The other day I was listening to the Pressure Sounds website -- you can do that -- listen to the Pressure Sounds site, I mean -- when you go there it starts streaming a hand-picked selection of choice reggae and dub cuts right to your desktop -- and normally I hate that sort of thing, but the tracks coming off of the Pressure Sounds site are so damn good that you have to smile and love it -- and so anyway I was browsing around and the sun was streaming through the window and warming my back and and I'd actually finished surfing their site and I was lying on my bed in the sun like a torpid cat and the tunes were washing over me and then I heard something that quite literally made my jaw drop.

Keith Hudson -- aka the "Dark Prince of Reggae" -- has long, long, long time been one of my favourite reggae/dub music producers, and I've got -- or at least heard -- most of his recorded output.

However.

I ain't never heard this one:

Keith Hudson and the Soul Syndicate - Ire Ire (4.68 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

The track is from his album Nuh Skin Up Dub, from 1982. A huge, spacious production along with sparse snippets of Keith's brooding, darkside vocals and some fresh instrumental approaches give this music a unique aura. Like I said, my jaw dropped. This is an essential disc for lovers of the deep.

And good news: Pressure Sounds have reissued the album on vinyl and CD. They're selling it for an almost-ludicrously low price, too.

Labels: heroes, music

I'm getting kinda tired of the whole killer-guy-from-Twin Peaks-look schtick. It's been a number of months since my project reached fruition and I've done nothing about it and I'm now thinking of something new. In fact, after a comment from a friend a few weeks ago likening me to Allen Ginsberg (R.I.P.) and then seeing the brilliant fantasy scene featuring Ginsberg and Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, I think I will look in that direction.



Of course that's David Cross playing Ginsberg in the film, not the man himself. I probably can't manage that degree of hirsuteness; I may have to go for a more senior Ginsberg a la his 1985 self-portrait (right, via the Village Voice).

I feel I will also have to lose a bit of weight to get there.


It's Saturday today. Last night at a Mexican restaurant I realised that there is still a lot of very nice tequila about that I haven't yet had the pleasure of drinking. I immediately resolved to rectify this situation. Hopefully this pursuit does not turn out to be mutually exclusive with the Ginsberg project. More soon...


New album out recently from Wiley. It's called Grime Wave.

Wiley - Local Lad (1.84 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

The sound is STRONG, yo.

Labels: art, heroes, music, tequila, youtube

Prince at 49 years of age:


Now 50, just as sweet as...

Labels: heroes

I've never made a secret of my abundant, absolute and all-consuming love for Iggy Pop. If you're gonna call The Idiot number one and then Lust For Life number two, then 1979's New Values is the third part of a divine trilogy of albums, which -- appropriately -- rivals Bowie's Berlin trilogy in seminality; it's not until the fifth track Don't Look Down, however, that anything* verging on the timeless greatness** of those first two records is approached.

Iggy Pop - Don't Look Down (3.3 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

[*] That's not to in any way diminish the excellence of Tell Me A Story, Girls, I'm Bored and the title track; it's just that they're in a different league.

[**] Is it weird that there's no word which means "the good quality of the song-writing" in the same way that 'lyricism' somehow means "the good quality of the words of the song"? Or is this just Vocabulary FAIL.

Labels: heroes, music, two-sentences-one-tune

I'm pretty disappointed that super-awesome guitarist Bo Diddley has died. This video is a fantastic tribute, though:



German freak-psych-rockers Guru Guru named a song after him on their second album, 1971's Hinten:

Guru Guru - Bo Diddley (6.85 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

Last night I was at a bar and I found myself trying to explain what it would be like to experience reality in four dimensions, instead of only three. At the time I felt utterly sober and lucid, but in retrospect I believe I may have been a little bit drunk. Either way, I had them eating out of my hands and marveling at the wonders of the universe.

