A Placid Island of Ignorance

Well, now that Nirav has lunk to me I guess I’d better start acting like there are people out there.

A belated Good Hello. I’m Jim Flannery, this is my blog. I’m not a particularly focussed person so you’ll find a bunch of different stuff in here, but I expect most of it will be about whatever I’ve been consuming recently … I’m not much into talking about myself (this will come as a surprise to people who know me IRL).

This is also my own little playground to build my own blogging apparatus and learn some CSS, so the features will appear gradually and the appearance of the page may change wildly from time to time. Comments will be up soon, but not too soon; in the meantime you can email me at this address if you want to argue (if your blog isn’t in the roll to the left yet and you know I read you, don’t be offended, it’ll turn up soon — I just haven’t built the interface for it yet either and editing those text files is way boring). Please do let me know if something looks really screwy in your browser ... but be aware that we are in the twenty-first century now and if you can display your browser's version number on one hand those references to “left” and “right” will wind up meaning “down” or worse … and if you’re using Internet Explorer you’re missing some cool stuff (see the “Better Browser” link in the right-hand column).

Radiohead Rorschach

Not much to say here, it’s hard to type from the floor.

Not yr Father's Sgt. Pepper, but 20 years ago, or more, from today. Why are decades shorter than they used to be?

Last night I played a Starfuckers album and I was thinking, this is really annoying but at least it doesn't sound like anything else. So today I crack open this new double vinyl from Eclipse1 1Sun City Girls, God is My Solar System/Superpower and throw on side one, recorded in 1982, and yup, there it is, the same choked-off little bits of notes, odd, immediately smothered hacks at the strings suspended in empty space some random number of semidemihemiquavers away from where a proper beat would be, miscellaneous thumpings on what a proper beat would be if only they ever repeated themselves ... the whole Starfuckers schtick, except of course if this recording were a person it would be graduating from college next year, and SCG have the good sense to move on to something else after five minutes or so.

When I bought it, the guy at the counter at Amoeba (who was most likely not born yet when the band started) asked, “What do these guys sound like, anyway? I keep seeing the name but I’ve never heard them.” Unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough to give him a Brando “Whaddaya got?” So it goes, at least I got the blog running so I can foist it on you.

And I can actually answer the question here, because these aren’t among your totally heterogeneous SCG albums, they be kinda focussed: mostly, we’re deep in improv/free rock territory here, the guitar now channelling Ray Russell, now Sharrock, now Lindsay ... the interplay sometimes reminding me of the Surman/McLaughlin Where Fortune Smiles, then again lapsing into a loping groove that makes me want to pull out my Mars Everywhere or Melodic Energy Commission records,2 2Isn’t it irritating how I describe a record you haven’t heard by comparing it to a record you’re less likely to have heard? or then of a miraculously remasculated Dead, until suddenly they start lurching around, wildly slashing at their instruments, the parts leaning on each other like a barfight where the combatants need to clinch to stay standing. Oh, and the pseudo-beat poetry is in force already too; “the stars are the semen of the little boy angels,” indeed.

What amazes me is how much they sounded like themselves already, on these earliest of their live tapes I’ve heard; aside from the fake ethno stuff, it’s all there already. How many of the Tuscon punks who saw these shows knew they were listening to hippie music (or worse yet, fusion)? How much guts did it take to play this stuff in that scene, in that time? And stubborn motherfuckers, they still sound like this, bless ’em.

(No, certainly it’s not quite hippie music, nor jazz … because there’s all this chaos, these rapid shifts from one mode to another (who was doing this rapid-fire eclectic collage at the time, beyond Zorn?) … but they’re in there for the hearing. Note to self: chaos sells.)

Nice stage outfits on that cover photo too.

truth of Ian MacDonald’s piece on Nick Drake, and life, for that matter:

The trouble with such elevation, with bliss such as this, and I have felt it, is that the only way forward, the only possible movement, from that point, is down. And moments of transcendence, epiphanies, don’t keep you warm at night. The memory of them just remind you how fucking cold you are.

No, I’m not depressed, actually, why do you ask?

All this foofraw in bloggerland about center vs. the provinces (probably half of them over there to my left) … here I am in the (my) bloody center, two great (both makeable in sequence) shows1 1Wobbly and a group featuring the guy from Crawling with Tarts doing live soundtracks at ATA; Comets on Fire, Parchman Farm, and what was described as “solo Norwegian woman playing black metal on an autoharp” at El Rio, that’s what. to choose from and where am I? Sitting in front of the damn computer because I spent forty minutes too long figuring out fucking file permissions on this thing nobody’s reading today anyway, and the high point of my evening is discovering that the labels on this NNCK album actually do show the side numbers (this may mean I never made it to side three before … given the crap pressing flaws on side two that’s not unimaginable)? Mother of god.

It’s true, one feels a sense of guilt over wasting the opportunity of living here — especially given the fact that I quit my job to stay here, when I could have just bought a car and moved to the suburbs — shouldn’t I just give up, move to Novato and watch Fox News like the rest of America?

Strange listening to this new Nurse With Wound record (She and Me Fall Together in Free Death) immediately after the Dizzee Rascal album ... side a comes in with this rolling, slithy drone that sounds like reverbed didg, and then Stapleton lays down one of his patented a-child-would-be-embarassed excursions on the traps, four bars with a couple boom-booms scattered around in them, over and over, just sloppy enough for us to believe it’s not a loop ... the drone sends out the odd splinter of resonance, the drums just keep going ... honestly, it feels like a minimalist hip-hop backing track ... except wow is it longer. After about five minutes we start to get some little squidges of white noise, that eventually knit together into a counter-rhythm, just the three elements bouncing off one another, almost krautrocky when everything locks in. Yeah, I’d really like to hear this with somebody rhyming over it. Totally.

