This evenings edition of Rockfort is a specially extended show dedicated entirely to Christian Vander, the drummer-leader of the legendary prog group Magma. During (the French language) interview, Vander holds forth on a miscellany of subjects including his passion for John Coltrane, the Kobaian language, and meeting his wife Stella.
Rockfort Magma Special - 9:30 – 11:00pm November 10th 09
"Learning from Japan" is a theme I keep coming back to, a sermon I keep preaching. Opposed to the crude view I call "Japan Original Sin" (people who harp on about research whaling, war criminal shrines and textbook lacunae, and with whom one eventually, inevitably, ends up playing a futile game of Atrocity Snap), the "Learning from Japan" meme simply suggests that Japan's difference from Western practice is valuable, precisely, to the West. We can't learn anything from people who think as we do. For the same reason, men can learn more from women than they can from other men.
The architecture world will get a chance to learn from Japan -- and from a woman -- in 2010; SANAA's Kazuo Sejima has been chosen as the curator of The Venice Architecture Biennial. I'm pretty sure she's the first Japanese to get this job; she's certainly the first woman to do so. A clue to her focus comes in a brief statement she's released saying that "a significant point of departure could be the concept of boundaries and the adaptation of space... it could be argued that contemporary architecture is an afterthought and perhaps an easing of borders themselves." That's a fresh thought already; architecture as an easing of borders in a time when they're generally stiffening.
I blogged last week about a new book from Lars Müller, The SANAA Studios 2006-2008. Learning from Japan: Single-Story Urbanism. My title today comes from there. The blurb explains: "During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan...
"As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA?" Browsing the book at Pro-qm, I got the strong impression that what we can learn from SANAA is something to do with a relaxing, elegant lightness and understatement, something to do with minimalism and gentleness, and something to do with a feeling of calm that permeates Japan very noticeably whenever you spend time there. Iwan Baan's photographs of SANAA buildings filled with schoolchildren or middle-aged culture tourists made me think of Alasdair Gray's excellent maxim: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
My radio focus these days consists of drive time sports chatter or the local oldies station that play the usual suspects (Beatles, Motown, Gloria Gaynor, etc.) Occasionally I'll slip in a treasured Baikinange CD on my piece of shit car stereo for some "culture", but basically I'm a lazy ass, content to mull over the merits of yesterday's hits and misses.
Driving home this evening, tired of hearing the "Bulldog" ragging on the Buffalo Bills, I flipped over to Legends 102.7 and caught the opening notes of one of my all time favorite tunes, "I'm Your Puppet".
Pull the string and I'll wink at you, I'm your puppet I'll do funny things if you want me to, I'm your puppet......
From the all knowing Wikipedia James & Bobby Purify were an R&B singing duo, whose biggest hits were "I'm Your Puppet" in 1966...."I'm Your Puppet" was written by Spooner Oldham plus Dan Penn and produced by Penn, who introduced Purify to Moore. The record spent 14 weeks in the U.S. chart, and sold an estimated one million copies. It was released in September 1966.
The duo continued into the 1980s, with no other big hits, but remained popular on the tour circuit.
The song was covered by a boatload of souless, white people including Donny Osmond, Elton John, The Box Tops and The Drive By Truckers. All fail miserably. Enjoy.
yesterday at the flea market, i picked up these two cabinet cards, because of the chair. as you can see it appears in both photographs. even though it's kind of an interesting chair, it wouldn't have been necessary to procure the photographs until i noticed that one image was taken in chicago, and the other in st. louis.
as difficult as travel must've been around 1870, i would imagine it being even tougher for a chair. i'm not sure if there's more to the story, other than the fact that face of the boy in the solo image, and the girl on the left in the other image have incredibly similar facial features.
like the photograph of the woman and the victrola i posted last week, the chair here does begin to feel like a surrogate for a missing person; and perhaps, because no one is actually sitting on it in either picture, there is a family spirit taking up the chair-sitting-space invisibly.
perhaps this invisible presence was felt by the others in the photographs; and that the subjects, along with the photographer, attempted to photographically capture this ghost, by travelling to different cities, and posing with different family members. it would seem that every time they, and the chair, had their photograph taken, they would be filled with hope that the phantom would somehow appear, sitting on the chair comfortably, within the photographic image that eventually appeared upon the paper...
if that was the case, then what we see here, is simply a failed attempt to make the invisible, visible.