I didn't actually mention Tralfamadore, but my explanation was cribbed heavily from Kurt Vonnegut's classic descriptions of four-dimensional reality in various novels of his (but in particular Slaughterhouse 5). To paraphrase (thanks wikipedia):

Tralfamadorians have the ability to experience reality in four dimensions; meaning, roughly, that they have total access to past, present, and future; they are able to perceive any point in time at will. Because they believe that when a being dies, it continues to live in other times and places, their response to death is, "So it goes."

Of course, there was never the remotest possibility that I would be able to do as good a job of it as Carl Sagan:



It's important to recognise that while Vonnegut's (and indeed the common) fourth dimension is identified with time -- for example, in Einsteinian relativity physics -- the dimension described by Sagan is a fourth spatial dimension. So in effect, he and I (and indeed Vonnegut) are describing two different things. And have described. And will describe. (Sorry, that was gratuitious.)

If that wasn't enough, Cliff Pickover asks us to consider how it would be to encounter four-dimensional beings in our three-dimensional spacetime. I gave it a shot. I think that is was for exactly this exercise that the phrase "my mind boggles" was coined.

And, The Commonsense Nihilist (whose blog has been going bloody great guns in general lately) recently posted on how to create four-dimensional paintings.

Labels: aliens are in our midst, debauchery, dubious nonsense, heroes

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man is a mediocre documentary about Leonard Cohen which I watched the other night. In amongst the dullness, though, was this:

Antony - If It Be Your Will (live) (4.12 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

That's Antony, out of Antony and the Johnsons, singing the Leonard Cohen classic from Various Positions. God he's good.

For K.

Labels: heroes, music

I'm partially blaming this on Martha:



Thought that was weird? Check this out!

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

I wee while ago I finally got around to re-watching Christiane F. (a.k.a. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a.k.a. We Children of Zoo Station) -- and featuring the stunningly beautiful Natja Brunckhorst in the title role as the teenage drug addict/prostitute -- and lots and lots and lots of footage of David Bowie in concert as well as gorgeous Bowie choons on the soundtrack -- and ever since I have been completely obsessed with his 1976 album Station to Station.

Especially after this bit, which I find myself watching over and over:



It's quite patently, ridiculously obvious that this man is a silly man, and kinda cheesy too:

The return of the thin white duke / blowing darts in lovers eyes x several

I mean, what?

But then, look at him. He's a freakin alien. He's a lost little boy. He's a demon lover. He's a chameleon, a changeling, whose appearance alters every-which-way you look at him. He's the Thin White Duke and he's blowing darts in your eyes. And, on the other hand --

Here are you / you drive like a demon / from station to station

is a pretty bloody good line.

So it's also quite obvious to me that as far as I am concerned, if you're talking about the 1970s, David Bowie, and Berlin/Germany -- and to a lesser extent makeup and smoke machines -- that he can bloody well do no wrong whatsoever. And by the way Station To Station, from which the above clip is the title track, is really, really farking good. Despite all it's.. oh.. I dunno.. cocaine-fueled conceit and bizarre lyrical themes and (what very possibly should be awful) "white-boy" funkin' and all that stuff... it's claustrophobic and paranoiac and sociophobic and agrophobic and detached and alien and arcane and it's the hottest thing to come swirling off a platter of crackly black vinyl since the LP reissue of Brett Easton Ellis reading his own short-stories.

David Bowie - Wild is The Wind (3.73 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

And Wild is the Wind is a seriously incredible love-song.

You can 'listen' to the rest of Station To Station here, only be warned that track 3 Word on a Wing is corrupt. But you don't really need track 3. Oh, Station To Station is his album which immediately preceded Low, dontcha know.

So:

[1] from henceforth his "famous Berlin trilogy" or if you will, Low, Heroes and Lodger (allmusic), has become in my eyes his famous Berlin quadrilogy, including on its front-end Station To Station.

[2] I really, really want a David Bowie soundtrack to my life. I'm serious. This is one way I have identified that I can become generally happier with my lot.

...

This is what Natja Brunckhorst looks like these days (above, left).

