Soisong Tangles

I try to buy everything related to Coil / Christopherson / Gristle but 22 english pounds for an object that's more or less certain to annoy the fuck out of me?

Twittering?

Did someone out there sign me up for twitter? I tried to sign up but there's already a Loki23 who people I know seem to be following...

I have no recollection of signing up before so either someone else signed me up, in which case - what's my password? - or there's an evil doppelganger about to twitter me away...

Or I need to get more sleep.

Creepy.

Portal Music

This kind of thing has been discussed many times before of course but it was good to see Blissblogger kicking the issue off again here because this is a much missed strategy in music papers / interviews which now seem to focus more or less exclusively on the moment itself, its place in the musical continuum, what they are going to do next... perhaps this is an unfortunate side effect of the new media / web 2.0: the need to be on (an in!) the next thing before the next person, to be already bored with the present and looking to the future... it's even worse in the forums where as early as 2005 people could be found discussing the death of Grime, Dubstep etc in the faint hope that something else would wrestle them from their sleep.

I think the focus on the past, on influences that shape musical understanding, is something that should be valued again. A type of interview where ephemeral, non-musical interests are foregrounded, where the music itself is left to stand alone as part of a wider cultural system.

I guess this might explain the hothousing of Hauntology as a phenomenon - bloggers want a return to the old journalism even more than they want an echo of 1970s futurism and Ghost Box et al plays right into their hands with it's myriad referencing system; seductive to Dadbloggers like me who want to scurry to find out stuff (or even better, rediscover stuff we've left behind - Lovecraft, The Willows, kids films on Screen Test...)

(((The Observer Music Magazine's recent focus on artschool music is another jumping off point though it didn't really attempt to elaborate on anything not previously covered - the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music are influenced by art shock!)) )

I've mentioned many times the very direct influence that the Scatology cover had on me and I Simon was dead right when he mentions that being a 'Throbbing Gristle fan was like enrolling in a university course of cultural extremism', even if it did lead eventually to some awkwardly non-camp, unfunny black holes.

But my portal music today slides in a related but different direction and at the time hit all the right buttons i.e. simultaneously confirmed my own excellent taste in mildly salacious literature while also opening up a few more cavities for exploration.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Bluestocking, by Momus:

I love you, you're so well read
Blue stockings well spread
Your carnal knowledge knocks me dead

I love you, you're so well read
Bluestocking give head
I love you, you've read:

Ovid, Anaïs Nin
The Song of Solomon
The Perfumed Garden and Georges Bataille's
The Story of the Eye
The Petronius Satyricon
The Arabian Nights, the Decameron
The Marquis de Sade's 120 Days
And Serge Gainsbourg singing songs to Sweet Jane B

I love you, you're so well read
Blue stockings well spread
Your carnal knowledge knocks me dead

I love you, you're so well read
Bluestocking give head
I love you, you've read:

Sacher Masoch and DHL
Portnoy's Complaint and mine as well
Frank Harris, The Life and Loves
Lusts of a Moron, Wings of a Dove
The Latins of the Silver Age
The triolets of Paul Verlaine
Lautreamont and G. Cabrera Infante
Mishima Yukio and Sweet Jane B

I love you, you're so well read
Bluestocking give head
Whisper what they said:

"Le silence de la chambre est profond
Aucun bruit n'arrive plus
Ni des routes, ni de la ville, ni de la mere
La nuit est a son terme, partout limpide et noir
La lune a disparu
Ils ont peur
Il ecoute, les yeux au sol
Son silence effrayante
Il parle de sa beaute
Les yeux fermees
Il peut revoir encore l'image dans sa perfection"


Momus - Bluestocking

JG Ballard

One of my favourite authors, perhaps the only one I've kept heart with since my teens is dead. Annoying. I liked the way the last few novels were sort of the same one, only turned slightly sideways - I was hoping that, eventually, they'd flip right the way around and face me, stare me down, scare me off.



Ballard was truly unique; unfussy, shark-eyed prose, deadly timings, with a unique sense of pace - the scattershot pop-art of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, the slow burning stupour of Millenium People, Kingdom Come, Cocaine Nights etc

(the dull thud of a tennis ball on a hard court beating out a psychic retreat)

He understood the prosaic horror of the shopping Mall, the gated community, the open plan apartment - took Henry Miller's Air Conditioned Nightmare at face value and then extended it into inner space, making mind-maps and neural connections out of endless hospital waiting rooms, rehabilitation suites and middle-middle class entertainment centres / twilight homes.



He wrote buildings better than any writer I know.

(a cleaner, blanker counterpart to the flowery sleight of hand of Jonathan Meades)

His writing acted as a kind of accidental neuro-linguistic programming, he wrote a listtle like Derren Brown speaks, and I've spent many hours listening to other middle-manager doublespeak, imagining a Ballardian nightmare of an endless conference centre; repeating corridors, Escher twitches, infinite white walls, Magritte prints echoing the sad figures of lone salesmen, cannibalising their laptops and keeping just alive...



Ballard's science fiction lost the science over time and never had action as such - his version of Apocalypse Now would have consisted of the LSD and Playgirls scene endlessly repeated as a descent into madness - and this made perfect sense; his world's became gradually quotidian and echoed the slowturns and machinations of Capitalist economy... the banality of evil has never been better expressed.



Wonder what he made of Twitter?

More pretty pictures here.