KLF Uh Huh Uh Huh

It was 3 AM, and I’d been reading the same sentence on the page of my IT law textbook over and over again for what seemed like forever. This triggered obscure skippety synapses in the Random Useless Music Trivia part of my increasingly bored mind and I found myself typing “KLF 3 AM Eternal” into Google just for the hell of it, only to reel back in shock at the discovery that after all these years of thinking they were saying “ACtion so GROO-VEE”, they were actually apparently saying “ANcients of MU-MU”.

Italy, Croatia, Hungary (Easter 2003)

Should probably have popped in here before I left for Italy, Croatia and Hungary to mention that I was going to Italy, Croatia and Hungary. But now you know.

It’s been a worryingly hitch-free holiday so far – Alec’n’Michelle holidays aren’t meant to be this way and we’re waiting fearfully for the fall. There was the small inconvenience of train strikes in Italy on the day we were hoping to travel to Florence, but ultimately all it meant was that we got another day in Venice, which was far from a hardship. We also got to grumble about lazy greedy Continentals, which is always fun. Meanwhile, Croatia is fabulously beautiful (scenery, old towns, people – on Easter Sunday the church was full of men in suits. I was very happy. Less happy about standing through two hours of the Good Friday service in Croatian, but never let it be said that I shy from the tough bits of the faith), and hopefully Hungary will be just as great.

For now, I had better log off and go join Alec, who is patiently reading (either American Psycho or the Bible, I’m not sure which) while waiting for me.

Billy Collins

I love finding new (new to me, anyway) poets to explore. Last week’s Saturday Poem(s) in the Guardian Review were by Billy Collins. Today seems to be about most of the days we’ve been having lately, if you ignore the biting cold that strangely crept in with the sunbeams in the past two.

I went looking for more, and ended up with quite a haul. Introduction To Poetry and Dear Reader seem like good ones to start with.

Man Listening To Disc and Marginalia are creepily accurate portrayals of aspects of my two main preoccupations.

Japan is beautifully erotic. Picnic, Lightning is about those sudden moments of clarity that elevate the mundane to the meaningful, and is also incidentally hosted on Nabokovilia, a pretty cool site that collects and explains Nabokov references in other literary works.

(If anyone wants to buy me The Annotated Lolita, please feel free. If not, then please buy it for yourself, it’s fantastic. In related news, I’m currently marvelling my way through The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight, which, though not even ranked among Nabokov’s better books, still beats almost everything else I’ve read recently hands down.)

The Real Losers/The Project/Magoo (Arts Cafe, London)

These bands played at the Arts Cafe last Saturday. Here’s a quickie:

  • The Real Losers: competent if not exhilarating punk. Funny moments when audience members, hopefully their friends, would shout things like “Go on yer losers!” and “Fucking losers!”
  • A strummy singer guy from NYC: needs singing and guitar lessons, which I realize is quite damning criticism to give a strummy singer type of performer, but he was really no Elliot Smith.
  • The Project: electropoppyweirdrock featuring girl with disembodied voice duetting with big-haired expressionless guy. Fascinating and unusual listening even to this jaded ear.
  • Magoo: bloody amazing, I haven’t been so blown away by a band I wasn’t previously familiar with since Asian Dub Foundation three years ago taught me to like drum’n’bass. Capable of crashing walls of sound and fragile balladry with equal panache. Apparently a new album is due July 23rd, and I’m assuming they’d have played songs from it. It’s going on the wishlist.

Public Enemy (Forum, London)

I’ve seen Public Enemy live, muthafuckaaaaas……

Ahem. Sorry, I realize not everyone reading this will regard such experiences as seminal. But let me take this in steps. First, they’re PUBLIC ENEMY, MUTHAFUCKAAAAAAS! Second, back in the days when for me, buying an album, any album, was an investment of staggering financial significance, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back was the first hip-hop album I ever bought. I know the same could be said for countless other wannabe music eclecticists who did….did..did…..did believe the hype, but let me point out that I spent these formative years in Singapore, where most Beastie Boys albums (and Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, for crying out loud) were banned until recently. Dammit, it took real commitment for a kid like me in Singapore to become an annoying music snob. Third, it became increasingly obvious in later years that my taste in MCs seems to have been indelibly moulded by the stentorian sounds of Chuck D. To this day, there is no MC I find as compelling.