Or this:


She's alive and well, and writing screenplays and so on (click images to follow links).

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

As previously indicated, Bob Dylan has a new album out this month -- it's called Dylan. I'm not about to show you where you can download mp3s of the new Bob Dylan (helloooooooo RIAA), but instead I wanted to share this great live bootleg with you.


Bob Dylan Color Line Arena 2007 (bootleg)

It's a really good-sounding audience-recording boot from earlier this year. Well, it's not THAT good-sounding -- I took it upon myself to clean up the audio a little on my copy -- a little stereo separation, a little loudness, a little compression never hurt anybody -- and you may find your way to doing the same.

It's got a bunch of new tracks as well as classics to which he has done that thing that he does where he completely reworks a stone-cold Dylan classic -- putting it into different keys, different time signatures, different vocal meter, acoustic originals --> rockin' out reworkings -- to the extent where it often takes the audience a wee while to work out what tune he is playing, and respond appropriately.

Bob Dylan - It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (live) (4.08 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

This is the original:

Bob Dylan - It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (3.81 MB mp3)

That's pretty much it for this post, except, I wanted to draw your attention to this.

This is the introduction. This is what the emcee says as he introduces Bob Dylan and the band. My question is: what kind of a cunt would say some of this stuff when introducing ANYONE, let alone Bob Dylan, to the stage.

some random fuckwit - How Not to Introduce Bob Dylan (1.35 MB mp3)

This, in case you can't work it out, is what he says:

ladies and gentleman
please welcome the poet laureate of rock and roll
the voice of the promise of the sixties counterculture
the guy who forced folk into bed with rock
who donned make-up in the seventies and
disappeared into a haze of substance abuse
who emerged to find jesus
who was written-off as a has-been by the end of eighties
and who suddenly shifted gears
producing some of the strongest material of his career
beginning in the late nineties
ladies and gentleman
columbia recording artist
bob dylan

Now I'm possibly going to go right out on a limb here, but I have to say that everything struck out is completely superfluous, and not only that, but it's utterly inappropriate rubbish as well. I think that this fella should be ashamed of himself. What a fuckwit.

Fella -- whoever you are -- fuck you. You're a cock.

Labels: heroes, misanthropy, music

This is so great, I have to post it here like I discovered it or something, but really I just cribbed from The Mahatma X Files:


Mea Culpa, from Brian Eno & David Byrne's classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts link.

Labels: heroes, music, youtube

I've ALWAYS thought Dave Brubeck was underrated as a jazz pianist and composer, but it's always been difficult to find any consensus. Until now.

I stumbled-upon this tribute compilation to Brubeck and reading the notes there, it was like a huge weight of obligation -- the obligation to prove to the world that there was a serious injustice being perpetrated here -- had been lifted from my shoulders.

I'd always felt like such a square for liking such a square. And now it's like Dave sidled up to me in a bar wearing an evening gown and sez "Baby you doan haffta feel bad no more... I'm gonna make everything awwright... I'm gonna make it all better" and.. well.. let's leave that there, ok?

The tribute compilation features some of the heaviest of the NYC experimental jazz heavyweights, and then some; Dave Slusser, Uri Caine, Pachora, Bill Frisell, Ruins, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Anthony Coleman, Eyvind Kang, Slowpoke, Erik Friedlander, Sex Mob, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, and David Krakauer. And it is a wonderful, joyful, eclectic, affectionate thing -- which is a good thing and a relief, as some of these tributes can be tiresome, overwrought wastes of time.

This is what they wrote:

Dave Brubeck is an enigma. Vilified by the underground intelligentsia for his stiff rhythmic feel and high record sales, Brubeck was a daring and distinctive composer whose experiments in expanding the language of jazz never got in the way of his natural melodic sense. Cross cultural influences, exotic scales and rhythms, experiments with odd time signatures, polytonality and unusual bar lengths are common place today in the music of cutting edge young jazzers like Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas and the like, but in the 1950s they raised more than a few eyebrows. Brubeck was the first. This is a tribute to a misunderstood experimentalist who introduced these elements into jazz over forty years ago in his own sweet way.

