a Carla Bruni album while releasing a song about how you'd like to eject her husband from elected office (which Biolay has done).

And then yesterday I was hopping back on the PMS wagon and had a tonne of brainless administrative things to catch up on at the office, so I finally gave La Superbe a listen and sure enough it seemed pretty awesome. Typically lovely instrumental arrangements and typically broody lyrics, maybe a little too self-consciously melancholic for me at this point in my reasonably self-actualized psychological existence despite the PMS, but I was getting into it.

However, then it started sinking in:

"Prenons le large" - "Don't you forget about me"
"Tout ca me tourmente" - A bunch of Goldfrapp
"Padam" - "Wonderful Life"

And oh my fuck, the whole thing is Disintegration with instruments instead of synthesizers.

I could go on. The whole double album sounded like a beautifully arranged pastiche of my childhood and adolescence. Which was half good and half aspartame. Finally I had a quick google to see if anyone else was picking up on it. All I found was pissed off Morrissey fans who didn't like that "La Superbe" sampled the same bit of Shostakovich that "Teachers Are Afraid of Pupils" sampled, which didn't do much except confirm me in my belief that Morrissey fans need to stop drinking the fucking koolaid, it's Shostakovich for shit's sake, and at least Biolay gave it the dignity inherent in strings instead of bastardizing it with synthesizers. God, Morrissey's a fucking prick. "I know," he must have thought, "let's take some lovely Shostakovich and put it to synthesizers, because I'm not a big enough prick yet." Prick, man.

And on top of that, while I'm in a critical mood and bringing it back to Benjamin Biolay, may I just say now, any pop star who's going to have a hissy fit about how much it sucks when you love a girl and she loves you and you're having lots of great sex and it all rocks and then she gets pregnant and then everything goes to shit - just shut the fuck up, okay? Write a fucking instrumental instead. Nobody's interested. Except your poor fucking kid. God, Benjamin Biolay sucks.

But I'll give La Superbe a chance to grow on me. Maybe I've been spoiled with a heavy diet, when it comes to new music, of Nick Cave and Tom Waits (the only two white guys upon whom the F-word and I see eye to eye, and hence who are on heavy rotation) being middle aged monkeys who don't give a toss so they may as well try writing something no one else has written before. And while La Superbe may be a pastiche of the music of my childhood and adolescence, there's no doubt it's a beautifully arranged pastiche, and that's worth more than a little in this increasingly ugly world. However that feels rather exploitative at the moment too. At the point in his career where Biolay would have to count on aging Cureheads giving up their fascination with him as an attractive tubercular-Heathcliff-as-composer archetype, because we've all had adult relationships or psychoanalysis or both by now, he writes super-pretty pastiches of the songs of our childhood and adolescence and draws us back into the income-spending segment. Well, tough. It's nice but you'll get no money from me. I'm cheap as a teetotaller Scotsman and I've found Grooveshark.

Also - in all honesty, I think Owen Pallett has ruined me for other musically sensitive types with unexciting voices. His songs are all about more interesting things than that mopy gallic je-t'aime-moi-non-plus-who-to-kill-first-me-or-you shit and his arrangements, if often less pretty than Biolay's, are way more interesting and stay with me way longer. Here's the Final Fantasy song that's been stuck in my head for about a week:

I'm gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench

M and I had a running stress-reliever - the word "Boner", which we made workplace-acceptable by referring to the Growing Pains character, who of course the presently missing Andrew Koenig played. Fucking best American television character name ever. Well, it's not unknown for people who were formerly famous cracking up and disappearing themselves, permanently or not, and considering it's been around five months since M disappeared it's pushing things a bit to freak out about Boner disappearing after M disappears.

But synchronicity, as an emotion or a perceived phenomenon, is a strange thing. It's there, certainly. Involved with a plain, garden variety sadness, in that I can't turn around in my office chair and say, or hear, "they can't get a Boner," "maybe Boner was dysfunctional", "I'm going to spend this weekend searching for Boner, you know, really reaching out" . . . or just "hey - Boner!" you know . . . tonnes of fucking comedy gold that aren't funny anymore because now M is missing, and even though this guy had the fucking awesomest television name ever I can't laugh about somebody being missing anymore.

