Possibly the least accurately named song ever..

would be one note samba by Jobim. I tried to learn it the other night. One note? By the time it's finished telling you it's only got one note it's gone through 10 chords, only two of them not weird. Tonight I start again.

Cars

After years of holding out we are finally buying a car. Or trying to anyway. Everybody who owns a car seems to live in Saggart or Clonsilla or some other place you can only get to by car.

Not knowing anything about cars doesn't help much either.

Barry Adamson on repeat

You know those times when you just have to put Barry Adamson on repeat? I must load some more on to iRob. You get asked, often enough that you'd comment on it, why isn't Barry Adamson huge? Why aren't they queuing up to have him write their soundtracks? Barry Adamson is an ex member of magazine (funky basslines, Sly and the Family Stone covers) and the Bad Seeds (they did dark) who went on to do solo electronic crime jazz. These were soundtracks to imaginary noir films. Just like everybody else from Portishead on you might think, but this was 1988. And Barry Adamson put out Moss Side Story. I first got some of his stuff with The negro inside me in about '94 or so - more for its cool cover version of Serge's je t'aime than anything else. I'd recommend Oedipus Schmoedipus and As above so below which should be easy to get.

That's it. I was too full of words yesterday after a long absence due to idiocy, insomnia, lethargy, deafness, and a strong urge not to ridicule incessantly.

test

DSCN3507
Originally uploaded by Emmaline.

some italics

Master musicians

I finally got my hands on 'Brian Jones presents the pipes of pan at Jajouka' by the Master Musicians of Jajouka. I've been hearing about this album for maybe 20 years. Isn't the net wonderful? All those things I spent my youth hearing about are now available. I can get my hands on old Kosmicherock like Can, Neu!, Faust, Popul Vuh, (I will be reading lots about Popul Vuh soon - apparantly it is the creation myth of the Mayan people and I'm going to Mexico in June) and so on. This album is a legendary psychedelic masterpiece. I came across it again recently in the Wire's list of 100 albums that changed the world if anyone had been listening. There is a fair amount of intervention in the recording - phased rhythm tracs, deep reverb in spots, and some obvious editing. The album takes a lot of stick from purists because of this - but then, it was people like Robert Palmer that did the criticising. I love it. Anyway, I don't like anything pure. I like keeping it unreal as Mr. Scruff puts it. I've been involved in a mailing list called exotica for about 10 years. Exotica is, to take a narrow definition fake jazz with fake polynesian influences. So no, this record is not a literal recording of a seven hour ceremony. But it is a wonderful presentation of psychedelic ritual, and more exciting than the average gnawa album. I can hear its influence in Badawi and in Frederic Galliano. Not in the music so much as the integration of found sound, music, and technology.

Less of a media John...

I've always been suspicious of the process of daily news and avoided consuming it. News doesn't happen on a daily basis, or on the schedule of 7,8,1 and 6 o'clock news programmes. Morning and evening papers are there to sell different things aren't they? Daily or continual news reporting is so wonderfully easy to twist and fool. There was a great part in the documentary The control room where they speculated about why the US might have murdered the Al Jazeera reporter on the roof of a hotel in Baghdad. The US media attache Josh Rushing (one of the most sympathetic people in the film) pointed out that if they wanted to stop broadcast they could simply jam the signal. No fuss about it. The Samir Khader of Al Jazeera pointed out that the two other arab media sources broadcasting to the general world in Baghdad were also attacked (with casualties) - the fact that al arabiya was attacked wasn't even mentioned in Ireland at the time - the US murder of a Palestinian journalist did get mentioned. He then replayed the arrival of US tanks in the centre of the city. There was supposedly a joyous crowd there. When you look at it again there is a suspiciously homogenous crowd of boys and young men that arrive with the tanks. Nobody joins them. He then pointed out that the young men did not speak like Iraqis, were foreign. And nobody broadcasting in town on that day could tell that. By shutting down the arab media, even for a single day, the army's orchestrated media propaganda did its magic. For all we know everybody in all the buildings around may have wanted to join the 'celebrations' at the statue of Saddam but a rational fear of tanks and soldiers kept them away. But I do believe we were successfully lied to. The fact that anyone knows that now is irrelevant - the result has already happened. Another side of this is that I never really believe the baby killing stories that almost inevitably arise from a war - whether this be Cromwell in Ireland, the Boers, or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. They take days to disseminate and years to be disproved. Not that it matters the feelings they create never go away. I still felt sick when I arrived in London and saw Oliver Cromwell's statute outside the houses of parliament. Mind you he's not that great a role model for republicans - he never could get himself elected no matter how often he purged parliament and the voting register.