I could have picked any number of tracks from the album to highlight, but I went with the version of Blue Rondo A La Turk by Japanese experimental spazz-core noise-rockers Ruins. Because.. well.. it's a great tune, originally, and it's a super cover version. (So's the original original by Mozart, Rondo Alla Turka -- 'pon which Brubeck based his composition -- for that matter.)

Ruins - Blue Rondo A La Turk (4.43 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

UPDATE
I couldn't leave it there, could I. Here's Sex Mob's fantastic cover of Jumpin' which turns the dainty delicacy of the original into a full-blown burlesque cabaret number.

Sex Mob - Jumpin' (6.74 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Sex Mob is a New York jazz band, originally formed as a Knitting Factory vehicle for Steven Bernstein to exercise his slide trumpet.

Labels: heroes, music

Oh crapola; Joe Zawinul died.


Joe Zawinul, the incredibly talented composer and keyboardist who played with, among others, Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderly, died today. He was 75.

More on Neverending Rainbow.

Labels: heroes

...in Levin I found some incredible wallpaper, too. Isn't it just so purty?


Wants.

...

Following the David Bowies a couple of months ago, my new BFF neglected stairways has uploaded the 8-track version of Captain Beefheart's Strictly Personal.

On the left's a picture of The Captain; click it to be magically transported to a comprehensively fast and bulbous website all about the same.

Labels: heroes, miscellany, music, photos

Dirk had cancer. He also had one of the best mp3 blogs around, Cities on Flame with Rock'n'Roll. Somehow, in between bouts of chemotherapy and getting one of legs amputated, he found the time to post album after album of the best, most obscure, most rare and sought-after and utterly desirable oddities in the history of rock music -- in particular Japanese weirdstuff.

Dirk had the best attitude towards his health problems too. Nothing much seemed to faze him -- not losing a limb, not any of the other tedious and debilitating effects of his treatments -- just as long as he got to keep rocking the weird music on his blog. Just the other day he mentioned that he was heading into hospital for his seventh (and hopefully) last round of chemo, after which he said he "didn't want to see the inside of a hospital for a very long time".

The next post was from his mother, saying that the doctors had found a huge tumour in his lungs. A few days later there was another post from her, to tell us that Dirk was dead.

If you feel like it, please leave a message on his blog to support his family and friends.

They really can use some friends now.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

I was trying to remain calm and positive in the face of reports from the U.S. that (1) Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama warned that he'd invade Pakistan in order to strike against al Qaeda, and (2) congressman Tom Tancredo suggested that the U.S. should "take out" Islamic holy sites, including Mecca. Way to go, retards. Way to stir up the ol' hornets nest even more. Could you guys just fuck off and leave the rest of us to get on with it? D'ya think?


I was struggling to remain chipper despite the encouraging reports that Venezuelan prez Hugo Chavez is continuing his peaceful economic revolution, and gathering support from other nations in the process. Holy shit. Harvesting a country's natural mineral wealth and, umm, funneling the proceeds back into the betterment and sustenance of the country and it's population? Outrageous.


I was fighting -- and failing -- to quell the urge to be WAY impressed at the Commonsense Nihilist's new project, a graphic novel involving himself, several artistic heroes, a time machine, and changing the course of history -- including the discovery of America. Not only does his idea rule, but he said he's going to do something and bugger me if he doesn't up and go and do it. Inspirational.

So it's not all bad news, is it.

Labels: comix, freedom-hating, heroes, misanthropy

My current project of rereading all of Brett Easton Ellis's books, in order, has culminated in me devouring his latest Lunar Park in a matter of hours, this week.

It's absurdly good. It features the main character Bret Easton Ellis, a wildly-successful author who achieved notoriety and success at a very early age, who has spent the subsequent twenty years getting fucked up, and whose life with new wife and kids has now fallen virtually to pieces. Yes exactly -- it is literally autobiographical, at least in part.