No wonder adults have no fucking sense of humour. It must get harder and harder to laugh at things the more indescribably horribly shitty things happen to you and the people around you. Everything gets a little too synchronous and has this whole hollow weight of loss and sadness beneath it, which swallows up the giggles like a sinkhole. But would M have wanted me to stop laughing at Boner? Will me not giggling at the name make things better? Probably not. Anyways, who'm I kidding. The word "boner" is always going to be fucking hilarious. But I'll always remember M while I laugh at it. I guess the best way to deal with the synchronicity is to laugh enough for both of us.

Anyways. In terms of the emotionally devastating synchronicity it's not as bad as A-Ha announcing they were going to break up on the day (we found out retrospectively, thank you very fucking much, you fucking turd of a British Foreign Office - may you collectively catch scabies and scar yourselves indelibly with frantic scratching, may you find relief from nothing short of the rough side of a cheese grater, you pack of useless, irresponsible cunts; may boners always be remarkable in your beastly, functionary lives by their paucity) that M disappeared. He was the only non-Scando I've ever known who liked them a lot. Indeed, the only non-Scando who claimed to have heard a single song of theirs beyond the ubiquitous, and awesome, "Take On Me".

Speaking of, I assume you've seen it but just in case - I can still laugh at this, anyways. I guess if someone near and dear to me had been clocked in a pipe wrench fight I couldn't, so, well, carpe diem:



And to be fair, here's an A-Ha single from 2000, that M really liked and sent me as proof that they'd released things in English besides "Take on Me". Apparently Morten Harket (and it's not your imagination; the man is a phenomenal piece of ass, as, my Finnish and Swedish lady friends breathlessly inform me, an unfair proportion of the male Norwegian population is - something to remember if the F-word ever dumps my ass) holds a note for 22 seconds in it, which Wikipedia says is a British chart record, beating Bill Withers' in "Lovely Day".



Another difficult thing about synchronicity is that that song has moved in my estimation from being an example of a fucking marvellous falsetto somewhat wasted on a half-decent pop song with lyrics that make no fucking sense to something indescribably sad. I miss M. I miss him so much.

No wonder adults listen and get attached to horrible mawkish shit like Phil Collins or The Boatman's Call (I've had "Brompton Oratory" stuck in my head since Saturday and I'm getting resentful). Nothing is allowed to be funny anymore, and repellent, repellent turds like "I Can't Stop Loving You" suddenly assume this crushing emotional weight and substance. I guess I should count my lucky stars that M wasn't into anything worse than A-Ha. Well he was, actually, he was quite fond of Madonna. But frankly the fucking Nazis could have played that shit over the loudspeakers at Treblinka and it wouldn't have given it any emotional weight or substance. Fucking. Hate. Madonna.

Victor Jara has had his second funeral.



Impossible to juxtapose that death and that voice. Not without getting into Jesus talk. People are such stupid brutes; he'd just been a rather lovely folk singer before. Now juxtaposed forever with some ugly foul-mouthed troglodytes in Washington who thought the world was dominoes.

What a life.

My lovely horse, you're a pony no more

On Friday I felt like ass on a plate, or as the French say, 'une assiette'. Both physically and mentally. It's cold season, which explains the physicality, and mentally - well, of course it's my boss. I sort of swing between missing him and realizing for the first time what a shithole the world can be sometimes.

Nonetheless that night I dragged myself to a concert with the F-word and some of his friends: this one. And it was lovely, and I don't think anything else could have reached me properly that evening, since when I've been feeling substantially better. Julia Charkova of Khakassia - her instrument and her nasal tuneful singing - was very lovely and sent my brain off thinking about Mongols and what they've done to music as well as the map of Asia.