Continuous news, rolling news sources like Sky News just love a big juicy pageant like the pope's death. I mean, don't get me wrong, he was interesting and did wonderful things for the end of the repressive system in Eastern Europe and soviet Asia (unlike the US Republican party which did nothing for those people but likes to, as Doonesbury said at the time, 'claim it' as their victory), relations with islam and the arab world, and went some way to making amends for the appalling treatment of jews by catholics. Not that that helped relations with extremist zionism of course as on the ground in Israel/Palestine the catholic church refused to be part of the programme of taking land from arabs, even when it was offered for christian churches. Anyway, they're still broadcasting it, and he's still dead. That's it. No news yet - just continuous news.

And the reason I'm less of a John is that I managed to not buy, and not miss, Sunday newspapers this week. I tend to buy The Sunday Times as it has Irish news in it but isn't as vacuous as most Irish newspapers (the Business Post being the honourable exception - the Sunday Independent being the hilarious nadir of pretend serious journalism). Last week I finally got sick of how much of it, that I read at least, was written by A.A. Gill, that guy Clarkson (he's supposed to only write about cars isn't he?), and Brian Appleyard. All people who have gone down the Julie Burchill route - write, but never read. So, out it goes from my weekly spending and nothing will replace it.

It's summer

It's been a whole week since I posted; as I said - what was to say? I have this seriously nasty cold? Until this morning I have been dizzy and deaf from the ear infection part of it. Right now I don't feel absolutely shit for the first time in a week and a half. And it's sunny and warm and walking to work was a pleasure and I could listen to headphones and chose Johnny Cash (American IV) knowing I have part III on my computer waiting to be put onto iRob whenever my ears are up to music again.

Went out to dinner in my favourite restaurant (mentioned below) last night. And guess what? The prices are up and the quality is down. The paneer came in what seemed to be the juice of a can of alphabet spaghetti without the slug like pasta. Do cooks think we won't notice that they have resorted to pouring sugar into the food? Listen, the thing with tomato sauces is you got to cook them. Takes time. No substitute for it. For some reason indian food cannot accept passata or other prepared tomatoes in it either. You have to cook from scratch. If you've not done the experiments save your time: I have.

Oh well, it was still good and not expensive. And they have more chillies in their food now.

I normally call in on DarkTeen on a Tuesday to watch Star Trek (one of countless bad habits) but I felt another night doing nothing would kill my cold, and anyway we've bittorrented half the series (if you want spoilers...). Then my beloved rang to say she'd booked our holiday in Mexico in June (and she'd got a decent price, she's much better at this stuff than me) so we had to go out to celebrate.

"Can I groove a jump off your bake."

What? It's a phrase from a tobacco company's glossary accompanying a policy document on marketing to generation x (this was '94). That and another wonderful brainstorming session on selling candied tobacco to the kids are at www.fairenough.com. As they say themselves "it might be funnier if it wasn't true".

Excuse the delay in writing - I had a nasty head cold and I was thinking at home that I should get a phone (and therefore the net) - but then I realised what would I talk about, the incredibly detailed hallucinations I was having? Or how my lips cracked open from dehydration because I couldn't breathe properly? Whoops, I already have.

Apparantly it's #29

I popped over to the Dewaele brothers website and found out the radio soulwax sessions are up to 29. That's this month's download, I was listening to it on the way to work this morning, but I didn't hear much.

Get this mix by JD Twitch

I went over to the site of those people that did the Kill the DJ mix CD (Optimo/Twitch and Wilkes) and they have a free mix available, starts off dancehall d'n'b and goes into A forest by the Cure and Radio by Joy Division. Loses a bit of impetus towards the end but it's still fantastic and free.