The book also features characters from Ellis' work, namely Patrick Bateman, who generally terrorizes him and goes about in Brett's neighborhood recreating the murders and violence of American Psycho. (We know it's Bateman because the guy looks a bit like Christian Bale, who played Bateman in Mary Harron's film adaptation of Psycho.) He is also being menaced by at least one of his former selves, and his dead father, and a child's toy bird which he gave to his daughter and which may or may not actually be a grotesque monster from another world. So it's really some kind of meta-novel -- a Stephen King-style pulp-horror fused with a soap-opera he-said she-said couples-counselling marriage falling-apart drama, all bound up in the sort of post-modern self-referential hyperreal structure that frankly I don't believe anyone but this author could get away with.

At some point Ellis observes that these terrors only exist because he -- at some point or another -- wrote them into existence; he immediately sets about penning a quick short story about the demise of Patrick Bateman, trying to write him out of existence again. It doesn't work.

I don't want to say any more and, besides -- you won't want me to give it all away, will ya; you'll want to find out for yourself. I have a feeling that I did the right thing in reading all his books in sequence before attacking Lunar Park; his habit of referencing and reviving characters from other works in new books is taken to an illogical extreme here and it helps somewhat to have, for example, every gory detail of Patrick Bateman's bloody rampages fresh in mind. Like I said, though -- absurdly, precociously good.

Some further reading:

Brett Easton Ellis in Wikipedia.
post-Lunar Park interview at The Morning News.
Brett Easton Ellis at e-Notes.
Video of interview on BBC.
Story about Lunar Park and BEE on Chuck Palahnuik's site.

Labels: books, heroes

Maher Shalal Hash Baz is the long-running, and "deliberately amateur-sounding" ensemble from Japanese songwriter/bandleader Tori Kudo. (Deliberately amateur-sounding? Try pseudo-naive, or faux-naive.

A few months ago on another site I wrote of the band (in the context of their album Blues du Jour):

Ppl have been spazzing out about and awarding big kudos to Tori Kudo's latest avant folk creation; it's all deserved. It's his most soulful, compassionate work and at only 41 tracks, is considerably shorter than his legendary 83 song opus, Return Visit To Rock Mass. [The song] Futility is so little, and yet it's so big. Does that make sense? I mean it only clocks in at a little over a minute, and it covers off all the emotional and compositional bases it could ever need to just so damn fine.....

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - Futility (1 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)


I've been listening to the new Maher Shalal Hash Baz record L'Autre Cap quite a lot recently. Upon hearing it, someone asked me to try to explain what the hell it was all about. (I don't think they really liked it.) I struggled at the time, but sitting on the bus this morning, squinting into the late-winter sun as we barreled down Lambton Quay, it struck me like a hammer-blow to the temple.

This is what aQuarius records wrote about L'Autre Cap:

As always, it's a magical, melancholic mishmash of lilting indie-pop, innocently sweet vocals, lovelorn lyrics, little big band (dis-)arrangements, woozy horns, percussive pitter patter, gently jazzy guitars, bassoon bass lines, and dysplastic Farfisa, all performed with unique, shambolic charm. Fans will be happily aware of what they're getting into here. Those unfamiliar with the band, we suspect you'll also enjoy the unsteady but friendly hugs Kudo and crew are doling out to your ears (and wish you could squeeze 'em back). That is, unless you're particularly hard of heart and/or uptight about musicians not "coloring outside the lines" as it were.

... and so this morning it all made sense in a whole wrapped-up no-loose-ends kinda way, it's all about the avant-pop semi-composed lunacy/experimentalism of The Red Crayola, of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band on Trout Mask Replica... and an amateur brass band, or the Portsmouth Sinfonia, or something.

Got me?

Labels: heroes, music

According to the Commonsense Nihilist, David Lynch's Inland Empire is a masterpiece; bloody good news, and I can't wait to see it.