And then Albina Degtyareva of the Sakha republic was incredible. I read the programme, I knew she's been to university to put as all in a shamanistic state of mind, but it put me in mind of some militant First Nations guys who used to live around my hometown, who were anxious to recover their culture and willing to do so through the medium of dreams and meditation in the cases where us fishbellies had successfully expunged the record. But in Sakha I guess the degree of isolation was so huge that even the Russian Orthodox Church is calling them syncretic, and going to one of the republic's university's is a way of dreaming or meditating . . . I don't know. It gave me a powerful urge to go there, though.

And she was incredible, it was really incredible, what can I say? It took me outside of myself at a time I really needed to be taken outside of myself. Like a Jehovah's Witness knocked on my door right after my dog died. I'm grateful I just had some quick shamanistic exposure on Friday instead of bumping into any religions that would require me to stop boffing the F-word extramaritally, now that I think about it.

Here she is with her old band:



Here's another with more giumbarde - sorry, just can't bring myself to call it a jew's harp - except I guess I just did.

From the bedroom to the marketplace

You know what I was saying the other day about Arcade Fire? Final Fantasy is also very sweet. And also very tinkly. It's like a Belle and Sebastian that can actually play their (his?) instruments properly. And any musical entity that calls its debut album He Poos Clouds is all win, even if I don't understand Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder if people still play that.

Anyways, look at this Owen Pallett, it's ridiculously awesome:

A statement of the obvious

The Arcade Fire is fucking ace. That's so obvious I feel a little silly typing it out. But I've forgotten about it for awhile as it's a bit too tinkly for the F-word so it doesn't get played at home, and for the past year or so my work has been so wordy that I don't think I've listened to music at the office for ages. But now that it's getting a little more spatial I can listen to music in a serious way at the same time, and it's been so nice to have Funeral and Neon Bible playing away.

Aside from the charm of the music, which I do find charming on its own merits, the Arcade Fire gives me pleasure by making me imagine a world where mainstream soul and R&B and fucking everything didn't suffer from a massive and indiscrimate uptake of electronic musical effects. Obviously I love electronic musical effects, but something went wrong somewhere. We're not in a situation where everybody is still touring with horn sections and that lots of big bands are soaking up all of those wandering lost uni music grads. Nope. Just Arcade Fire, and Final Fantasy, and a bunch of other Canadian and European weirdos who I never hear of until it's far too late - case in point:



Broke up ten fucking years ago . . .

The lone woman's playlist

Currently the F-word is in Berlin and I'm here. Next week I'll be in Dubrovnik and he'll be here. Soon after that we'll go away to Portugal together. Occasional seperate vacations are rather nice for all sorts of reasons, mostly having to do with mutual appreciation and personal space, but probably what I enjoy the most about it is getting the run of music I feel like listening to - things that are either too poppy or too whiny to bother playing around him when we both like Nick Cave, Tom Waits, pre-synthesizer R&B, orchestral, operatic and a bunch of other crap enough to not rub each other the wrong way. He's got his own things he listens to when I'm away, including Frank Zappa - yikes.

Anyways, that means right now I'm listening to:

Tricky, Maxinquaye. Probably the constant and fucking inescapable Michael Jackson playing everyfuckingwhere over the last week or so was what reminded me how much I miss this album. He samples "Bad" on "Brand New You're Retro" and I'm quite fond of it. And while this urge is already morphing into a desire to listen to a bunch of Massive Attack and some other Tricky abums, Maxinquaye is very dear to my heart. It was on constant rotation during the wonderful months that I went chronic, and it's really part of who Mistress La Spliffe is . . . but personal descent into drug dependency aside, really I just think it's so pretty, one of the prettiest albums I've ever heard. That's the thing about trip-hop, and it's why I get confused when people hate it. It's so pretty. To hate trip-hop, you've got to hate pretty. And who hates pretty? Assholes, that's who.



Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. My feelings are split on this album and even if the F-word could tolerate the whiny quality of Jeff Tweedy's vocals (which one would think he could, Radiohead being okay apparently) I would have to keep it on low rotation anyways. I've written before about the fucking pain of getting a five-second blast of "I'm the Man Who Loves You" stuck in one's head on a repetitive loop, and even now I'm wary of getting it lodged back in there - last time it took about five fucking days to get it to stop playing. That doesn't change the fact that it's a damn good song and that the makes-the-Cure-look-like-the-Pizzicato-Five lyrics are not only not stupid, but accompanied by - once more - pretty. It's a marvellously pretty album. And who doesn't like pretty? Assholes, that's who.