Apparantly there are 1o more about in the filesharing world for those that participate in that.

I still want to talk about Daft Punk...

...but I ended up listening to Annie's debut album Anniemal instead of taking notes (it's all about the detail with Daft Punk) and loving her fizzy pop. It seems to have been released last year but I only saw 12"s in the shops in the last couple of weeks. That's what happens when they release stuff on CD only; I don't even find out about it. We've loved her stuff (what little there was) since The greatest hit which, according to all the web bios was released in 1999. Maybe, but you try buying it outside Norway before Summer 2000 when I did. Unfortunately her producer/partner Erot died and nothing else was released apart from I will go on which I got on a 2002 release on Loaded.

I always had a thing for breathy girly pop like St. Etienne or Dubstar, and the most played songs on my iPod are cheesy pop (including a couple of Richard X things and he produced the first single from Anniemal), but I can understand that others find it cloying. Nothing on this album has, for me, the sonic impact of greatest hit with it's solid house beat allied to silly disco toms and serious sonic manipulation undermining the pop melody. If you listen close you can hear lots of sounds that appear to have been recorded inside the mouth or very, very close amped up, looped, and multiechoed. The track has a sonic richness allied to glossy melodic pop that you rarely find.

That, and I listened to some of the How to kill the DJ part two, so no in depth examination of Daft Punk's attempt to bring a live rock dynamic to their programmed dance, how they dirtied their beats, and yet, how they haven't stretched beyond one of the many microgenres Arling and Cameron invented for themselves to very little success. It's hard not to feel a little jealous of Optimo, like they're stealing your thing by putting out these releases full of records that you know and love, and that a certain community know and love. But hey, they do it, and they do it better than I could!

A mixed bag of scores...

Went record shopping with a mate this Saturday. Picked up some old Yello secondhand in Abbey Disks - there's a bunch of old stuff there if you're interested- but nothing new there grabbed our attention (apart from an I monster 7"). Moved on to Carbon in Temple Bar where the range of new stuff is always going to be cool, but pricy. Bought a couple of the five or six GAMM 12"s they had there. GAMM are a bootleg label so if you like something you buy it there and then. One was old breaks, something like Tim Love Lee's 12" mix of 'Again son..', you could put it on, pop out for a whiz and still sound like you had mad skills on the breaks. Another was the SWAT cop show funk with a full on samba/batucada beat track. What's not to like? I also bought the Kill the DJ compilation, which I haven't listened to all of but it's fairly safe to say if you liked 2 many DJs (which one? I had about six at one point and I know they did several sets after that, I don't know where they are now and...) you should give this a blast. The set list is a bit more now (Gang of Four) but also more daring (they mix into the Langley School Project doing Good Vibrations into that) but the game has been raised. We then popped into CIty Discs and browsed mainly the second hand vinyl and CDs. What a great shop, best prices in Dublin for new records, great selection of new electronic vinyl, and a huge range of second hand CDs. My mate bought an old Afghan Whigs 12", a Black Strobe 12" and something else, all winners he says. We both bought the LCD Soundsystem's new single for 2.99, just as we were moaning about the price of the album on vinyl which doesn't even come with the singles which were vinyl only in the first place, yes we have them but we wanted to keep on being treated specially. I suppose going on to a big record label means you can't indulge in that kind of behaviour. And I bought a Boyd Rice/NON compilation of ambient work from '75 to 2004 for a fiver. Not bad going.

I've been hearing about Boyd Rice for so many years it's amazing I haven't heard his stuff before. I suppose I listen to very little power electronics or industrial or whatever. This one passes the girlfriend test, some of them must you know, we listened to most of it last night whithout her going 'what is this shite?' I like the way that he takes the John Cage attitude to his noise art - he gets around people saying 'that's not music' by saying that it isn't. Cage said 'don't call it music if the term offends you'. You might have noticed a Cage connection in my name and the blog name BTW. So why would you listen to this if previously you listened to music? We were round visiting some friends with a nine-month old child. She had all these annoying toys that produced facile melodies (including one that kept on going do-re-mi to fa-do-re!) and my mate was saying it drove you mad and they got into your head. I was saying that there was nothing better for earworms like that than music that cannot be parsed by rhythm, melody, or harmony but simply by timbre and structure alone. I said I'd burn him a nice drone CD I have, but this Boyd Rice one will do too.

