Music

Shit day

Published on February 3, 20101 Comment

Yesterday was not good. Big things KI can deal with, like S. back in the hospital with a raging infection and a lot of pain and the prospect of staying there the whole of February, perhaps longer. You focus on the practical and don’t try to think about it too much in the small hours of the night, though that was a bit difficult last Thursday when they rang about the emergency operation. It’s the little things that fuck me up, like finding out I lost a work entry card on the train, coming back home to find a fuse on an external drive had shorted the electrics and other minor aggrievations like that. Things that can drive me into a cold rage at the best of times, but especially now.

So fuck it.

Photographic

Published on October 28, 2009

It struck me, when this song came up on the Ipod, that nobody born after about 1989 or so will understand the stalkeriffic lyrics about “bright lights – dark room”, or films like Blow-up. That whole idea of taking a limited number of pictures and then having to take them home to develop them and be surprised at what you photographed is gone, so the plot of those sorts of movies cannot happen anymore. Not a novel observation, of course, but a good excuse to put that video up.

Your Happening World (6)

Published on October 25, 2009

Graham Sleight on the appeal and limitations of Hal Clement’s science fiction:

However simple the central conceit, “Uncommon Sense” nicely demonstrates the central idea of Clement’s fiction: investigating the world will enable you to make sense of it and, very often, benefit in the process. Cunningham may look, superficially, like a Heinleinesque Competent Man, but he differs in having the kind of detailed curiosity I’ve described. Heinlein’s heroes tend to win out because of the strength of their belief, because they’re right but the world doesn’t know it (quite) yet. Clement’s heroes tend to win out because their faith in empiricism is ultimately rewarded. (The unspoken axiom there, of course, is that empiricisim is sufficient to solve any problems that may come along. It’s no surprise, then, that Clement’s stories tend to be arranged so that this indeed is the case. The question of how often a situation like the one in “Uncommon Sense” might arise in everyday life is not addressed.) There are a couple more arguments that might be made against Clement’s worldview. First is that empiricism tends to trump all other values — contemporary readers might balk a little at the scene in “Uncommon Sense” where he kills the crab-creatures just on the off-chance that he might find out things about them. The second is that he’s not particularly interested in character. Characters have traits, to be sure — Cunningham is determined, the two men who have highjacked his ship are “villains.” But any idea of a more rounded selfhood is very rare in Clement.

Other science fiction writers that fit this description are Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Forward, amongst others (yes, they tend to be male). That’s the sort of science fiction I grew up with, somewhat lacking perhaps in the characterisation or literary departments, but as Graham says, promoting a worldview in which experimentation and rational thought are key to understanding the universe, where it didn’t matter what your shape was, as long as you could talk the language of Science (even if most of the heroes of these stories were of solid Anglosaxon stock). It’s a kind of science fiction that can’t really be written anymore today, as we expect more than just clever puzzles in our stories. Nevertheless there is value in them; the best of them show you how scientific reasoning works, that the universe can be understood and reasoned with. Hal Clement was a master at this and you could do worse than to check out his best story, Mission of Gravity, in which the planet Mesklin, with its oblong shape and gravity varying from 3g at the equator to 275 or so g at the poles is the star, a great example of worldbuilding grounded in science as well as how to make a didactic story worth reading.

Meanwhile Margaret Atwood would like you to know that she doesn’t write that icky science fiction. Whatever.

Moving on, this series of photographs of dead albatross chicks stuffed full with plastic is, as Paul McAuley says, very Ballardian, but also upsetting. These albatrosses nest at Midway in the middle of the Pacific and when the parent birds set out to find food for their chicks, they instead return home with plastic garbage, from the huge floating plastic trash fields that collect in the North Pacific, trapped by the North Pacific Gyre. This is actually a problem that afflicts every ocean, with no easy solution in sight.

Ballardian was also a word used on the BBC4’s synthpop weekend, as more than one early eighties synth pioneers explained the inspiration they got from Ballard, something I was sure Owen would’ve mentioned. Instead he concentrated on the dept post-punk owned to modernist and brutalist architecture, something also mentioned by more than one artist on the documentary. It’s kind of obvious when you look at it, the clear, stark lines of the fifties and sixties architecture these bands grew up in echoed in the cold, “inhuman” sounds of their music, both fascinated and repulsed by the dehumanisation inherent in high modernist technology, just as this was about to disappear from the cities and towns they grew up in. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that many of these bands came from dying industrial towns, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, all later to be transformed into post-modern shopping ‘n art wastelands in the eighties and nineties).

