unpopular

New Oneida album is fucking genius too, by the way. What is with the start of this year, suddenly? SO much great art! I am happy again. I was starting to think it was just me being grumpy and hating everything, or at least being unable to be excited about anything. So Yay!

Morgan’s room is empty, so why do I call it Morgan’s Room?

Long term readers may recall mention being made in the summer about the teenagers in the house behind us writing ‘Morgan’s Room’ on the outside wall in what appeared to be hair colouring. Well, the words are still there, although much faded of course. I’m kind of surprised they lasted this log to be honest. So if it WAS hair colouring they used, imagine what it does to your hair. Anyway, just kind of idly wondering whatever happened to Morgan because the room seems to be filled with junk now, and neither her nor her ‘moped boy’ brother have been seen for months. The only ones who seem to still be around are the scary looking mother and the weird young sibling of indeterminate gender who is currently playing very badly on a skateboard out in the street. Also, there was a burgundy dress hanging on the washing line in their garden for about a month. It came to have a kind of tragic air about it. Today however I notice it has finally been replaced by of what looks like a pair of hideous striped curtains, which are tragic in a different way.

It’s kind of hard not to notice these things, incidentally, just in case you’re thinking I’m some kind of peeping tom freak. The geek lair window overlooks the garden and the street, and I can’t have the blinds closed ALL the time (although I do try). Also, the Swiss BMW and Miami Vice boy students are back in town, their vehicles parked in the street, in the case of the Miami Vice boy, taking up an inordinate amount of space. Bah.

The Diary That Will Change Your Life suggests that today I kill something. I wont deny I considered killing off this blog, but instead settled for (unintentionally) slaughtering a large number of bugs on my bike ride. It’s one of those strange days where the sun is out warming the air, but it’s still pretty cold. So riding through the countryside there are clouds of little bugs hatching out in the warmth of the sun, only to be clobbered by the cold as the light fades. Or by passing cyclists. I nearly didn’t got out though. I kept remembering last January when I went on a similar day (actually if I’m honest it was a hell of a lot colder) only to come a cropper on black ice on Woodbury Common, and besides which, I was thinking, ah, there are so many items on my ‘do this today or you’re a loser’ list maybe I shouldn’t sacrifice a couple of hours just to ride my bike in the cold. But in the end the thought that I would hate myself even more if I didn’t make the effort won out. I’m glad I went too, even if I’m still coughing and spluttering with the effects of the cold air on warm lungs.

Of course I shouldn’t be doing this at all with that list of ‘do THIS, and do it NOW’ laughing at me from the corner of the screen, but what the hell. Listening to an album by an Australian band called Bilby which arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s kind of nice. Quite fragile and polite but with the wink of knowing subterfuge. I’ll probably swipe that line for a review at some point, so no-one else nick it please, okay? Also got two new Matinee releases in the mail yesterday, so yay! for that. There’s a Smiths tribute that I’m nervous about writing about for a whole range of reasons, and a Liberty Ship album that made me smile because they’ve used the band name written in the sand trick for the panel under the tray, just like what I did with the Visitors sleeve. It’s funny seeing it, makes me feel kind of old or something, remembering doing it with The Sea Urchins and then the Visitors way back in the mists of time and the results being in my old fanzine, and I’m pretty sure that at least one Liberty Shipper has that ‘zine, so… I dunno, it’s kind of nice I guess.

There’s something about Bilby that recalls Life Without Buildings a little; like a breath of a whisper of a ghost or something. Maybe it’s just the occasional phrasing. I dunno. It’s the same with New Estate, who I love. They have a LWB edge sometimes too. And a Swirlies swoosh.

Whatever.

The new Squarepusher is fucking genius incidentally. The press release says he had music in Lost In Translation. I guess I missed that, or maybe I just didn’t recognise it, what with losing track of Mr Jenkinson right after Feed Me Weird Things. Apparently this new one is his NINTH album?! Fuck me. Are all the other ones as good, or is this him finding his feet again? Someone let me know.

And back to LIT, I know what Liz is saying about it being ‘critically’ great, but I also think it is great on other levels too. I think it’s emotionally great; I think it deals with issues of age and relationships with sensitivity and insight; I think it raises questions about communication in the modern age, and whilst I don’t necessarily agree with the point of view that face-to-face interaction wins out over technological interfacing, it’s an interesting subject for discussion. In fact I think the only point I disliked was where Murray was talking about kids, and for a minute you think, yes, someone finally has the guts to be negative about having kids, but then it’s all blown, and it’s yeah yeah yeah, whatever, get on with the movie now please.

You are Architecture.