But it was getting late and we had Bad Santa to watch. I'm sure I'll mention that here again.

And I meant to write a review of Daft Punk's Human After All. I've had it for some time and not listened much to it. Next time.

Media Whoredom

I became a media whore yesterday evening. Somebody in work mentioned me to the researcher on a radio show that he was on as someone who might talk about blogs if I was rung. So they did and I talked on 2FM (a national radio station) with Dave Fanning and Karlin Lillington, a journalist and blogger who knows far more about blogs than I do, for a few minutes and felt like a phony. That said, I do stand by everything I said but I don't think a life as a rent-a-quote is for me.

On the way in this morning I listened to a compilation CD somebody made for me called 'The creative genius of William Shatner' and it ruled. This is stuff from The Transformed Man, his legendary performance of Rocket Man at the Science Fiction Awards in 1978, his priceline ads, and some stuff I'd never heard before, including collaborations with Ben Folds from a few years ago. They worked together again on his recent album Has Been. If you get a chance have a listen: there are moments of genius on it.

Goggling at Google

So what spurred my rant on the French revolution? Lara Marlowe wrote a piece in the Irish Times about a French project to digitise old newspapers in which she quoted the director of the Bibliotheque Nationale de Franc, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, suggesting that Europe do something about the hegemony of American information sources on the internet. I have for some time been worried about the near monopoly google has on student's research. Even when far more appropriate tools are available to strong students the pull of just typing in a question to google is irresistable. The example cited by M.Jeanneney was the prevailing attitudes to the French revolution in the Anglo-saxon world - that now includes us by the way - which would be quite shocking and extreme to most French people. The funny thing is that a search for 'french revolution' on google brings you to George Mason University's excellent site.

Are the French being paranoid? I don't think so. It would be them that points it out of course, but in the face of a sustained barrage of public and official racism that is truly shocking and awesome (shock and awe together are a euphemism for terror) I think they probably have more cause to worry than most not in actual imminent danger of having a president googling for a target which he will then order bombed back to the stone age. If he choses a target that isn't already living in the stone age of course.

Google has reached a monopoly just as it has become less reliable. Networks of links, farmed and managed by commercial organisations, are undermining the relevancy and purity of its beautiful ranking system. No doubt they are programming day and night to fix it. No doubt also that once you start hacking and kludging your very paradigm has been undermined. In reality of course their system was compromised from the beginning by non-automated systems ranking the importance of linking sites (you don't really think they weighted every site on the internet do you?) but we ignored that as it solved the problem of reams of useless sites making their way through the older stochastic relevence ranking systems. Those systems were undermined immediately by web programmers spamming their sites up the robots ranking. A war of attrition began with the search engines which the 'bot programmers, playing catch up with the field, was destined to lose. What google did to get around this was rank sites by how many sites linked to them and weight these sites by how many linked to them. In practise, in the early days, this meant being on the top of Yahoo! I know this from looking after a website that was on the top of google's ranking for years despite having much larger competitors that had many more sites linking to them.

You all remember, I'm sure, that typing in 'French military victories' into google and hitting 'I feel lucky' leads you to a page asking do you mean 'French military defeats' and such racist nonsense as -
'World War I
Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.'
To set the record straight, just as Germany was defeated in WWII by the Soviet Union, the Western front was an irrelvance, Germany was defeated as an attacking force in WWI by France and the appalling losses it was willing to take to defend itself from invasion. Those losses effectively finished it as a warring nation for the foreseeable future. Given its history of invading most of Europe for the previous centuries this was probably not a bad thing.
So yes, the French are right to be worried by an unreliable racist monopoly on information.

What has the French Revolution ever done for us?