What struck me personally, both in the interviews and the clips, was the lack of computers. The whole micro computer revolution, already taking shape in California at the same time completely passed these bands by, using synthesisers, drum computers and tape recorders as purely mechanical instruments. (The musical soundtrack to the pc revolution was always more likely to be progrock than synthpop anyway.) In some ways you could call this the last music from the industrial age, the last truly modern, future looking genre. After that post-modernism and the end of history comes in and there’s no longer room for linear ideas of progress and such.

What do the following videos have in common?

Published on August 16, 2009

Billy Ocean — When the Going Gets Tough.

Tina Turner — We Don’t Need Another Hero.

A-Ha — The Living Daylights

Glenn Frey — The Heat is On

And of course: Duran Duran — A View to A Kill

That’s right. If you watched the music video, there was no need to see the movie anymore…

Teardrop Manoeuvres in the Dark

Published on August 4, 20094 Comments

Owen on Julian Cope’s autobiography, Head-on, his abilities as a writer and how wrong his musical preferences seen in retrospect: Part of what is interesting in it is in seeing just how wrong the Liverpool in-crowd (of which Cope was unabashedly one) were, how their coolness and their talent were in inverse proportion. As a rule, if the young Cope dismisses a band – John Foxx’s Ultravox, Visage, Japan, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – they will be very interesting, but if he takes them seriously – Echo and the Bunnymen, Wah!, his own group – then it’s Merseybombast all the way. .

Of course, even at the time Echo and the Bunnymen were a punchline on The Young Ones… Like Depeche Mode, they were a band always trying slightly too hard to be convincing. Cope’s own band, The Teardrop Explodes at least had the saving grace of having a sense of humour — how could it not, Cope having named it after a specific panel of a specific Daredevil comic? Cope could get awfully seriously and was convinced of his own importance as musical genius at the time, but it was always balanced by a certain playfullness his more poofaced rivals didn’t have. This is best seen in Kilimanjaro, the 1980 debut album and the Teardrops’ best, one of the best albums of the first half of the eighties: with all its punk and post-punk influences it also has a sparkling, natural lightness to it, cheerful keyboards and brass section, sort of hinting of what Paul Weller would do much later much more bombastically. There’s more than Merseybombast there.

(And isn’t that, or “Madchester” or Bristolian blagging just a localised version of second or even third city syndrome, where to even be noticed by the juggernaut that’s London you need to shout seven times louder? It’s not something we really have in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam may be the biggest city in the country, but is not much bigger than Rotterdam or Utrecht and while it may be so arrogant as to assume it’s the centre of all arts, the reality is that it’s just as provincial as any sleepy town out in the boondocks, endlessly gazing its navel, letting the other cities go on with actually doing things. But I digress.)

Fortunately Owen didn’t write this post just to slag off Cope and his pals, but to praise another of my favourite albums of that time, OMD’s Dazzle Ships:

If Dazzle Ships is a concept album, the concept seems to be communication, travel and distribution as enabled by technology, something usually carried out dispassionately, but here made overwhelmingly romantic, a pathetic fallacy for obsolete machinery, with an underlying terror at the prospect of turning ourselves over to abstractions, whether technology or capital. So there’s a willed innocence to much of it, with ‘Telegram’ making this wholly superseded technology wildly exciting – ‘I’ve got a telegram!’ he sings, attempting to tap into the joy of its early discovery. Elsewhere, it’s about deception as much as communication. The Dazzle Ships of the title are perfectly chosen, as this experiment in warpaint for Great War battleships was, until after 1945 Britain’s only major experiment with Modernist abstraction in public life, a utopian idea utilised for depressingly, if impressively atavistic purposes. The title track, with its collage of empty space, foghorns, forlorn drones and sudden, panicked alarms, is almost synaesthetic in its evocation of a locked-down landscape controlled by the defence industries, a blank lullaby to Cold War big tech.

What Dazzle Ships evokes in me is a feeling of retrofuturism. It sounds like it could be the sidetrack to one of those mid-seventies distopian big budget movies like Rollerball or Logan’s Run where most of the interest is in the set building, but unlike those movies aware that this future won’t happen. There’s an element of both repellance and fascination about technology in Dazzle Ships. On the one hand there’s that seventies view of modern technology as being inherently alienating through its use by big business and big government as tools to oppress and regimentise the life of its workers and citizen. By teh time Dazzle Ships came out this view was already oldfashioned, as both government and business were busily shedding their paternalism for other ways to screw us over. On the other hand, as Owen writes, OMD sings about these technologies with a sense of innocence, “overwhelmingly romantic”. Robots might put car workers out of work, they’re still fascinating pieces of equipment, as any twelve year old knows.

All of which evokes a certain continental view of the future as seen in the rearview mirror, of a time when it was possible to imagine the Cold War would stay semi-thawed forever and we would keep continue to have to imagine our futures under the shadow of World War III, with limited room for imagination but quite safe in a way.