[Shards Fragments and Totems]
CHRIST, WHY won’t that damned baby go to sleep????!!!
OK, OK, we put you too bed too late cos we had a late frigging appointment at the health clinic — stop punishing us like this!
You said you wanted a bed — well WE GOT YOU THE FUCKING BED — but that’s no excuse for learning ON JUST THE THIRD NIGHT to jump out of the damned thing and spend the evening bawling out of your bedroom door!!!
AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, John’s a godless communist and you know how anti-authoritarian THEY are, hmmm? Those burning book jokes are just a little too pointed, you know what I’m saying? As for myself, I have never been a professed Satanist, though the texts are entertaining, and Satanists have been valued colleagues in the past — especially those that work in the City. (Dunno where my mortgage would be now if it weren’t for them!)
Still, Luka says that good writing is “the lamest, crappest thing anyone anywhere could aspire too. it’s not even difficult, any half-brained idiot can manage it. it’s the very thing that makes blogs so stultifyingly homogenous, ‘good’ writing, ‘good’ taste, ‘good’ opinions”. As you would imagine, this simply shows that Luka has been nestling comfortably in the blog circle jerk (many thanks to Tim.E.Waster at UK-Dance for this particular bon mot) for too long. I’m sure that if all you ever look at is Reynolds, TWANBOC, Eden, Luka himself, Masters of the Midnight Blog or Dubmission, and let’s face it I try pretty hard to read these and only these, that you will become bored with the endless round of well-constructed syllogisms, informed debate and interesting insight. But these are scarcely representative of the wider blogosphere. Oh no. These are some of the few small wisps of wheat in a field of chaff. Most blogs are only semi-comprehensible and certainly only half-literate, and I don’t mean that in a good way (this is probably a pretty good description of more than half of my stuff — or at least, the stuff I don’t remember writing when three sheets to the wind. Which is what people actually notice…). In fact, so far as I can tell, a good half of the blogs out there are just aimless rightwing dribbling.
If Luka wants “crappy”, “offensive” blogging by “bad boys”, there’s an almost endless supply of it. Try http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/warblogger.php, or, better, http://www.andrewsullivan.com/ — he’s the most popular blogger on the web, even more so than the very nice Doc Searls, and I think this tells you everything you need to know about mass market blogging.
Of course I could make serious point about we anti-authoritarian politicos and Left-Hand-Path-ers tend to value a bit of well-reasoned discourse and hence like good writing, but fuck it, here’s a random FUCK .
Oh, and Luka, if you’re out, pop over and we’ll share a bloater.
“To make dancehall you HAVE to look like an ugly bastard.”
Hmmm.
Tenor Saw. Most of Ward 21. Shabba Ranks.
Lady Saw. Lady G. Cecille.
Possibly a flaw in the argument that no number of Yellowman pictures can fix… then again possibly not. All pictures of butt-ugle dancehall stars welcomed…
Fab minimalist new Dizzee video here.
I like it a lot.
It’s seriously distrubing the hipsters but I say it’s fab, and not cos I’m being contrarian, it’s cos I like it.
Better than I Luv U?
:-0
Techno whinges
My blasted laptop PC seems to be dying on me. Keyboard’s no longer working, which makes it less than useful as a portable, and at least for a while it was crashing if the lid wasn’t at a particular angle. It weighs a ton and the battery lasts about fifteen minutes. Mind you, it has been hammered for the last four years. I’d really like a Tablet PC — that technology that everyone slagged off a few months ago. I think I’m on of the few people who really benefit from that. I seem to spend my working life taking notes on paper and then typing them up into reports. If I could take the notes and then convert them to text afterwards I could save maybe 30% of my time. Basically, with these things you write into the screen of the laptop with a special pen thing, and what you write gets converted to text afterwards. I have a Palm, but this would be more convenient, because you just write freehand. I tried a Toshiba Portege 3500 that belonged to a guy I was working with and it seemed great. But they’re very expensive — The Tosh would be about £1800, maybe more if I want to put Firewire on it. That’s a lot for a laptop, though it does have a 1.3Ghz mobile P-M thingy and wi-fi.