"You are the most functional art form and rarely do anything without some practical purpose. Although you are capable of easilly outstaging the other arts, you usually prefer to go unnoticed."

what are you?

what kind of billionaire would you make?

Also, envy of being a billionaire. Not that we think Sofia Coppola is a billionaire, but she surely isn’t short of a bob or two. Really this comment in relation to lunch discussion C and I had regarding Apple and Steve Jobs, and then Bill Gates and Paul Allen… this in turn relates to our watching ‘Triumph Of The Nerds’ on video last week. We were both kind of repulsed by the idea of Paul Allen spending part of his vast fortune on buying a basketball team, stadium and cheerleaders; it seemed so ‘80s, so neuveau (sp?) riche, and so darned MALE. Which is fair enough because Paul Allen is indeed male. He even has (or had) a beard, so, you know… But then so did Steve Wozniak, and the Woz didn’t buy a sports team (not to the best of my knowledge anyway) with his fortunes. Instead he started up a computers in schools project in California (if you were being unkind you could say there were more needy states for computers in school than the home of the personal computer industry, but hey, I don’t think anyone was EVER unkind about the Woz…) and helped teach the kids, which is so cool. Chapeaux. And maybe that’s partly why people are so devoted to Apple and people aren’t so much (if at all) to Microsoft. (note for a later date: think about the peculiar way that the Apple corporation retains a strange sense of being a ‘small’ ‘outsider’ company despite being a massive multinational corporation – how does it do that? Was it always thus? Or only whilst Steve Jobs was involved? When Jobs was out of the picture, did it still have that appeal? Or was there a whole period between the initial sexy ‘newness’ of the personal computer phenomenon and it’s ‘multimedia’ rebirth where ALL computer companies were by default beige?)

But back to billionaires: what kind of billionaire would you be? Would you be a Paul Allen, spending it on essentially big toys, or would you be the Woz? And wouldn’t it be fun to able to find out?

I asked for decaff but I think they gave me caffeine.

I asked for decaff but I think they gave me caffeine. Or maybe it’s just the buzz from being out in the world, the lift from seeing something so near perfect it leaves you all aglow and smiling inside. And jealous as hell too, but that’s another thing for later maybe. I mean, just got back from the movies where we saw ‘Lost In Translation’, and, uh, well, what can I say? I’m permanently suspicious of reviews I read in the mainstream press these days, so I was nervous due to the fact that The Guardian kept heaping praise on it, but I shouldn’t have been so worried, and should have had more trust in Mark Morris and indeed in William’s nod of approval, and in fact strike that because I DID / DO believe (in) those people, so whatever…

Liz wasn’t sure about it though. She was unconvinced about the pace, about how Coppola has this one pace and when she lifts it, it still doesn’t lift enough. I dunno about that. I think the pace is perfect, and it’s the lack of a raised pace that makes it so refreshing. The narrative unfolds in a perfectly sculpted manner, details let out at just the right moments, so we’re held in thrall throughout. The relationship between Murray and Johannson’s characters is beautifully portrayed, and it’s a difficult relationship to play too. One wrong step and it looks pervy or inconceivable, but it’s to everyone’s credit that this never happens. And of course the almost complete lack of physical contact is spectacular, so that a simple hand on a foot can be so loaded with emotion it hurts.

Plus the music… yeah, I know it’s probably just my age or something, but I swear hearing ‘Just Like Honey’ in that context was like one of my most peculiar experiences of recent years, mainly because of the juxtaposition of memory and the present tense. So I was sort of lost in this sea of the movie and of images of me wandering across a golf course in the darkness of a Scottish winter, headphones burrowed in ears and that song distorting to fuck, and… Yeah, it was strange. Good strange, but strange nonetheless. Oh and of course Murray doing ‘Peace Love and Understanding’ is genius and now I have that song lodged firmly in my brain, just as I did after seeing ‘200 Cigarettes’, but that’s no great burden because it’s a great song and is it Costello’s finest moment? Maybe. I’m not the world’s biggest Costello fan, so I’m saying no more.

We had talk after the movie about blogging and how a lot of people seem to be obsessing over the notion of memory this year (well, Liz was, and I just felt a bit ignorant because I read so little of what other people are up to. I’m so insular and self-obsessed). We also touched on the way first novels are filled with a writers ideas from the past twenty years or whatever, and this is why second novels are so difficult. I wouldn’t know about that really. I’m still waiting to get all my ideas out for the first time. Ha ha. But of course that’s a lie because those ideas trickle out in a variety of ways; through writing about music, via visual art projects, by blogging maybe too.