UPDATE

Billy didn't think nearly so much of it.

...


People in rabbit suits remind me of Donnie Darko, that most vague and troublesome of flims. What do I mean? In addition to the original theatrical release (which I hated the first time, and loved the second), and the DVD release which gave you the expanded and changed (to some to an unnacceptable degree) director's cut, there is now available a three-DVD version out which includes the theatrical and director's version, as well as a further DVD of extraneous nonsense.

Sometimes I think I should just give up trying to make sense of all this and get me a Frank the Bunny talking action figure.

...

NP: Pavement - The Killing Moon (Friday farce)

Labels: films, heroes

From Rotten Tomatoes:

Warner Bros is set to release a DVD box set of Blade Runner that rivals all other special editions and will keep the fans drooling until it's on shelves this December 18th. Presenting the film in HD formats, the DVD collection will come in a briefcase with, a three-hour documentary and (count them) five different versions of the film, including Ridley Scott's dark "work print."

Hmmm I hope that it will not only be available in HD formats, as this consumer electronics late-adopter will not be supporting Blu-ray for quite some considerable time yet.

Labels: films, heroes

Ooooohhh... neglected stairways has uploaded a 38:47 mp3 mix-down of an 8-track version of David Bowie's classic, brilliant 1976 album Station to Station.

Taking the detached plastic soul of Young Americans to an elegant, robotic extreme, Station to Station is a transitional album that creates its own distinctive style. Abandoning any pretense of being a soulman, yet keeping rhythmic elements of soul, David Bowie positions himself as a cold, clinical crooner and explores a variety of styles. Everything from epic ballads and disco to synthesized avant pop is present on Station to Station, but what ties it together is Bowie's cocaine-induced paranoia and detached musical persona. At its heart, Station to Station is an avant-garde art-rock album, most explicitly on TVC 15 and the epic sprawl of the title track, but also on the cool crooning of Wild Is the Wind and Word on a Wing, as well as the disco stylings of Golden Years. It's not an easy album to warm to, but its epic structure and clinical sound were an impressive, individualistic achievement, as well as a style that would prove enormously influential on post-punk.

-- allmusic.com

Listening to it now.. there's a few brief sections of chewed tape, but it sounds GREAT.

UPDATE

Whoah. He's also just uploaded Low, Bowie's equally-classic and equally-brilliant 1977 follow-up collaboration with Brian Eno.

Labels: heroes, music

It's a little weird to be sitting and wondering how to say that the film you saw last night -- the new one by Werner Herzog, your favourite filmmaker ever -- kinda sucked.

Rescue Dawn -- the real-life story of U.S. fighter pilot Dieter Dengler, a German-American shot down and captured in Laos during the early days of the Vietnam War -- played at the Embassy last night and its 2+ hours really dragged. I was almost glad when it was done.

Putting it into context, though -- (1) I have seen Herzog's documentary on the same story, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a goodly number of times -- so I knew the story almost backwards, thereby rendering the dramatised version free of almost all suspense, or uncertainty as to how things would pan out; (2) for some reason I really can't stand that Jeremy Davies guy; and (c) the jingoistic "U S A! U S A!" ending grated and frankly seemed in poor taste given the current global political climate. (Or am I just over-sensitised to that?)

I have to forgive Herzog because never before have I watched one of his 50-odd feature or documentary films that I didn't -- at the very least -- think was pretty bloody good. Indeed most of the time I'm perfectly happy to bandy about the term "genius" in relation to his work. Everyone is allowed to slip-up from time-to-time. So it goes. And I will concede that visually, the film was a delight to watch.

Lumiere Reader reviewed the film here and here, and didn't really seem to like it that much either. I gotta say, however, in response to Tim Wong's piece, that I remember no scene with no fucking grizzly bears. Curious and curiouser.