Side two. My god. Stapleton sings.

New Weird Britain, I guess. “Black is the Color,” not in Patty Waters territory, but nothing to put the mustrad folks in a good mood neither. A slow, menacing take, strongly reminds me of some of the songs on Gira’s half of World of Skin, these same chords over and over, downstroke on one on 1-2-3, a little surge of the others across 4 and then back again (this’d be the one riff/song disc, don’t wanna waste ’em, that good English frugality at work). Stapleton sounds like he’s in a trance, little-girl voices bubble up from below, doom doom doom. A winner.

And on we go into more “traditional” NWW pict-grooving fare, scrabblings, micro-edits, tapetransport artifacts, a flourish of calliope, somebody’s stepping on a harmonica ... it all sounds like a genetically-modified take on Marchetti’s La Caccia, till we get to the vocoded pron tapes, anyway ...

OK, just to be quite upfront, I’ve most-always been a fan of Peter Greenaway’s, since my first viewing of The Falls at the SF Cinematheque, back in the early 80s (ok, I wasn’t that crazy about The Draughtsman’s Contract the first time through, not till I saw some others and “got” the value-added). Even given my expectations, I was fairly gobsmacked by his recent novel, Gold.

People familiar with his films will easily recognize it as being of the same “stuff”: almost immediately, we understand that we are reading a series of short chapters, each of which will tell us something about the gold which went into one of 92 gold bars (of course it’s 92) (which started out as a hundred (of course)) which are found on the back seat of a car abandoned on the last day of the european war in 1945, on the side of a road outside Bolzano, the only town in Italy in which no one can cook a decent plate of spaghetti (a fact with which we will be very, very well acquainted with in the course of 200-odd pages). The stories are told in the BBC-voiceover voice of what we can call “the Tulse Luper films” — The Falls, A Walk Through H, Vertical Features Remake1 1And this is, as you might have guessed, part of the cycle, though only momentarily ... the ubiquitous but ephemeral Tulse does make a glancing appearance a hundred pages after you’ve given up on him, the cover illustration features an almost-completely erased reference to “The Tulse Luper Suitcases” (title of an upcoming film, and a website) ... — the details calmly, emotionlessly recited, in that friendly yet slightly-ironic I-know-something tone of James Burke drippingly making another “connection” for us.2 2OK, showing my age here. Greenaway’s connections, however, are both more obscure and more pungent.

The stories of those gold chains, bracelets, washroom taps, cigarette cases ... they’re all different, but they have a terrible sameness to them too, as they make their way, either individually or in groups or amalgamated into bars, from all over the continent into a vault in Baden-Baden and thence to Bolzano. The ultimate fungibility of gold stands out clearly: it can always be converted into value; but here it works as a reverse Philosopher’s Stone, converting lives into boxes of saltfish and loaves of bread, and passing on, Gold still, to the next transaction. And far from reflecting a “gold standard,” the exchange rate turns out to be extraordinarily fluid ... a bracelet is worth a life at the start of the process, but worth a loaf of bread somewhere in the middle, then a bagfull of dollars ... and in the end worth nothing, because Lt. Harpsch is dead on the road to Bolzano, the gold bars scattered across the back seat of his car.

Cupidity. Death. Futility. Death. Over and over and over.

What develops is an image of the Nazi system as a great black hole in the middle of Europe, inexorably sucking all history, all culture, all life into itself and defecating an endless stream of anonymized golden turds. And on and on goes Greenaway’s voiceover, drawing connections, now piquant, now hilarious, now heartbreaking, as the coincidences become more and more (or less and less) absurd, the “justice” of the outcomes more or less approximate to dream logic, freudian-punning connections ... backing away here and there as if surprised by his own audacity, commenting on it, justifying it ...

As the years go by, objects of domestic usage disappear. Where do they go? Broken, stolen, burnt, lost, sold. At the start of this particular story we had twenty-five Jewish artefacts, the peasants returned fifteen, in the shop in Prague we now have only eight. This is of course only a story and you can please yourself how you organise fictions to suit your intentions, but it is supposed to be a researched fact that after a hundred years only three per cent of all objects manufactured by man survive, and after three hundred years only one percent. It is an interesting but, I suppose, not so surprising a fact, that what has survived a hundred years stands a one in three chance of surviving three hundred. A third of all things survived will go on being survived by a third forever. (p. 90)

Greenaway’s been castigated in the past for his work’s “inhumanity” — think of the reactions to the rape scene in The Baby of Macon, for example. But here, I think, it’s the anaesthetized calm of the authorial voice that makes the tragic moments so unbearable ... because the mechanical quality of the structure and the mechanical quality of the prose echo the absurd mechanical quality of the process of the accumulation of the gold, the massive rationalized industrialism of the Final Solution ... and when the author suddenly shifts and speaks directly to us, it’s like a medium breaking trance ... Certainly Greenaway has always been fascinated with classification systems and game-playing more than with character; but here that urge to order takes on both a narrative purpose and a punishing reflexivity.

If I had a complaint to make, it would be with the production of the book ... do I seem petty to complain here about typos? The book is saturated with misspellings, which is annoying enough in any professionally-produced book, but maddening here, where the voice fetishizes facts, and where there is much subtle play in the slight mangling of those facts: when the crashed Mercedes’ license plate changes numbers in one story, or a gold bar is smelted in August of 1945 (where April would make sense, and August makes no sense at all (since the crash occurs in May)), well, how do we take that then? Dammit.