Public Enemy have still got it. By the time Nick, Benny and I had got absolutely knackered from the sheer intensity of their performance, Griff was still doing quintuple kung fu kicks across the stage, Flav was crowd-surfing, and Chuck D was still sprinting everywhere bellowing. Some bits got a little self-indulgent, like Flav promoting his new album, and going on and on and on at the end about how the war was fucked, and how we had to raise our fingers in the peace sign, and then join them to signify togetherness, and then clench our fists to signify the power of togetherness, but I guess that’s something you have to expect from a rap group which are about more than gold chains and ho’s.

Other worthy features of the evening were masterful performances from supporting acts Killa Kela and Kool Keith. Killa Kela’s gotten even better since the last time I saw him. I suppose people in the beatboxing loop would say he’s still got some way to go before he reaches the dizzy heights of Rahzel or Doug E. Fresh, but I ain’t never heard of them beatboxing speed drum’n’bass before, ‘aaaight? Also noteworthy was his rendition of Britney’s I’m A Slave 4 U complete with gasping orgasmic vocals.

So that was another ridiculously worthwhile gig for the list. I’m seeing El-P and Murs next week, and I haven’t even written about the amazingness of Magoo on Saturday. And Calla are playing at the Water Rats in May. And I’m seeing Nick Cave in June. There are many other ways in life of being a sad geek, but all this certainly works well enough for me.

Newcastle: Fun Amidst Shittiness

[I didn’t go to Newcastle to enjoy myself. I went because John said he needed me. The fact that we ended up having a good two days is what I’m going to concentrate on writing about, despite the sad circumstances surrounding my visit. So a lot will necessarily be left out.]

On my first day in Newcastle we walked through Jesmond (which, in John’s words, is like a bit of Hampstead that wandered out of London and got very lost), Georgian Grainger Town, down the elegant curved Grey Street to the Quayside with all its lovely bridges especially the Millennium Bridge that opens and closes like an eyelid to let ships through, and lounged in chairs like big embracing egg-whites in the very cool Stereo bar. John was getting concerned – I was thinking Newcastle was lovely, despite his strenuous efforts to persuade me to the contrary.

So the next day he took me to see the Gateshead multi-storey car park. I was suitably cowed by this, but then we went to the fabulous Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (lots of pictures of it here), and watched life-size plaster casts of people being worked on for Antony Gormley’s new work Domain Field, and saw the Cobra exhibition described as too good for the North, and before long there I was going on again about how I would go back to London and become a Newcastle crusader.

Right then, said John, we’re going to Hebburn. We walked out of the Metro and gazed upon an industrial wasteland. Down the road was “Upper Crust”, an optimistically-named sandwich shop. Next to it was Jeanette’s Hair Design & Greeting Cards, where I hope Jeanette was aware of a synergy between the two products that eluded me. In the town centre we got Saveloy Dips, which were basically sausages, pease pudding and stuffing, in a bun. Apparently this Northern specialty is getting harder to find in shops, so I guess I was just lucky to be with someone who knew where to go. On the door of the town library, a poster proclaimed “The Internet has arrived!”

In the park, we read graffitti. John likes to keep himself informed on what’s been going down in the neighbourhood. Apparently Tino went to jail and got off with a lad. And I started feeling nervous about the Hebburn Hash Heads, a ubiquitious and most certainly menacing collective which left their mark everywhere. We climbed a hill, and I said “Nice hill.” “Oh, it used to be a slag heap,” John said. Bede’s Well was once revered as a source of miraculous cures. On Tuesday it was a trough in the ground clogged with beercans. One suspects the Bede’s Well Guest House nearby in Jarrow has been having permanent low season for a while.

In the corner store, a nice old lady gave John a big hug and said how sorry she was to hear about his mother. While making him a sandwich she chatted to me, asking me where I was from and little pleasantries like that. In hindsight I’d agree that she did say “And you’re going back” as more of a pointed comment than friendly question, but I didn’t pick up on it until we left and John mentioned that this nice old lady once told him how she thought the National Front was damn right.