Labels: films, heroes

Oooooooooooh it comes ever closer. There's a September 10, 2007 release date on the documentary (watch the trailer) about Scott Walker (Allmusic) called 30 Century Man, and frankly, I can't bloody wait:

• a guy playing a side of meat as percussion
• a big wooden box erected to record the sound of somebody slamming a drink down
• Scott Walker talking on camera (!)
  

I'm dying to see it. Heh. Meat as an instrument... genius.

The hype is er, hyperbolic:

"" the most influential and enigmatic figure in rock history ""

.. and ..

""rock's most fascinating and elusive outsider""

(excluding Jandek, I presume).

But nonetheless, exciting.

...

As Jo helpfully pointed out, I AM going for drinks with the Wellingtonista crew tomorrow night. So despite my wailing and my woe about the (good-)heath of my liver, all is not lost. That is, if I can shake this nasty lurg. And, I do have to work all weekend. Arrrggghhh.......

...

NP: Oren Ambarchi & Johan Berthling -- My Days Are Darker Than Your Nights (Eat My Art Out)

..an impenetrable forest of sound that you will take pleasure in losing yourself w/in......

Labels: heroes, music

He's popped off to the planet Tralfamadore for the last time and I will miss him. Not that I ever knew him personally, dig, but I will feel an absence, a void in the fabric of the universe -- the space which he previously inhabited. Perhaps not so much actually on a personal level, for the resonance of his work lingers on and on and on and on and so on... but more the idea that if the human race could produce such a fine fellow -- as a humanist, the ultimate collision of sadness and magnanimity -- will it ever bother to do so again? Could it, even?

And I think the world will be a poorer place -- and we will probably struggle for some time to examine ourselves as effectively -- without his intelligent, forthright sagacity.

My favourite Kurt Vonnegut moment? Encountering his drawing of an anus while reading his novel Breakfast of Champions for the first time at about age 14. It looked something like this:

Some possible reading:

Custodians of Chaos: an excerpt from his memoirs A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut's Blues For America

Salon interview and profile from 1999

Wikipedia entry

Labels: eulogies, freedom-hating, heroes

Scottish rock legend Nikki Sudden, guitarist for Swell Maps (1977-1980), one of my favourite bands - and one of the greatest and most fun and original punk outfits - has died.

R.I.P. Nikki Sudden.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

Polish author Stanislaw Lem, one of the greatest ever writers in the science-fiction genre, has died.

R.I.P. Stanislaw Lem.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

No one's going to be doing an obit on him on the late news. He's not going to be inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. He's not going to be awarded a post-humous Grammy, or a post-humous Lifetime Award for Services to Music, and the anonymous remaining members of The Red Krayola aren't going to accept it on his behalf.

But he's arguably - demonstrably, even - a greater musician than any of say Brian Wilson, Lennon and McCartney, Zappa and the Mothers, Beefheart, Klaus Dinger or Michael Rother, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison or Mo Tucker, Conny Plank or Conrad Schnitzler, Roky Erikson, Ralf und Florian, Van Dyke Parks, Eno, Mobius or Rodelius, Uwe Nettlebeck and Faust, David Bowie; anyone who set out at roughly the same time and who did something significantly weird; something outside of the pantheon, of the expected, of the projected trajectory of rock music.

I realise that this is a very big call, but I stand behind it 100%. And the good thing is, he's not even dead; I couldn't imagine a greater opportunity to laud the man and his work. So yeah. Mayo Thompson and Red Krayola = good. Bloody good, in fact. As Ritchie Unterberger puts it (on allmusic.com), Thompson "seems as concerned with deconstructing the language of 'rock' music as with actually expressing himself within it. This makes Red Krayola's catalog challenging, often difficult listening. Its saving grace is the quirky charm of Thompson's songs and vocals, with a whimsical humor and open-mindedness rather atypical of avant-rock."

Over the course of nearly forty years, Thompson has created a legacy of wonderful music in a series of superb recordings. He has also recruited a diverse succession of excellent musicians to play with him - a few being Gina Birch (the Raincoats), Epic Soundtracks (Swell Maps), Lora Logic (X-Ray Spex) and latterly, the perennially multi-faceted Jim O'Rourke. He has himself played in the legendary Pere Ubu for a time, in the 80s.