C and I were talking earlier about how she still doesn’t trust her blogging entries as valuable writing (or at least, as valuable as her ‘finished’ reviews etc) because they are not carefully crafted works. I mentioned how this morning Robin was saying almost the opposite; how involvement in online forums had diluted the urge to write ‘articles’; that the rapid exchange of ideas and formulation of insight provided by that, and by blogging, was more appealing that sitting down to write a ‘finished’ piece. It’s an interesting area. Certainly I find it harder to sit down and write a ‘review’ now than to simply write as if for my blog, or journal. There is a certain freedom there, which is largely illusory of course because the ‘articles’ are effectively going on the same larger entity as the blog (the Tangents site, in case you ARE reading this in isolation), but still… It’s strange.

And maybe it’s the freedom of time that appeals. The freedom to say, okay, now it’s getting towards time to have some dinner and maybe I’ll just leave this here and return later… Or not. Maybe pick up the thread another day, another week, another year. It doesn’t matter. Or it matters less.

Listening to the new Stereolab album, which sounds terrific (and I had kind of given up on Stereolab, so hurrah! for that)

Oh, and jealousy, envy, whatever… as in, ‘why am I not that talented?’ ‘why can I not make great movies too?’

Someone somewhere is either hacking my mailserver or is spoofing my email address. So I keep getting emails that appear to be from myself with rather worrying subject matter like teenager porn… It’s kind of scary, and this the week I just read the MacUser story about identity theft. I’ve let my webhosting company know about it, but I’m not sure there’s a lot that can be done. And whilst it’s annoying not being able to filter out the spam with Spamfire, what’s most worrying is the thought that other people are getting this spam and thinking dreadful things about Tangents and me, or worse, are reporting MY email address to their ISPs for spamming….

So yeah, because of that I’m going to change my address soon and stop downloading from the old one. I’ll email all friends soon about that no doubt.

Hmmm, ‘Milkshake’ just came on again, and damn it, Carney IS right about it. It really is great. And what’s that Colleen song from? ‘Your Heart On Your Sleeve’… it teasingly cuts off mid song too. Ah, just looked on Amazon, and its from a 2003 album on the Leaf label, who I’d forgotten all about. Something else to check out.

milkshake

actually, on second thoughts, maybe John was right about 'Milkshake' after all...

An animated day. Ha ha. The whole school day was spent in the room with 15 or so year 10 and four year 8 students, all making animated movies. It was manic. I think everyone enjoyed it though, despite us not having enough cables in the end which meant two groups sharing one camera, which wasn’t ideal, but which just about worked. The results were really cool. The year 8 kids did a fantastic job, perhaps because they didn’t set themselves too difficult a task. Anyway, they made a wicked little movie called ‘It’s A Bug’s Death’ It’s a lot of fun and includes vomiting, as you might expect from 12 year olds. They like that kind of thing…

So I was running around like an idiot helping everyone do what needed to be done, sorting hardware and software issues (Panasonic DV cameras are miles more user friendly than Canon ones, incidentally, at least on today’s experience) and I don’t think I got chance to pause for breath at all. But it looked amazing, all these kids really into what they were doing, spread out with all this technology juxtaposed with messy stuff like plasticine and charcoal and chalk. The Powerbooks all have big smudgy fingerprints on the trackpads, it’s kind of funny. It would be so easy to get overly precious about the technology too… but I figure the important thing is what it gets used to do. It’s just a tool, after all.

Tomorrow the year 10 students will get to import their scenes into iMovie and edit it together. I just did a couple tonight myself to model for them in the morning, and it’s easy as sin. I think they’ll really enjoy doing this part. It’s like putting together the finished work, and that’s always nice.

Then all we need to worry about is the soundtracks… I wish we had iLife 04 already so they could use Garageband, but we don’t, so I may have to ask the music dept to get involved. We shall see what happens. It would be a shame to have them left as silent movies.

So tonight I’m listening to a mix tape sent by John Carney. It’s mostly amazing, with a glorious selection of stuff like Janis Ian, Aural Exciters, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Dorothy Ashby and Julie Covington (yes, THAT Julie Covington… at least I presume it is. Don’t cry for me, and all that…) Also on the mix are cuts by Alicia Keys and Kelis. I don’t see the appeal though. For me these tracks stick out like sore thumbs, trying too hard to be hip, or something. Maybe it’s historical context. Or maybe I just don’t like the sound. The Jazzyfatnastees on the other hand, sound pretty fine.

Okay, my head is near implosion point. Think I’ll go make C watch the opening episode of ‘Triumph Of The Nerds’ with me.

Conumber

Of course the Squarepusher EP I was referring to yesterday (the first Spymania EP) was the 'Conumber' EP... And fine stuff it was too.