This evening’s edition of The Bike Show finds Jack Thurston in conversation with Debra Rolfe, Campaigns Director at the Cyclists Touring Club. Debra and Jack discuss CTC’s new “Stop-SMIDSY” campaign aimed at encouraging motorists to be less oblivious to cyclists. The programme also features writer, poet, publisher, OuLiPo member and French cultural attaché to London, Paul Fournel reading from his latest book ‘Need for the Bike’.
Let's say -- just hypothetically -- that I'd been pondering for several months what a new novel should be about, because I want to keep writing these things, now I've started. And let's say -- entirely speculatively -- that I'd actually refined and defined a slew of "signature specifications" to the extent that I was able to start writing the new book, suddenly, last week. Let's call it The Book of Pim, but let's say absolutely nothing about it at this stage, because it's not my business to tell or yours to know, at this point, what this notional book will say or do. Let's just say one thing, though: that although the book is set in a far-off People's Republic whose real world cognate I've never been to, Manchester (a city I've only been to once) figures in it. Not the real Manchester, but the city I built in my imagination while listening to the records of Joy Division, Magazine, The Fall and The Passage. Let's watch an information film:
The man delivering this lecture about Manchester, The Fall and Mark E. Smith at an academic conference at the University of Salford is Dick Witts, an academic at the University of Edinburgh. He begins his lecture with a brilliant deconstruction of a BBC4 documentary about Manchester -- a film good in its way, but also typical of the reductive, revisionist and tediously "iconic" way such history gets reduced to successes, soundbites and the same old talking heads. Witts lists the 35 individual shots the documentary uses to establish its vision of Manchester in 1977, sourcing them in documentaries from 1946, 1955, 1967 and 1978, often as much about Salford and Ordsall as Manchester itself, and as much about urban regeneration as the urban decay it's intended to convey. Only 10% of the visual material intended to evoke the seventies, Witts shows, actually comes from the decade.
Witts then goes on to set the scene much better than the Factory documentary, showing a transition in 70s Manchester from Modernist glass-concrete-and-steel redevelopment to Postmodernist restoration, pedestrianisation and heritage-orientation. He also displaces the cliché about the Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall sparking Manchester post-punk, pointing out that the experimentation of Van der Graaf Generator, the "basic" rock of The Worst, and the radical localism of the folk scene also played their part.
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group The Passage. And it's at this point that I can reveal that The Passage is the only Manchester group I still listen to, and that the vision of the city conjured in Passage songs, especially the early ones, is what's informing the book I'm now -- hypothetically -- writing. Sure, sure, The Fall is an endlessly fascinating group, and Mark E. Smith is perhaps Britain's greatest living poet. But for me, personally, Dick Witts -- the modest, acute music lecturer at the podium -- is much more important and much more fascinating. I could write a book about why my book will contain echoes (transmuted to a far eastern People's Republic) of the dark, schematic Mancunian landscapes Witts' lyrics evoked across four Passage albums and several EPs and radio sessions. But for now I'll just write a couple of paragraphs.
The Manchester landscape of Passage songs is one of personal scenarios of love, hope and lust played out against a backdrop of politics noir, an environment poised between Blade Runner and The Threepenny Opera. This Manchester is presided over by "Mr Terror, Chief of Police", a Methodist police chief called Anderton whose motivations are religio-fascistic. Anderton is real, a policeman-puritan who claimed to take counsel directly from God and believed AIDS to be a punishment for the immorality of homosexuals. Anything that didn't contribute to Anderton's definition of "a good and useful life" was within his remit to quash. He may sound like the sacrificial Christian copper in The Wicker Man, but woe betide artists trying to pillory him in fiction: when David Britton portrayed Anderton as "Lord Horror" in a 1989 satirical graphic novel, the book was banned and Britton sent to prison for several months.
Anderton in Passage songs is described in Old Testament terms as a layer of "snares" and "traps". He plays a similar role -- authoritarian hate figure -- as The Dictator Hall plays in my own first album, The Happy Family's The Man on Your Street. Over music sinister, twinkling, thunderous, complex, modular and modern -- music which, like an operetta, keeps sweeping the same motifs into new combinations and contexts -- a series of schematic terms define life: FEAR POWER LOVE, the transition from midnight to a new dawn, fire and ice, bodies and minds, drugs illegal-forbidden and legal-compulsory, seconds, hours and days, the provinces and, beyond them, the chilly, distant capital LON DON, almost Chinese in its distant, imperial brutality.