The surprising thing about Wilco, though, was that when I saw them live it was still awfully pretty, despite the album feeling very engineered and very trippy in its own way.




Speaking of pretty and the Pizzicato Five - The Pizzicato Five, Made in the USA. No excuses or explanations here. I just love it. Maki Nomiya could be singing "twiggy fuck yourself up the ass, you aging nineties hipster" and I'd still love it.



And the last one is rather a cheat, because I'm sure the F-word would be okay with it, though he does laugh about how heroin-y it all is - but it didn't occur to me to put him back on until I realized I'd need a stand-in boyfriend for a few days, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings. I fucking love this album. And love his voice. This song makes me feel like I'm being cuddled.

Death, monkeys, and dancing bears

Thinking about the meaning of death in different cultures these days. My study of non-European cultures has been either so academic or so pop, so Bhagavad Gita or else Monkey!, that I have no practical idea what death means to people outside Europe. There's something rather brutal about the dominant thread we have in Europe and North America now. Centuries of training by our religion to see life as a linear progression to death and to the subsequent judgement of our selves, as we now understand our selves, by God, who we comprehend as another self. I think we still have that pattern, if you can call something so simple a pattern, in our minds. But now, for so many of us, especially in Europe, who have been repelled by the church, we've lost even the small complication of the assumption of judgement at the end - just the simple linear sentence of our selves, growing and aging and dying, and then a sudden full stop.

But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .

I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.

Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.

In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):

A post-mortem will be held to determine which was the cause of death:

A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie

The Red Dragon has a closed mind re. covers

Nick Cave has spent the last thirty years exploring how us emotional retards get to enjoy life too and there are few songs better at it in my strange-o book than the Bad Seeds' 'Loverman'. That is a fucking horny song. It's one of my favourite songs, definitely. The lyrics go from very silly ("I am what I am what I am what I am") to fucking gold ("With a trembling heart, he's coming through your door with his straining sex in his jumping paw; there's a devil crawling along your floor") without ever sounding inconsistent - a general feature of Nick Cave's lyrics I find irresistable. It's a gem of a song and I love it. I can't really comprehend a reality in which I wouldn't love it.




And yet I've always promised myself that I'll studiously avoid listening to the Metallica cover. The idea makes me want to retch. There are emotional areas of my brains I'm happy to have prodded at in Nick Cave's voice where James Hetfield's voice has no place, even if it's dressed up in Nick Cave's words. Frankly, eww. The guy from Depeche Mode covered it too and that sounds about as appealing. More eww.

Another awfully horny song, in my book, is "Use Me", from Bill Withers. I've gone on about him before, so I won't repeat myself too much. When his songs are good, they're wonders of lyrical and melodic seemingly simple perfection, and he was only ruined by all of those damnable keyboards and synthesizers. And the voice! It's a lovely voice. A proper man's voice. A sexy, comfy duvet of a voice. "Use Me" is a marvellous example of his marvellousness and playing it is the easiest way to explain and understand fun and nasty love, and that voice is singing to its best effect in it; as far as I'm concerned only Bill Withers could pull off that mumbling at the end and still make it count when he sings "it ain't too bad the way you're using me because I sure am using you to do the things you do."



And another cover I'll studiously avoid is Mick Jagger's 1993 cover of "Use Me". Don't get me wrong. Mick Jagger was horny once upon a time too, and "Let's Spend the Night Together" has got me wet played over the loudspeakers in charity shops. But his is not the voice I want to hear singing "Use Me" to me. A fucking middle class limey knight? Don't we have better things to use?