I have been interested at the propaganda victory and ideological debate surrounding the French Revolution ever since I was in school. We had to study William Burke's 'reflections on the revolution in France'. William burke was an Irish conservative and British MP. He was a Tom in other words. His essay began, roughly from memory, 'when I first beheld the queen of France, then the dauphiness, alighting from her carriage her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground...' and lots of flowery prose defending the beauty of a corrupt and murderous monarchy. I was livid at being forced to read this gilded nonesense and being told, no argument, that it was great prose. I discovered William Blake's 'let the brothels of Paris be opened'

The Queen of France just touched this globe,
And the pestilence darted from her robe;
But our good queen quite grows to the ground,
And a great many suckers grow all around.

I can remember the joy I felt reading through my Da's old book of Blake, most of it incomprehensible to me, and discovering this; someone else we were told was 'good' lacerated Burke's idiotic pretensions. It felt good, centuries later, to have my point of view expressed on this issue by a great writer. Imagine how much better it would have felt at the time? "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" as Wordsworth put it.

Over the years I started noticing things about the French revolution. It never got mentioned without the accompanying phrase 'not since the worst excesses...' The French revolution has become a byword for tyranny in the English speaking word. The most famous actor in it is not Robbespierre or Marat but the Scarlet Pimpernel. A fictional character from 1905. More than a century out of whack. I had read discipline and punish by Foucault and knew that the rate of execution during the 'Reign of Terror' and the French Revolution was slightly lower than that during the last days of the ancien regime. I knew that the people they killed were dedicated to overthrowing the state, and sought allies abroad to bring this about. I knew that the number killed in the 'Reign of Terror' was, from other reading, about a third of the number massacred after the suppression of the Paris Commune. But they weren't toffs. The guillotine was regularly held up as an example of the inhumanity of the revolutionaries. Yet, I also knew that the guillotine was a device scientifically designed to minimise suffering and get the ugly business over quickly. As distinct from the ancien regime's pageantry of torture, degredation, humiliation, and day-long executions. This is the pageantry of a regime that has lost control. An interesting side note on the cruelty of the guillotine is that I have read several times that the disembodied head remained conscious for some time (why only with the guillotine? Why not with hacking a head off with an axe, or pulling it off with a rope?), and that this was an unconscionable cruelty. I happened to be reading some scientific and medical history some years back and came across Roselyne Rey's History of pain which refers to the late eighteent to early nineteenth century controversy over where pain came from, the nerve endings or the brain itself. In it there is reference to correspondance between a rural French doctor and a rather more important one in Britain. In the letter he makes reference to having heard an account of the execution of a Duchess(?) and that after her head came off it was picked up and slapped. His sources said she blushed. The eminent doctor in a reading to the Royal Society cited this as evidence that pain came from the brain (for if sensibility - but only the rarified sensibility of a Duchess mind - remained after the body was severed from the brain, so did pain). Obviously hearesay is hardly a source of scientific opinion: it is however a source of public opinion. And it is one that has stayed with us in the English speaking world.

Vive la revolution!

Pigeons eating vomit...

... slowly freezing on the pavement. As Martin Amis said of pigeons, what is it that even they consider worth excreting? Another nasty thought is that most of what you excrete (anally) used to be part of yourself. I think we have a comforting fiction that it is undigested food or something. When it's undigested food you can see that it is (think sweetcorn) most of it is recycled cells and bacteria. If we produce a half litre of blood a week it has to go somewhere or we'd explode. Oh, and lots of bacteria too. Take some antibiotics and notice the effect. Mind you they do mess up your digestion anyway.

Misogynistic one-trick ponies and the right to have silence

I went to make tea for my Beloved this morning before I left for work and John Waters came on the radio to discuss the morning's papers. I had just read an article comparing this radio station's morning coverage of the papers with others. They talked of the gravitas of Newstalk's survey of how the papers were covering stories. I thought to myself 'is that fecker ever off the TV/radio? And he only ever has one thing to bang on about. Fathers and child custody. You'd think he didn't have custody of his own child. You'd think that his persistent pursuit of victimhood was backed up by something other than being a rich columnist (think Julie Burchill) with reactionary views (sexist in his case, racist in hers) whose voice was never off the media.' I came back with the tea and sure enough his review of the papers was about child custody. Now I normally leave work just when the paper review comes on (I live near work but I start early), but he appears to be there about a third of the time. Is taking his views seriously really to be considered as gravitas? He is a lonely buffoon.