What I want to know is whether Windows XP for tablets has any trouble running music apps. I’m not buying it for music but for work, but nevertheless this puts a big and unexpected hole in my technology budget, so I’d like to get some musical return on the investment. Especially since my equally ancient and decrepit beige G3 Mac is beginning to fall over — Cubase 4.1, which admittedly is a very old and pretty ropey version, crashes constantly — so something like a second-hand Quicksilver G4 was on the cards. Looks like that will have to be delayed so I can cope with the cost of a new laptop.
So I want to know if it’ll have any problems running fruityloops or muzys, on which I’ve been doing some technoid ragga, and maybe Soundforge or Cubase — will the Tablet stuff stop them running? It would be cool to have it as a recorder, maybe with a little USB audio interace hanging off it… But I can’t find anything on the net about it. There’s some Tablet PC-specific music apps, but they don’t prove that audio apps will work. But this guy seems to be using a Tablet PC with fairly normal music apps, albeit not the ones I have in mind, though his apps still seem to use MIDI and possibly audio recording, so maybe interference with drivers and DLLs isn’t that bad. It’s a bit of a worry though.
Well I’ve been involved in small press stuff since 1987 or something and I don’t have any discipline, as John well knows!
Nah, it’s cos people who’ve been involved in small press can write better.
I’m extremely pleased that Gyrus is doing a blog. He’s an extremely interesting and talented guy. Seriously. Anyone who’s read any of the 2012s (his magazine / book series in the nineties) will know that he’s very well informed and very smart. He also writes like a dream. Check him out for informed and entertaining comment on and insight into the under-the-counter culture.
Fuck.
How do I get different free ads on my top of my blog?
Probably by paying money.
Blissed Psychedelic Freaks Bequeath Skykissing Guitars to Industrial Autopsy Aesthetes
… which is perhaps one of the greatest subheads ever. Though at first I thought it was produced by machine. Entertaining to see Reynolds’ take on the micro-revival (surely more conceptual than real) of industrial leads with an extended paean to Cabaret Voltaire, whom Matt TWANBOC put in a Grey Area (sudden thought — perhaps this was actually an exceptionally erudite in-joke on Matt’s behalf? Shudder to think I didn’t get it first time round…).
I have to say that the idea of a TG reunion festival at a seaside Pontins interests me a lot less than, say, a Caister Soul Weekender. You won’t get Louie Vega doing a garage and soul 7″s set for a start. In fact I doubt you’ll get anyone playing anything you can dance to, still less sing along to. If they were smart they’d have Shaka playing, but I bet they won’t. (Big up Eden for the fabulous quote about why Shaka was industrial really. Sort of.)
In fact if they’re smart they’ll get me and Eden in to DJ so that people can get some relief from the unremitting onslaught of unlistenable bollocks. Will anyone play Supercat’s Boops? No? Well what kind of industrial festival is that then? (Note: I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about this festival and this is nothing but sheer prejiudice.)
Anyway. Reynolds is talking about archive releases of old Cabs stuff. Now, apart from Nag Nag Nag, did they do anything THAT good on record before Red Mecca? I always found Mussolini Headkick et al a bit art for art’s sake, but I wasn’t listening to them first time round, hearing that stuff a couple of years later. I got heavily involved when 2X45 came out and I still think this is the best jumping off point for the Cabs. I think their best stuff is probably CrackDown and Drinking Gasoline, which were their more deliberately poppy stuff for Virgin ferchrissakes, but to me it’s the stuff I most want to listen to. If this sounds like I’m judging the Cabs by the prism of today’s taste instead of taking all the Cabs stuff, like 3 Mantras, on its own merits, then I’m probably guilty as charged. Nevertheless, Drinking Gasoline really deserves to be re-mastered, and indeed remixed. The CD copy has awful sound, but the tracks are fantastic pulsing proto-techno, a dancefloor version of industrial psychedelia, and really do with a polish. Kino in particular is excellent,with hiccupping vocals and stuttering, muscular beats, quite 2 steppy but with a sophisticated acid feel. Sleepwalking is great too, really nervous pounding rhythms with great screeching synth lines. You’d like it.
