Kanye West's Slo-Jams Workshop Walmart Tent 3:30PM

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Joe Meek was tone deaf. Check out the demo he made for Tel Star.



Yeahhh.

Grand old song, Telstar. The scene in Mad Men where Don catapults himself towards California as it plays is pretty stupendous.



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Here is the reggae equivalent of telstar.

2:04!!



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Some recent reviews:

Anna Calvi- Why Can't I Live in the Past?


Bjorn Torske- Kokning

Hercules and Love Affair - A Good Album with a virtually unanimously unpopular review

The Streets- I Will Be Dead Soon

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'Beauty is not a luxury. How can you say I don't deserve beauty?'

-Imelda Marcos

Meant to put this in my Romanticism paper at some point, forgot.

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I love it when people say 'I would think' when they mean 'I think'.


I dislike it when people say the weather is 'disgusting'.


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I think what gets me about is that it's usually used to refer to misty rain, that 'fine rain that wets you right through' as Peter Kay would say, and whilst this can feel oppressive, I find something distasteful about referring to water as something unclean.


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Nigel Blackwell agrees with me on this.

'I quite like a bit of drizzle so stick to the facts'



59 of those 109 views are me.

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I bet Nigel Blackwell would get on well with Karl Pilkington.

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When old people ask for coffee, just coffee in McDonalds.

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A standard family reminiscence leads to metaphysical certainty.



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Here's a piece I wrote a long time ago about The Lewis Chessmen which didn't get published. The paragraph where I use the word 'silly' six times is a deliberate attempt at AA Gill emulation:

The Lewis Chessmen exist on their own island in history (-appalling opening sentence/pun, it deserved to be binnned in retrospect). No one really knows where they came from, who they were made for, or why they disappeared for seven hundred years. It wasn’t even immediately obvious they were chess pieces upon their discovery. All we have is the pieces themselves, and the knowledge that they are for chess. That’s literally it. Oh, and we also know they’re made from Walrus ivory.

It’s hard to get an exhibition’s worth of information out of this, but of course the pieces themselves are more than enough. They are extraordinary, both now and in the context of their time. Chess was a game which originated in the East where the depiction of humans in art was a taboo, and so Chess pieces at the time were crude blocks. The Lewis Chessmen were uniquely ornate for their age in their detailed depiction of real people.

Detailed, but not realistic. Because the pieces are, and there’s no better word for them than this: silly. They look like children’s drawings of people come to silly three-dimensional life from the page. They inspired Noggin the Nog in their silliness. Not that mere silliness degrades their value in any sense. They may be the first truly silly piece of art ever, and perhaps the first deliberately silly art, which is much more important yet.

And they’re not just silly. It’s hard to connect to the art of the distant past at the best of times, but it’s never helped by the fact it seems so anti-individualistic and brutal. But the smiling, kindly, ridiculous faces of the Lewis Chessmen bring up no such barriers to the past. Look at the face of the Queen smacking her cheek in surprise, or the Bishop slumped with head in hand, or the King who just looks constipated. Never has an army appeared so harmless; nor has the distant past ever appeared so humane. Exhibition runs until 8th January.

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Here is a joint-review me and Gavin wrote for The University of Aberdeen's Gaudie of The University of Aberdeen's Gilbert and Sullivan Society's production of The Mikado. We were fairly clueless about what G&S do/are and so whilst Gavin retreats to his typical (and great) safety ground of post-theoretical reasoning, I tag along kicking my heels throughout the text with little to say other than I enjoyed it, like Phaedrus in 'Phaedrus'.


James: I’ve never seen a Gilbert and Sullivan thing before.

Gavin: Nor I.

J: They’re all about Britain, right? This one clearly was, and it was set in Japan. It could be set anywhere. The presumably hysterical jokes about Victorian British democracy shot over my head a bit, but still: so English!