Please make him and his atavistic colleagues seeking victim status (you know the ones, those that hide their misogyny under a cloak of 'saying what others dare not') shut up and allow us silence from their tedious, bland, formulaic, reactionary drivel.

The Beloved 

Restaurants

I don't know. It's funny. Myself and my Beloved went to a restaurant on Sunday (I was visiting a sick friend and was starving so I didn't want to cook) and it cost 45 yoyos for two take-out style Thai curries and a bottle of indifferent wine. No surprise there really. Went to an excellent restaurant last night and had four different dishes (dhal, paneer, chestnuts and green beans, spicy potatoes) and rice and a nice bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc (Nautilus - they've gone screw cap which is fine with a young (2004) wine like that, they didn't have the gruner veltliner left, which is a pity as it goes really well with curry) and it came to 48 yoyos. This place isn't your normal curry house; it really is distinguishable from the ultra fatty muck that you normally get and that caters for people that have already had a skinful by the time they get in the door (ever leave an indian take-out in the fridge overnight and see what happens to it? I promise that if you do you will have to be drunk to order there again). I suppose in the other place we had the joy of scarlet shiny polyester tablecloths and all the Chinese staff pretending to be Thai. And what a joy that was.

We don't eat meat. I think that should make eating out very cheap, but then I think meat should be very expensive. Most restaurants think nothing, however, of serving up some pasta mess that really should cost a fiver (and does in Italy) and charging 14 for it. Jaipur gets the pricing right. We started eating fish a couple of years ago. I think it was partially because we were sick of getting ripped off in restaurants. If I'm going to pay I'd like to do it for something that cost money not some "goat's cheese tartlet" that has been in your cold room for a month and comes out dry (the filling) and soggy (the pastry) at the same time from your microwave. Does anyone like goat's cheese tartlet? We were discussing clueless restaurant reviewers on the way home, my Beloved thought that being a socialite and posh doesn't necessarily mean you know anything about food. She also was saying that she hoped Jaipur didn't cop on to what good value they are. This really is food that you could easily be charged twice the price for somewhere else. I'm going back. Soon.

Laurie Anderson

I met Laurie Anderson last night. I felt like such a fanboy nerd stalker walking up to her and put on a posh voice as she made me nervous. To put it in perspective I was sorry I didn't have my camera with me as I wanted to see what she had called the settings programmed into her effects unit. However she was so pleasant and animated that I was put at my ease. You know the way she talks on the records? Well she really does simply talk like that. The caesurae, the odd accents placed on words, the measured pace. But with permanently arched brows and an infectious smile. She was performing at the opening of her show in IMMA in Kilmainham. I didn't go to the show after as the place was crowded and I live accross the road so I can go and experience it at my leisure. It's a funny thing, Michael Durand - a photographer friend - mentioned that she was playing in the gallery and I assumed that I wouldn't be able to get in without tickets, that I'd be spotted as an interloper, rather than given not bad wine, a free performance, and a chance to talk to someone whose work I have loved for years. I get that feeling about art galleries and film festivals, they accidentally exclude people; I always thought it was strange that the theatre festival got people going to the theatre even if they didn't normally do it while the film festivals always seem to make a demotic activity elitist.

So what did we talk about? Unfortunately I didn't add to her store of happiness. I was wondering had she tried to do anything about the obnoxious Ford Ka ad that soundalikes the title track from her Bright Red album. This song has background sythesiser washes and male and female voices, disturbingly uninflected and changing mid sentence without warning or break in the rhythm, saying 'get into the car little girl: it's a brand new cadillac'. The Ford ad has similar synth sounds and a similarly disembodied voice going 'get into the Ka'. There's no way that an ad agency can really think a song about a paedophile child abductor is really a good idea for an ad for a family car? A small and young family car at that. Her attitude was that it happens all the time and if you spent your time following up on all of them you'd never get anything else done.

Great to meet her.