Of squeaking and sicking

I'm at home having a massive sick, and next week we're gone Thursday and Friday on vacation. Dear oh dear. And you know what, good. On Wednesday, not only do we have the pleasure of meeting our normal deadline, but also a meeting at which I shall be obliged to be confrontational; better the stress of confrontation, I'm operating on the assumption, than difficulty in sleeping because I'm quietly letting myself get fucked up the ass by people who aren't even thinking of giving me a reach-around. Part of my problem at the moment is that the person they're threatening to replace my old boss with is the same age as I am. More experienced, yes, but I'm feeling a whole new emotion at the moment in terms of not wanting to have a boss who's my age. Oh well. I should just get over that. I think it's more difficult for some colleagues at the office, who are both older than the threatened new boss, and vastly more experienced.

Oh boo. This massive sick is making me feel bad. My head hurts, my lungs hurt, it looks like I've got two black eyes, and I am absolutely full of doubts about everything that I can't ingest and digest. Which, this morning, is turning out to be everything except dried bread soaked in cafe latte. I want to hippy out now. Not nine fucking months from now, now. What if I fucking die? What if I get fucking cancer when I'm fucking forty and have to think, fuck, I squandered years of my life not being a hippy? That's the sort of mood I'm in.

Well, life isn't all bad. The F-word introduced me to Last.fm. I'd heard of it before but thought it was just crap. It turns out I like it. Although the endless Mark Lanegan on the Nick Cave Radio is starting to piss me off, but not quite enough to ban it. It's just the repetition that gets to me. It also turns out I don't like PJ Harvey's new album at all. I resent her singing in that little squeaky pitchless voice when I know she's capable of yelling 'I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering while my head burns' in key and loud. If I want squeaky and pitchless I'll take the chick from the Arcade Fire, thank you very much.

The Red Dragon autodomesticates

My mum is coming to visit this evening, which means - once more - fuck all about the Locrian women as I engage in a last minute struggle to ameliorate the state of the apartment. It's just a reflex at this point. I'm 30 years old. I've been living without parental supervision for 12 years, and been visited by them frequently, especially my globe-trotting mum, in that time. During some of that time I was occasionally much less functional than I flatter myself I am now, and Mum has seen some fucking dire things when visiting my apartments. I always get them spic and span in the parts they spend time in - their bedroom, kitchen, living room - but I could never bring myself, during my druggier years, to actually clean my own bedroom. Hangover adolescence, probably. 

I have a distinct memory - I don't think it's just a hallucination - of my mum walking across my bedroom in one of the apartments I had in northern Italy so she could look at its balcony, and casually kicking a used condom out of her path as she did so. Unbelievably disgusting, I know, but if it makes it any better, I'm pretty sure it was fresh.  Ho hum. Credit to her for never saying anything. And credit to my brothers for raising her tolerance so high. Why bother getting upset with your daughter for being a slutty drunk piggy stoner when your sons are . . . well. When your sons are my brothers: three of the greatest men on Earth.

Anyways, that's all, it's back to scrubbing for me. In the meantime, please enjoy some Buraka Som Sistema. Besides M.I.A. whining out the refrain so charmingly I have no idea what they're going on about, but it's good marching music and it will help you ask yourself some tough questions about how you've let your life get to where it is now instead of devoting all your time to learning how to dance that awesomely. 

The Red Dragon has an appetite for development

Wow. I'm in a very dragony mood indeed today. Better think pleasant thoughts.

1. Appetite for Destruction. Had the F-word acquire it after having a dream that I'd heard the first single from Chinese Democracy (which I haven't) and that it was surprisingly, enchantingly good (which I doubt). Remembered what a good song 'Mr. Brownstone' was and demanded the whole thing. I'm glad I did, except for some of the lovey-dovey crap in those whiny grating vocals, ugh, but mostly glad to have 'Mr. Brownstone' again. That must be one of the best songs ever. Add it to the list, I guess. I always think I would have liked that sort of '80s grock music better if the composers had limited themselves to writing about drugs. Once they start singing about sex or violence I start figuring I should either be listening to soul or the Bad Seeds. Anyways. 'Mr. Brownstone'. Awesome.

