No comments for the time being whilst BlogSpeak clears some nasty viruses out of its system…
Archive for September, 2003
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Black Sabbath, Status Quo, Hawkwind, Fleetwood Mac and others seemingly line up for PiL triple-disk tribute album… [spotted via NTK]
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RIP Edward Said. A good man, and a brave scholar, who achieved that rare and precious feat of giving theoretical scholarship relevance to the way in which ordinary people experience the world.
Lots of obits, here, here, here, here and here. Probably loads more too. An archive of his work is here. And finally, last month a 25th-anniversary edition of Orientalism, the book that made his name, was published by Penguin. Said wrote a new foreword to this edition to encompass the events of the last two years, an adaptation of which can be found here.
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Just because I am a big SY sucker.
Daydream Nation was actually the first SY album I bought, and to be honest I hated it the first three or four times. But back then £8.00 was a lot of money to a kid, so I stuck with it. This is certainly part of the reason why I’d always describe it as my favourite one of theirs. But these days Murray Street’s the one I reach for first. Obviously everything released imediately post-11th September took on an additionally haunting quality that was never there in the first place – and since this album was recorded in the band’s studio near Ground Zero, you can’t help sense its unwitting presence. For me, ‘Disconnection Notice’ is the killer – ‘Did you get your disconnection notice?/Mine came in the mail today’ just sounds like its straddling the line between apocalypse and community normality that cut through that time. Disconnected from what? And why so calmly resigned to it? Just coincidence, but no less haunting.
Speaking of which, one of the first records I bought after 9-11 was Born into trouble as the sparks fly upward by The Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band (subtitle: ‘Plays a tiniest worried symphonies’). I was sitting on the train coming home reading the inlay card – and this was still in the days when people had one eye trained on the skies – reading track titles like ‘Sisters! Brothers! Small Boats of Fire are falling from the Sky’, and ‘Built then Burnt [Hurrah! Hurrah!]‘. You shouldn’t read too much into these coincidences, but it really spooked me at the time. That album’s final refrain ‘Musicians are cowards/Musicians are cowards …’ still hurts.
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Angus has been eulogising about the Melbourne streetmaps (I’ve never heard anyone get affectionate about the London A-Z…), but as I sit here beneath a map of the Balkans, I have to admit, I’m something of a cartophile too. And purely by coincidence, I’ve just read this passage, from Czeslaw Milosz’s Noble Prize Winner, The Issa Valley (Penguin, 2001), which is great, by the way:
“Although the atlas showed neither Gine nor any of the surrounding locations, something it could easily be forgiven, Thomas became fascinated by maps – the way the finger went down, and under it were born forests, land tracts, roads, villages, and vast multitudes of people in motion, each distinct, each somehow distinguishable from the other; but how, the moment it was lifted – poof! And just as he had hungered for flight, for a higher perspective on those kneeling in church, so now he ached for a magical magnifying glass powerful enough to bring out all that was hidden beneath the paper’s surface. The more we devote ourselves to that realm of contours, zones, and lines, the greater our enthrallment. The thrall is as great as when the mind tries to imagine what lies between two numbers. Now, if a map could be drawn to include every house and human, stationary or in motion, that would leave all the horses, cows, cats, plant species, fish in the Issa – not to mention fleas on dogs, shimmering beetles in the grass, and ants and many other things. That meant a map was always approximate. Another discovery gained through his map explorations: Seated up here in the chair is one me, but down there under my finger being held on the blank spot that ought to have been Gine is another. I am pointing at myself, at the shrunken me. The second me is not the same as the one up here; down there, it is merely one among many.”
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Spotted over at It’s a good ideology…. Amazing what you can find.
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Anyone else think this is David Blaine stuff is getting a little beyond a joke? I mean, I have already come out in favour of people taking the mick out of the guy, and I stand by that. What he’s doing in hijacking images of Gandhi, Tianenman Square, etc. for the sake of personal aggrandisement is pretty tasteless, and I hope the whole exercise is deemed a failure and he’s pulled out early to consider the errors he and his publicists have made. And if he loses the money he was going to make out of the whole sorry episode, so be it. But I certainly don’t want the guy dead, hurt, or arrested for the appalling crime of “being American”.