G: But that’s the thing. The best, most telling thing about The Mikado - a make-believe Edo Japanese operetta – is that it has nothing to do with Japan. It's an English cartoon manhandling a tradition making fun of itself (and of foreigners; don't let it be denied). There's no hint of Asian themes or timbres in the music; instead, Sullivan just blithely plugs away at his preferred meat-and-two-veg rumpity-tum-pum pop Romanticism. The overture is stout imperial adventure, not the Otherly East.

J: There’s a certain kind of English theatrical comedy which they clearly couldn’t resist plonking in, as per. The self-important bureaucrat, the overbearingly sexual spinster, the weedy lad come good, all of these characters are standard British comic stage characters from Shakespeare to Stoppard. But this isn’t surprising. What are G&S if not establishment, traditional?

G: It’s sillier than most theatre though. We rarely talk about how very close opera is to pantomime, probably because we rarely talk about opera. This is “Buffa opera” - panto rather than dry modern Absurdism. Disney and Broadway can fairly clearly trace their heritage right through. Its humour is neither subtle nor malicious; a warm kind of satire, which we're very unfamiliar with.

J: It did drag things out, first into parody, then beyond that into self-parody. The infinite codas to a song which you got the point of in the first three lines, and such.

G: I know! You could halve the libretto and not lose any plot; there's so much repetition, antiphony, and tra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-las that it could easily fit within an hour instead of our two plus.

J: It was self-aggrandising, certainly. But it never lost sight of its own absurdity. It revelled in its sheer, brazen-faced pomposity. Victorian society was so self-confident, did we expect anything less from a wilfully pop opera about a country on the edge of the empire? It’d be weird to cut it down to a work of Brechtian minimalism. You’ve got to go on (and on and on) about something every now and then, haven’t you?

G: Yeah, if the froth was gone it’d be missed. I’d see another one.

J: Me too, and it’s hard to imagine getting a stronger production from a student troupe. I was terrified I’d be seeing some awful work of nationalism. And, in a way, I got just that. But when it’s this self-aware and deflating, fighting silliness with silliness being produced, it’ll take on the unseemly silent dignity of all historical things, which it wouldn’t survive. It’d take a cold heart to not at least smile. Or perhaps smirk?

G: Yep; all credit to the cast and crew, particularly James Corrigan’s tenor blast and Daniel Fletcher’s pomp. It’s weird to think about G&S being the only survivor from the whole busy field of Victorian pop, but it’s a good thing they did survive.


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Ahh A Quoi Ca Sert L'Amour, it must be the greatest duet ever. Here La Mome's not just defending love but her entire career and raison d'etre and, bigger than that, the purpose of music/art in the widest possible sense. Music exists to put limits to rationality and say 'thereof we must not speak' when clear argument (the lad in this, who i think piaf was snogging at this point) invades the realm of ignorant beauty. "EACH TIME I CRY, AND YES I'LL ALWAYS CRY... BUT YOU YOU'RE THE FIRST, AND YOU'RE THE LAST... IT'S YOU THAT I WANT, IT'S YOU I NEED." This is nonsense! But it makes sense if you don't think about that.

And no chorus! Just relentless dialogue. A Wittgensteinian approach to argument: if it reaches no conclusions it's fine, the process is what's important, and it must be repeated over and over again lest we forget. There is no highpoint, no catchy way to bring all this to a close. To perform any art about love is to fight, and the fight must be relentless.



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WE LOSE GARY MOORE AND THE WHTIE STRIPES IN THE SAME MONTH?????!?!?! not GARY MORE!!!

The White Stripes would never have released a good album again anyway so let's just move on. And hey, The Hives are still going! Probably.

The White Stripes were as important band to me as they were to nearly anybody else (despite the relentless uphill struggle I sometimes had in demonstrating this fact) but there comes a time when you have to accept that every time they made a good record it was a bit of a miracle, and recently the invisible hand of chance has come to claim its dues, and Jack White is incapable of landing on his feet anymore. Ah well, is all you can say.

Not actually a White Stripes song but concisely conveys every good about them:



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