In John’s house, we told his sister and her boyfriend about everything I’d seen. She pointed out that I hadn’t seen the River Don yet, and when all 3 of them burst out laughing I knew we were on to something. We got in the car and drove there past morose young men and angry teenage girls, all in tracksuits. The River Don didn’t reflect the sky the way water usually does. We walked along it, breathing in its bouquet of sewage and decay, and stopped on a bridge that led to some boarded-up derelict warehouses. “I wonder what’s in the River Don today,” John said cheerfully, and we peered over. There was a cooker, a microwave, and a shopping trolley.

I Hate You, Dan Rhodes (A Timoleon Vieta Come Home Review)

I read Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Dan Rhodes) in the train on the way to Newcastle, also listening to Roxette’s greatest hits album (laugh all you like, I’m secure in my music obsessiveness. For the record, the other albums I listened to on the way were Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights and Extra Yard: The Bouncement Revolution, a Big Dada compilation) at the same time.

I really, really liked the book. It was extremely funny, written in the sort of effortlessly readable prose that I tend to be too indisciplined in my writing to manage, and packed a hell of an emotional wallop while actively resisting cliché. But it left me in bits, and I need someone to blame. Read on.

Timoleon Vieta (a mongrel with beautiful eyes) was trying to find his way home after being abandoned in Rome by his owner (Cockroft, a former pops orchestra conductor, now a sad has-been living in Tuscany), under the influence of a manipulative object of infatuation (a mysterious figure known as the Bosnian). Timoleon Vieta was living on rats and bin scavengings, slinking along barely noticed, his skinny belly close to the ground, tired and hungry and sad, and then Roxette sang “I guess loneliness found a new friend”, and my heart almost broke.

I went on through the book, through instance after instance of how our imaginations eagerly build up hopes for happy and meaningful futures, through the slow agonizing creep of disbelief when those hopes start to be eroded or are destroyed in one fell swoop, through Cockroft’s desperation for some company, any company, that won’t eventually leave him without a backward glance, through Timoleon Vieta’s aching paw pads on his long journey home, and then I came to the ending, where my imagination’s hope for a heartwarming resolution to all this pain was cruelly dashed in exactly the same way it had happened to almost everyone else in the book.

I closed the book and sat back destroyed, watching the countryside race heartlessly past, and then I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt started up.

I hate you, Dan Rhodes. I hate you, Roxette. And I’m not even a dog person.

Gym/Tate Britain/Timoleon Vieta Book Launch

[We are at war. Two of my friends in Singapore have SARS. A dear friend here has suddenly lost his mother. It would be flippant if not downright disrespectful if I started writing about my week without clarifying that behind the breeziness I am actually trying to take all this in my stride.]

Here’s what went into Thursday:

Continuing gym membership saga

My relationship with my gym membership got even more complicated on Thursday morning. I arrived at the gym too late to go into the Pilates class I’d been aiming for. This was far from devastating, and I was all ready to go cheerily and sweatlessly back to my comfy flat and sprawl on the couch with English Passengers (so good) and tea, but then the girl at reception suggested I use the gym instead. I laughed this off, explaining I’d never used one before. “Oh, but we can book you in for a free induction!” she trilled brightly, and unable to think up another excuse fast enough, I had to reluctantly agree. Friends, I feel myself slowly losing the battle against fitness. What is to be done?

Conversation, culture and closeness

The afternoon was a lesson in how to have a wonderful time in London with very little money. All you need is a beautiful day, a Marks & Spencer’s pasta lunch, a bench outside the Tate Britain, and a best friend you haven’t seen in a long time. At about 3 we decided we should probably fulfil the original purpose of the outing and actually enter the museum, which was a good call given that without some discipline we would have been entirely capable of obliviously talking the afternoon away till the museum closed at 6.

The quantity and range of art you can see for free in London museums never fails to overwhelm me, and this museum is no exception. We’d had a vague plan of seeing some Turner, Days Like These (a triennial exhibition of contemporary British art), and Constable to Delacroix: British Art And The French Romantics, but could only manage the first two in the end. I thoroughly enjoyed Days Like These – I found almost every exhibit visually and conceptually interesting (which doesn’t always happen for me and modern art) and came out with an impressively low number of I-don’t-get-its. The latter comment would perhaps attract sneers from some arty types, but getting it, or at least having some vague sort of clue, is what makes modern art worthwhile for me.