2. Arrested Development. Finally MSN is streaming the full episodes to markets outside of the US and we're trying to watch it all before we leave for Italy on vacation, after having seen and lurved the first season. Almost there now. Well into the third. I can't find ways to praise that show enough, besides to say I don't think I've ever seen such a successful American television comedy, besides maybe the first season of the Sopranos. And that makes it the funniest situation comedy ever, as far as I can figure out. Don't believe me? Watch the fucker and try to argue. Or at least read this exchange:

Gob: My God. What is this feeling?
Michael: You know, the feeling that you're feeling is just what many of us call... a "feeling".
Gob: It's not like envy, or even hungry.
Michael: Could it be love?
Gob: I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite - it's like my heart is getting hard.

That's all I can list at the moment. Very hard to look for bright sides today. Tomorrow will be better, when deadline is past and I can really appreciate we're about to go somewhere warmer and sunnier for a couple of weeks. It's just so dark here - so cold and dark - half a week away from the darkest day of the year. I fucking detest living this far noth. A full seven fucking degrees north of Toronto. It may be easier to die of exposure or get frostbite in a Canadian city than it is here, but at least there's some light. At least you don't get fucking rickets there. I could cry. But I won't. Instead I'll drink a coffee and work.

The Mistress in Her First Class Compartment

God, I'm getting sick of work. Luckily Canada is coming up soon. Marseille, besides the fantastic weekend with its fantastic kayaking, was a nasty hit not only of work but of anti-fun, with fucking cunty mosquitoes no less - no kidding - I was bit ten times whilst sitting through all the presentations. That shit was not quite hell, but purgatorial for sure if I've read my Dante right. And now I'm in the thick of report season. It's almost done. One more. And then - well, it's not smooth sailing, who the fuck am I kidding? I'm going to have indignant Teutonic fuckers bitching me out for the rest of my tenure at this job about how I'm not believing their lies over the lies some other Teutonic fucker is telling me. One of the sectors I cover is just fine, and most of the Teutons I interview are just fine, and I know the sectors my colleagues cover are just fine. It's just this one that's an everlasting pain in the ass . . . but at the same time I'm too interested to give it up, even if someone volunteered to take it off my hands. It's so interesting when adults lie, and this sector has a more chequered history than most, I suppose, though I'd never dream of boring you by telling you anything substantial about it.

Anyways.

On the train between Brussels and Marseille I sat in the rarefied airs of the first class compartment, reflected on my usual half-baked Marxist theories about how in the modern world bourgeois premiums don't get you shit besides an absence of proles, not even a fucking glass of wine or a nice packet of crisps or anything. Two things complimented, even improved my reflections: The General in his Labyrinth and the Arcade Fire's albums.

The General in his Labyrinth wasn't Love in the Time of Cholera or 100 Years of Solitude; it wasn't even Love and Other Demons, but it was pretty damn good, In Evil Hour good, though less supernatural. It worked very well as a cold portrait of physical disintegration, and also the disintegration of a dream, a political dream that went beyond abstracts like freedom straight to a new world, a huge new world . . . it made me care a lot more about Simon Bolivar, reading it. The sun shining out of my ass as it does, to me Bolivar was important because he inspired Garibaldi, and to me Garibaldi was important because whilst marching against the Papal States he got shot in the foot in Aspromonte, and Aspromonte is important because it bred the olive half of the Almighty Me, hence saving me from melanoma, so far at least. Thanks, Simon Bolivar! Anyways, it's made me much more interested in him, and very interested in her too, who Garibaldi went to visit in her destitution in Peru. There are all of these fascinating lives that we can only imagine. It's enough to make me want to get some mescal and head out into the desert in a pukey bid to try to recreate history. But then most things are.

And the Arcade Fire albums - not much to say about those. I like them both a lot but they annoy the hell out of me unless I listen to the whole thing in one go. Song by song it's all just trembly nonsense and my brain focuses too hard on the bad-cranked vocals, but if I have, say, a five-hour train trip between Marseille and Brussels to while away and all too much concentration to spare, they're perfect. That Bruce-Springsteen-kicked-in-the-balls-and-with-more-instruments jitteriness is like a pathetic but pleasant rallying cry for all the non-insane people in the world to stop the insanity - I don't think it will work but it's nice if I have enough time to sit down with the entire albums. I like Funeral better. And that's all.