Anticipating Endless Nights

From Neil Gaiman’s journal:

“I finished Miguelanxo Prado’s story for Endless Nights yesterday — a very strange story, in which we get to see one of Dream’s first relationships, and learn weird things about the DC universe at the dawn of time (so there will be some people who will find it really cool that Killalla of the Glow is from Oa, and some people will simply go “What a short name for a world”). The strangest thing was writing a two page scene for Delight – who is, obviously, in a hundred million years or so, going to be Delirium, but isn’t her yet.”

The information above will mean nothing to you if you’ve never read Sandman, but if you have, please join with me now in responding: I WANT.

Juxtapositions

I decide my cheek and the library table are getting on a little too well for their own good, so I stagger to my room and put on some Sonic Youth at their most dissonant and abrasive – crashing guitars, wailing feedback, screamed vocals, the lot. I jump around a lot.

Feeling better, I go downstairs for dinner and find a string quartet playing in the dining room. How nice. A former hallmate’s brought his quartet here for some small-scale performance experience. I sit down and spend most of the performance trying to physically restrain my cringes at off-pitch notes and jittery timing, both of which literally give me goose-bumps in their imprecision.

Sometimes life’s little juxtapositions amuse me.

Never Mind The Backlogs

Cryptonomicon is still good going whenever I have time to pick it up, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel an ongoing and recently gnawing need to feed greed. Which is rather absurd, given that American Gods has languished, unopened, for far too long on my bedside table and needs a lot of TLC, The Prince really should get reread soon so I can return it to the guy I borrowed it from six months ago, and I really want to finish Love In The Time Of Cholera some day instead of reading it halfway three times and inexplicably abandoning it each time despite liking it very much.

So I suppose that means I shouldn’t go out and buy Atonement today then.

Of course there is also the small matter of all the other books that remain unread and completely unfamiliar, such as Cases And Materials In Company Law, Cheshire And North’s Private International Law, Dworkin’s Law’s Empire, Shaw’s International Law…

I think this all boils down to an acute case of eyes bigger than brain.

Fumbling With Múm

I already have problems writing anything remotely original, profound or unpretentious about a lot of the conventional instrument-based music I listen to, despite the fact that I like to believe I appreciate it on more than a superficial level, so I’m not even going to try to say anything more about Múm’s Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK other than that it is one of the most exquisite little collections of bleeps, fuzz, static, dinky music-boxes and glockenspiel chimes that I’ve heard in a long time.

Force Of Habit (20 Minute Loop)

Sometimes I probably take music deconstruction too far (although I hardly ever write about it here for fear of (a) sounding pretentious and (b) being wrong) but it was quite an epiphany when I was blissing out to Force Of Habit (20 Minute Loop) yesterday and trying to figure out what made a reasonably ordinary sounding song feel so tragically beautiful, and realized it was the augmented fifths in the chorus. (There you go, guilty of (a) already. Proceed with caution.)

Kelly Atkins’ and Greg Giles’ voices don’t convey anything particularly special when singing on their own but the minute their harmonies begin you’re drawn into their misery; they’re staying up all night “finessing a way of keeping each other down”, they’re locked into a relationship destroying itself by “force of habit”, and those augmented fifths strain at the seams with hurt and helplessness and regret.

I hasten to add that the song doesn’t reflect my current mental state at all, and I hope it never does. For now the lump in my throat is pure sympathy, no empathy.

East, West, Buying CDs Is Best

I’m sure foot reflexology is an enjoyable and beneficial form of alternative therapy when actually done by a foot reflexologist, but right now the most visible effects of the foot reflexology slippers my mother sent from home via my brother are that I jump a mile every time I put them on and shriek “Fuck me, that hurts.”

“Retail therapy”, on the other hand, is a phrase too Generation X’y and Douglas Coupland stylie even for this Coupland fan (“parental units” is another), but it undeniably works wonders once embarked on. Sunday saw the acquisition of:

  • Closer (Joy Division)
  • Music Has The Right To Children (Boards of Canada, finally)
  • Sound01: A Big Dada Sampler (excellent)
  • Hip-Hop 24/7 (3 CDs featuring a surprisingly good range of styles: Roots Manuva, Aim, Jeru The Damaja, Public Enemy, Sugarhill Gang, and, er, Snoop)
  • Urban Funk Breaks III (also much better than your usual bog standard Ultimate! Party! Breakbeats! compilation)
    (all of the above for a total of £28.85 at HMV)
  • three pink items of clothing (one little top and two unmentionables)

Yet another saddening example of the triumph of evil Western capitalist values and consumerist culture over ye olde Oriental ways, I suppose.

Rocket (Smashing Pumpkins)

Ever since Yoichi nearly banged my door down in glee on Tuesday brandishing the Smashing Pumpkins DVD he’d just bought, and we rushed downstairs and monopolized the TV room by sheer noise and enthusiasm and nostalgia, thumping out drumming climaxes on the tables, belting out choruses and air-guitaring ourselves into a frenzy, everything has been building up to this morning.

Sun. Breeze. Saturday. All you need is Rocket.

Around 1.00 the riffs start sliding into that wonderful progression and I realize the rules I learnt in Grade 5 music theory about how some progressions just work and always will were actually spot on.

Around 1.20 what I’ve always somehow thought of as the “Indian motif” comes in. It’s too insistent and compelling to feel sensuous, but it’s damn sexy in its own way all the same.

They haven’t hit us with the big chorus yet. It’s coming. At 2.00 the guitar wails steadily and inexorably upwards, Billy sings “the moon is out, the stars invite. Think I’ll leave toniiiiiiiiight…” and we’re off, up, away, employ all the rocket metaphors you want, baby, because they’re all good.

Jumbled Headmusic

From a piano session with Tay last night, Carrot Rope (Pavement), Jed The Humanoid (Grandaddy) and Evaporated (Ben Folds Five) are sitting cross-legged on the floor and swaying dreamily.

From The Royal Tenenbaums on Sunday, Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard (Paul Simon) is throwing sand and thumbing its nose at the above three.

From Alec putting on The Cure last night, Lullaby (ohhhh, when that bass comes in) is slinking and gasping its way round clawing at the walls while simultaneously reapplying layers upon layers of black eyeliner.

From the radio this morning, Witness (Roots Manuva) is bursting the bionic zit splittah, downing ten pints of bittah, right now seeing clearer than most and sitting here contented wit’ dis cheese on toast.

Sing-a-long-a Sound Of Cynicism

Apart from traditional ideological divides eg. East/West, North/South, capitalism/communism, pro-life/pro-choice, I have discovered yet another source of stark and violent division amongst peoples.

So tell me, if a good friend of yours called you up and said it was their birthday on Sunday and they’d decided to spend the afternoon at Sing-a-long-a Sound Of Music, would you say: i) “OMIGOD, that sounds SOOOO fantastic, I’ll come as a brown paper package tied up with string!” or ii) “Sweet Jesus, deliver me from this hell on earth”?

Humph. Well, screw the naysayers. I’m not old enough for dignity yet.

Wrong Wu-Syntax

The Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator is highly dissatisfactory and clearly ill-conceived. My Wu-Name is apparently Lazy-Assed Destroyer, which just goes against all MC naming conventions. Consider: the unchanged spelling of “lazy”, the unnecessarily grammatical “ed” on the end of “Ass”, and above all, the “er” that ends “Destroyer”.

I think my Wu-Name should have been Lay-Z Ass Destroyah.