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Wednesday
NONE MORE TRIVIAL
very conufsing yesterday turn on the TV NEWS and it's all this stuff about a Muslim guy named BAROT (pronounced, near as fine line damn it, BORAT i.e.) over in AMERICA and his Trigger Happy TV footage where he leans his camera over to make the Twin Towers collapse and makes this silly Lil Kid noise like "kuh-powww"
but this is how trivial i am, what i could not get out of my head for the rest of the day (and still, now, obviously) was the 'surveillance' footage he took of WALL ST, and unremarked by anyone in the middle of spick span upper caste Wall St is this one empty SHOPPING TROLLEY... now, I know Manhattan, and i REALLY do not remember there being any supermarkets in that area; I guess a HomeLess Person could have left it there, but there was NOTHING in it, could they just have sold their empty tins and bottles they collected then? what - on WALL STREET!!!?? Seriously, I spent hours thinking about this.
Also, on TMF an astonishingly dull video for Amy Winehouse's REHAB, where she looks more like a DRAG ARTISTE than ever before (doesnt she have any girlfriends who one tipsy night might say, seriously girl, whats with the eye shadow?) but what kept nagging me was her voice, me thinking, this sounds SO familiar, like earlier this year when every trendy new band seemed to remind me of THE MEMBERS or THE RUTS or someone like that, then I finally got it, Amy Winehouse, Rehab, uh ... anyone here remember CARMEL? Ick.
I said it was trivial. (I do have better thoughts than these but i've been too busy to write them up.)
STILL can't get into Joanna Newsom.
Finally heard the new BOB DYLAN and was VERY disappointed, comapred to the last two. WAY too much of the "way down by the lazy river" croonery on this one for my taste. People seem to have reviewed it entirely by rote.
I've been sent a copy of Da Capo's BEST MUSIC WRITING 2006 - about which I can't say too much because I'm doing a working-hat-on review of it for someone...
But there were pieces in there that actually made me WANT TO HEAR, NOW!, stuff by EARTH and KEVIN BLECHDOM and even (even!) MERZBOW (even! because even tho I KNOW i won't like it or find it as interesting as the writer does*). Which made me reflect on how I've read continuously about some of this stuff for the past few years and never ONCE had that feeling... all the Da Capo pieces didnt assume that awful dry snotty insider-knowledge FANBOY tone that WE ALL ALREADY KNOW ABOUT THIS STUFF AND HOW GREAT IT IS AND WE ALL ALREADY HAVE 34 CD-R release ONLY COPIES OF IT. The MISS AMP piece on Kevin Blechdom I thought was especially great: it was filled with LIFE and HUMOUR and SEX and SILLINESS but still managed to make some rilly serious points without making a big clanging deal of it.
_________________________ *{this isnt just laziness or personal aesthetic antipathy; I DO actually have a whole worked out theoretical position about why I dont think this stuff works, a priori, or at least, certanly, why I dont think its higher claims do... which I should LINK to Mark's latest piece over at Freaky Trigger about Modernism (which itself contains pertinent echoes of a piece I've always wanted to write provisionally entitled WHY ARE THERE NO SCRUFFY ARCHITECTS?) (or, IF ARCHITECTS HAD THEIR WAY THERE'D BE NOWHERE LEFT TO GET LOST AND DERIVE THROUGH...) (because, BTW, one of the things I've been doing the past two weeks in an attempt not to spent each and EVERY day watching ROCKFORD FILES re runs is actually going on long two hour strolls around North London in the diamond Autumnn light...) _________________________
Nice to see SOUTHERN COMFORT again (it was pertinent as a VIETNAM allegory, it may be pertinent again, especially if you caught any of the recent stuff in the News where US Generals were saying, well, we didnt know ANYTHING about Iraqi society or mores or structure going in so we just had to GOOGLE it, bascially, and trust to dumb luck...) and BATLE OF ALGIERS (well...), and some recent ALMODOVAR on the TV; but my favourite film from the past two weeks had VIN DIESEL in**. I know: I know.
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**{ Pitch Black? Pitch Dark? Lots of stuff about light and darkness and wandering blind and eyeless through an alien desert, anyway, and (this is JUST pre 2001) it had futuristic (non symbolic, non weighted) MUSLIM characters in (could they DO that these days?) and some pretty cool Nietzschean stuffa bout GOD, and, I thought, some kind of thematic subplot out of DANTE. (No: really.) Well - scared the shit out of me, anyway. And I mean that literally - at one or two points i DID actually JUMP out of my seat or cringe away wth hands over my eyes. (Only later did i reflect and realise that, by contemporary standards, it actually had very little explicit gore or violence in it. It was a lot sharper than that - lean and economical in the best modernist B movie way and a great corrective to the post MATRIX tendency to Epic sprawl and overload. And believe me - I dont scare easy. I watch loads of 'controversial' and putatively 'scary' stuff but how often do I actually blanche? Just about NEVER. Ditto comedy: I realised this week that I spend hours with a tight little smile on my face watching post-Gervais post-Larry David 'clever' comedy and THINKING 'Oh, this is smart and adult and funny' - but NEVER ACTUALLY LAUGHING. (The only thing in the last two weeks that actually made me genuinely unexpectedly spray-chocolate-milk-through-teeth LAUGH OUT LOUD... was an old rerun of an ancient RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY episode. Is this just me getting old?
posted by Ian 11/08/2006 09:15:00 AM
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