The Passage website and above all the LTM re-releases might give you a glimpse of why this band, this man, wunderbar, ich glaube, n'est-ce pas? continue to mean so much to me. They took subversion and avant garde experimentation further than anyone else in the early 80s, and Dick Witts was simply more intelligent than any other British songwriter at the time, his wordplay more serious and more witty, his politics more radical and advanced. It's not particularly surprising that BBC documentaries (even BBC4 documentaries) gloss over The Passage, and not particularly surprising that Witts himself tends to as well. But important parts of my imagination got lit up by Witts' vision the way other people (including Witts himself) were illuminated by Morrissey or Mark E Smith, and I have a feeling that those parts are now flexing and stretching and, one day soon, will see the dawn.
Today’s edition of Edible Landscapes is a fluid affair; a two hour recording by Knut Aufermann made in the wine cellar of organic wine farmers Rudolf and Rita Trossen. Their wine estate is located in Kinheim-Kindel on the river Mosel, Germany. As the Trossen’s wine ferments carbon dioxide escapes audibly through air-locks on top of the barrels, turning the cellar into a space dense with orchestral bubbling.
Edible Landscapes 2:00 – 4:00pm November 9th 09
What are the first WM artists doing? I mean those that contributed to the first WM CD? The Dutch folk and bluegrass band Blue Dew turned their most recent theatre show "Little Whiskey Child" into a movie, with the band members as actors. The music by the film is been played live each time, just like in the old days. The premiere is next weekend in Zwolle at the filmfestival:
Doing Hard Time in Shaker Heights tells an interesting story in the history of the automotive industry (and the history of 1950s sexism) about Oldsmobile's attempt to design and market a car just for the gals. The laaaaaadies. The Dodge LaFemme. In pastel colors. With optional matching parasol, raincoat, and purse. And it all failed dismally, who saw THAT coming?
Maybe you'd disagree, but listening to The Four Millionaires version of The World is Waiting for the Sunrise (of which Les Paul did a classic version) make me think the banjo player tried to see if some of Paul's experimental techniques might work for HIS axe, too. At any rate, the album is by far the best album released as a giveaway from a St. Louis furniture store that I've heard all week.
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
Forget the places you've been going on holiday, and go on holiday instead to Beirut.
Do not expect to learn about the world through journalists.
Any Obama backlash will simply help usher in someone worse. Skip it.
Your mother holds a key piece of information, essential to your happiness. All you have to do is ask her the right question.
Blogs you check habitually are the wrong ones because they tell you nothing new. Try switching to Letters of Note, correspondence deserving of a wider audience. Certainly, the letters collected here are from the past. But they very readily suggest parallel futures -- for instance, a future in which Andy Warhol isn't famous.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
The everyday contains everything you need for a religion.
Stop expecting new musician Y to be "the new musician X". And stop expecting old musician X to be the new musician X.
You have been underestimating the colour yellow.
Conspiracy theories waste your time. It's all a big conspiracy.
Your body will thank you for using a bicycle every day during the new decade. Using bicycles will become a condition of using computers successfully too: the correspondence between them will become clearer over time.
The teens are destined to be the decade in which we'll finally stop wearing jeans. It'll be a slow sputtering process, but why wait? Ban the jean from your wardrobe starting January 1st by this simple rule: each time you find yourself reaching for jeans, reach for hose instead.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
Drums are finished. Except for kettledrums and gongs.
You know too much about LA and not enough about Laos. On the internet and in "the real world" you're consistently looking in the wrong places for inspiration. Why is that? Partly it's because the things that could really change you make you scared.
This is the decade in which you will finally make the switch from quantity to value. One ramification: you will move from an expensive place where you have to do a lot of meaningless work just to exist to a cheap place where you can exist easily and can therefore afford to dedicate yourself to work that really means something to you.
The penny finally drops: people who drive cars just end up seeing a lot of roads.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but they might be located on the other side of the world.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do. They are hidden next door, but to befriend them you will have to learn a new language.
You will probably be happier amongst people who do not think as you do.
Nothing could be better than a market at 5am, but to experience it you will have to get up earlier and brave the cold.
Learn to make things with wood.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
Everything you know is right, but that was then and this is now.
"Wynonie's Rumpus Room". Sounds like a really indelicate euphemism to me. Anyway, I got some great sides from the fabulous blues shouter that I had never heard before here.
If you're a runner (if you ever met me you would know right away that I am NOT) you're always looking for ways to remove dead weight and avoid wind resistance. That's why Scott Dunlap's blog features this necklace made from the discarded toenails of his running buddies. Just one bag of gris-gris and this serious-looking piece of jewelry and you're all ready to mess with someone's juju in a big way, yes?
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group 
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
No previous decades are to be revived this decade. Make a little more effort with the shapes of things, please.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