Book launch, dah-ling

It was for a new book by Dan Rhodes, writer of Anthropology (one of my favourite books), and pleasant email surprise every now and then ever since he found this site one day.

Dinner beforehand was the terrible mistake of Ken Hom’s Yellow River Cafe, where I had some of the worst Oriental food I’ve had in this country since I once tried a Budgens chicken in black bean sauce ready meal, but execrable food was soon forgotten when we got to the venue for the book launch and found there was a free bar. I was, however, hoping not to meet Dan in person for the first time by telling him how fanchashtic it wash to vinally meech him, and so I was only delicately sipping at my Smirnoff Ice when Roxette’s Fading Like A Flower filled the room. (At this point I should probably explain that apart from the fact that he wrote a book I like very much, the other connection revealed by our email exchanges was a common love for Roxette and other very uncool pop music.) So I was hopping around telling Alec how much I loved the song, and Alec was trying to look as if he wasn’t with me, and then Dan came over and said hello, he’d seen my face light up at the Roxette, and was I Michelle?

I managed to avoid any embarrassing conversational gaffes, the reading was hilarious and ended with Dan sucking on some helium and leading us all in a rousing nasal sing-a-long to I Want To Know What Love Is, so an evening well spent, I think. Of course, I left with a signed copy of his new book, Timeleon Vieta Come Home, which you must all go and buy too.

Philip Appleman

A few hours before the bombing started, Garrison Keillor read Philip Appleman’s poem Last-Minute Message For A Time Capsule on National Public Radio. I’ve had a number of poems by Philip Appleman on this site for quite a while, and instead of suing me for copyright infringement as he has every right to, he was kind enough to email me this poem himself. His New And Selected Poems is pretty much impossible to find in bookstores here and Amazon UK doesn’t even stock it, but if you like what you’ve read on this site, I highly recommend you try getting your hands on a copy.

Cheerleader/Corrigan (Water Rats, London)

I’d never heard of any of the bands playing at the Water Rats on Thursday night, but decided that for £4 and a jaunt just around the corner, I’d take the risk and believe Time Out, where Cheerleader were described as “Buzzcocks and Pixies-styled noise” and Corrigan as “zinging post-punk and cinematic post-rock…variously recalls Magazine, Slint, Joy Division and Shellac.”

Cheerleader put on a show that deserved a much bigger audience than the 20 or so people watching it. Good songs that were catchy but not samey, occasional Frank Black-esque screaming from the guy, strong charismatic lead vocals, and both vocalists sounded great together; in general a solidly competent performance head and shoulders above some of the crap I have found myself watching in disbelief in the past (Mull Historical Society, this means you).

Corrigan was…intriguing. I’ve never seen a band that seemed so disconnected from its lead singer. The rest of the band looked the indie-rock part, shaved heads, spiked hair, cool faded T-shirts etc. As for the lead singer, I have difficulty describing what he was like without being probably rather offensive, but if you’ve ever watched Will And Grace, picture Jack in an rock band.

None of the band ever seemed to look at each other, and completely ignored the antics of the lead singer and his attempts to commune with them. I didn’t quite see the influences of Slint or Joy Division that Time Out saw, but must admit ignorance with regard to Magazine and Shellac, who are still on my long list of Canonical Bands I Should Probably Get Around To Listening To At Some Point For The Sake Of My Own Indie Cred. All the same, the band played cohesively if non-interactively, and I mostly liked what I heard. My problem was that I didn’t think the lead singer’s vocals (kind of like Billy Corgan but without the edge) went with the band’s type of sound, which, come to think of it, would have worked well with an Ian Curtis type of voice (so maybe Time Out was right to use “post-punk” after all).

So I think what I’m left with for this band is that I won’t personally be keen on them unless they change their lead singer, but they do deserve to go on to bigger things. (If you think about it, I’m sure a lot of people watching the Smashing Pumpkins starting out could have said exactly the same thing.)

Four quid well spent.