Apparently you wanna know where to start. I wouldn't go past God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It (1968, highlight Victory Garden, surely the only love song penned in the voice of Eva Braun and sung to Adolf Hitler); Kangaroo (1981, highlights Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock Pts. 1 & 2 and Born to Win (Transactional Analysis With Gestalt Experiments)); Black Snakes (1983, highlight The Sloths); and the Blues Hollers and Hellos EP (2000, highlight Container of Drudgery).

Also check out the internet to find out lots of information about new releases of old, unreleased Red Krayola material, including the astonishing 1977 album Corrected Slogans. You'll also be able to read all about how the company that makes Crayola crayons forced Thompson to change the band's name from The Red Crayola.

photo by James Welling.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

A guy I affectionately refer to as Ass-Computer, a pal in Finland, paged me earlier in soulseek saying "have you seen this?" and passed me a link which ended with "obit_thompson.html".

My heart sank and a heavy grief overwhelmed me.

"Fuck!" shouts I. "Mayo Thompson is dead".

Of course, it quickly turned out that it was Hunter S. Thompson, erstwhile Doctor of Journalism, a.k.a. Raoul Duke, who was in fact deceased.

A weird mixture of relief and frustration and fulfillment replaced the grief. In a sense I'd been expecting it. I mean, the guy's been dicing it; lining up to bite the big one for a well over forty years. It's not exactly unexpected, that he would go on a crazed acid binge after gnawing for several hours on the pineal glands of kidnapped Amazonian tribesmen, and shoot hisself in the head as he battled to fight off the giant man-eating reptiles.

Or something.

So I guess the bats finally caught up with him in this world; now he's barrelling down the highways of the next, in the midst of a depraved ether and qualude bender, furiously shooting off his six-gun while they're screeching overhead, dive-bombing the car and snatching at his aviators. Probably with the devil riding shotgun, "as your Lord of Darkness, I advise you to use the flame-thrower." etc.

R.I.P. Duke, and take care, you mad mother-fucker.

Short tribute. HST has had arguably the greatest influence on my life in terms of how I view the world, how I think about states of existence, the managed consumption and abuse of intoxicants and narcotics and the beauty and potential of the written word. For that I'm incalculably grateful.

PS. Oh yeah, and if you're the bastard that's got my copy of Songs of the Doomed (yeah, I know I lent it to ya but I've forgotten who you are) get it back to me, would ya?

PPS: Non-deceased Musical maverick Mayo Thompson has recorded and released an astonishing amount of incredible music under the project name The Red [CK]rayola since approximately 1966.

Labels: eulogies, heroes

John Peel is dead, so I spent some hours in the middle of the night listening to all the Peel Session LPs I could lay me hands on - distressingly only the Damned and the Syd Barret were able to be located - and the CD reissue of the Siren albums on Peel's label Dandelion.

I've already read several carelessly-hurried obituaries wailing "how will we ever replace him". Fer chrissakes the man's barely cold... what kinduva half-witted thing to say is that? I think I'm gonna start issuing contracts for hits on the offenders...

Peel's motto regarding the music he presented on his legendary radio show was "A balance between things that you know people will like and things that you think people will like". Reading it now it may seem a little obvious but it's a hard balance to find; it's also one I've always strived for in my modest efforts on the radio.

Courtesy of the BBC:

• John Peel's bullet point biog.
• If you would like to remember John, or to offer your words of condolence click here.
• For advice on how to cope with bereavement go to One Life's help pages.

Jen-Smacked-Face met the man - more than once - and she stole his taxi. Here she eulogises eloquently about him.

3PM Edit: Lord-only knows why I put "Sir Robert Peel" in the title of this entry. Please accept humble apologies. It was the middle of the night - perhaps I was google-fatigued. Title adjusted accordingly.

Labels: eulogies, heroes