Reynolds is quite right to slot Industrial into the psychedelia thread. IIRC, as far as Gen was concerned the sixties never ended and he was carrying right on with it. (This isn’t meant as a dig BTW — he used to talk about it, and at least by his own lights he was spot on). His use of Manson stuff was nothing to do with shock value IMO, it was more a way of examining how and why the sixties “went wrong”, just as his use of Holocaust stuff wasn’t about shock value, but of examining how twentieth century industrialisation “went wrong”: genocide as a perverted industrial process.
To this list must be added Z’ev
Oh yeah, cracking stuff. I’ve shared cigars with Z’ev.
> I got messed up last night and ending up in a really rambling ranty conversation about Wilhelm Reich getting his books burned by
> the US government.
Yeah. Now, don’t forget, he was in the Communist Party too John — and THEY turned him against him too. Which is one of the top two or three reasons I’ll never be a full on Communist.
> I was basically trying to say that just because he had his books burnt didn’t automatically mean his ideas were all alright
Errr, ditto! I presume John’s not throwing the orgone baby out with the reichian bathwater. Hopefully not.
Either way, being labelled “the book burning guy” has to be the most wry of ironies for our John.
> Oh and people always mention “Tools You Can Trust” but I have no idea about them, possibly because they were rubbish.
They were OK-ish. They did a couple of Peel sessions that were fairly good. After hearing them, I remember there was a TV documentary about How We Record Radio One Sessions (And How to Build A Career Therefrom) which was a small eye-opener. Two speccy slapheads who couldn’t quite believe their luck and were totally winging it. The producer — I think it might have been John Leckie — politely described them as “under-rehearsed”. I thought it was kind of cool at the time, and I think it’s kind of cool today. But only kind of.
john eden on who’s a goth and who’s not: This is a bollocks argument because we were talking about genres which very rarely emanate from the band itself, but are given to it by journalists, fans, the mysterious people who decide where things go in record racks, etc.
I suspect my argument isn’t bollocks cos it’s identical to the one you’re putting forward here.
However, yesterday’s blogging was done late at night, and there seems to be a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on my desk, so who am I to argue.
So anyway, it’s perfectly valid to call Killing Joke goths
Nope, that still sounds a bit silly to me. I just don’t think Killing Joke can be called, definitively, goths — I don’t think it’s factual to say that they ARE goths, either as individuals or as a group. I don’t think that they went for them whole eyeliner, black vampiric clothes, Nosferatu poster life style. (Jaz Coleman’s face paint doesn’t count.) I didn’t meet them til much later but one of my cousins knew Killing Joke quite well in the early eighties and went out with Youth for a bit. Reports did not indicate any gothique tendencies.
Of course, John’s point is that your genre is defined by the judgement of the audience and of critics, which is a good variation of the “death-of-the-author” theme. But that still doesn’t work for me in the case of Killing Joke. I don’t remember people calling them goths then, probably for fear of how they’d react, and they just plain don’t feel goth. Anyway, the death of the author argument only applies to records made after 1986, so their first three albums are safe.
> It’s only closet because I got bored of wearing black clothes all the time,
I hadn’t noticed the sartorial development, but I never had John down as a goth, more of a crusty hippy with new romantic tendencies. We once turned up at the Wag club both wearing the same Coco the Clown shoes — quelle surprise!
> but I have no problem lining up with people who are into daaaaaaaaark music
And… this is kinda the “problem”, if there still is one, with Goth. It’s not about “daaaaaaaaark music”. It’s about a safe little pastiche of “daaaaaaaaark music”. If it’s fake dark — the Mission, the Nephilim, the Specimen, 99% of the Sisters, Look Mummy Clowns — then it’s Goth. If it’s real dark — Killing Joke, Coil, Soft Cell, the Wurzels — then it’s not Goth, it’s something else. That’s why the more entertaining, less embarassing end of Goth mutated into a modern version of Glam and merged into the more poodle-y end of the metal scene. When fake dark is a knowing pastiche it can be camp fun. When fake dark is posturing vacuity it’s embarassing, like a punk version of The Enid. Bauhaus doing Ziggy Stardust is arguably more fun than them doing Dark Entries, or certainly Antonin Artaud, though the jury’s out on Bela Lugosi, which is probably still a fine record, just with shit lyrics. Or possibly they’re just camp…
Oh, and reading blogs purely for the information contained in the ads is a bit too Camille Paglia for me, darling ;-).