Boring Like A Drill.

As part of my recurring curiosity about London’s psychogeography, I went to the launch of the book London: City of Disappearances in Bishopsgate. Bishopsgate was an appropriate location for the launch: the City’s frontier, the line of the old city wall acting as a threshhold where the establishment’s corporate bastions give way to the rapidly redeveloping East End. All around the Bishopsgate Institute’s Great Hall are new cafes and bistros built over what was formerly bohemian squalour, and before that working class and immigrant enclaves.

My own place in Hackney is on a similar border, but between two manifestations of the same economic weather. To the west, gentrification and property speculation encroaches, as the housing estates gradually disappear, one by one. Just to the east lies Olympic territory, the Hackney Marshes destined for wholsesale reconstruction by 2012.

The book, a collective repository of memories from the famous and unknown alike, solicited from an open call for contributions, was edited by Iain Sinclair, whom I have discussed several times before. He spoke of the intertwining of history and myth, of the city as a tissue of ephemera related from one individual to the next, its identity made or lost through what someone remembers or forgets.

“Every appearance is a disappearance,” we were reminded, thinking of the construction sites that surrounded us. It was not a necessary injunction. As a newcomer, I knew that arriving in a city entails always being reminded of how much you have already missed. As for Londoners, they are so preoccupied with memories, with conservation and preservation, that every change in the city is regarded as a loss. The preservationist urge is so strong in most Western cities today that the population’s response to the cityscape is almost entirely reactive, focussed exclusively on what is to be destroyed, with no deep consideration of what is to replace it. Really, it would be more instructive to remind ourselves that every disappearance is an appearance, for ill or good.

Sinclair himself has been guilty of this kind of barbaric nostalgia – who, not knowing what is of value, hoards everything – reacting to every alteration and relocation with an innate fear and mistrust. Transported back to Victorian times he would have doubtless been dismayed by the excavation of the sewers. His attitude has become more enlightened lately, having explored further afield into the suburbs, and learning from J.G. Ballard how to appreciate the new city that has sprung up in the Docklands.

Someone asked how he knew that all the stories collected are true. “I don’t.” Everyone invents their own world, and so each London described cannot help but bear a greater or lesser resemblance to the city you or I would recognise. Some of the collected memoirs are likely fabrications; some flatly contradict each other. (Two ageing anarchists in the book claim to have been working in the same Charing Cross Road bookshop at the same time, and each vociferously denies that the other was there.)

The book will not give a definitive overview or coherent mapping of a city plainly seen, but hopefully in its omissions, repetitions, dead ends and contradictions, its confusion will make a truer reflaction. As someone who prefers to play the hunter-gatherer of used and remaindered books, it will again be a portrait partly eclipsed by time when I get around to reading it.

Over at Sarsaparilla there has been a discussion about whether or not Magic 693 is the haven of awesomeness I described, or a high-rotation hell of the more obvious chestnuts. In the interests of objectivity I listened for an hour or so and wrote down their playlist, reproduced below. Songs with that ineffable “Magic” quality are marked with an asterisk; two asterisks mean a particularly “Magic” segue.

• Olivia Newton-John: Twist of Fate* (Mis-announced as “Second Time Around”)
• Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass: Tijuana Taxi**
• Charlie Rich: Behind Closed Doors
• The Diamonds: Little Darlin’
• Peter, Paul and Mary: Leaving on a Jet Plane*
• Stevie Wonder: For Once in My Life
• Dr Hook: Sharing the Night Together
• Gene Pitney: Mecca*
• ABBA: SOS
• The Walker Bros: The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine
• Julio Iglesias: Drive (lame Cars cover, not a lame REM cover)

After this low point comes a sustained passage of brilliance which makes Magic so special:

• Normie Rowe: Ooh La La*
• Lobo: Don’t Expect Me to Be Your Friend*
• Ned Miller: Invisible Tears*
• Herb Ohta: Song for Anna*
• The Bee Gees: World*
• Christopher Cross: Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do) (back announced with the comment “great lyrics!”)
• Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz: The Girl from Ipanema (yes, the announcer remembered to name-drop Stan Getz)
• Tom T. Hall: Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine**
• Simon and Garfunkel: The Sounds of Silence
• Lulu: To Sir With Love
• Foster and Allen: I Will Love You All My Life
• Bruce Channel: Hey! Baby*
• Bobby Goldsboro: Summer (The First Time)**
• Peter and Gordon: I Go To Pieces
• Rod Stewart: That’s All (Sigh. Rod Stewart covers creaky old standards: the aural equivalent of Patterson’s Curse.)
• Mary Hopkin: Those Were The Days
• George Baker Selection: La Paloma Blanca*
• Bobby Vinton: Blue on Blue
• Billie Jo Spears: Blanket on the Ground**
• The Beatles: Michelle
• Dan Hill: Sometimes When We Touch
• Lonnie Lee: Starlight Starbright*
• Kevin Johnson: Rock & Roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life)*

And then I switched it off. I think this vindicates my opinion, don’t you? Ads included two rival Jayco caravan salesman, a shop that sells those self-lifting recliner rockers, Australian Pensioner Funerals, Ian Reid Vendor Advocacy (“Go on, ring us!”), Bayside Skin Cancer Clinic, Tyabb Packing House Antiques (“Need a new sideboard?”), and Leafbusters. Strangely, nothing from either Bargain National Tiles or OzKnits (“Love your cardigan! Paris?” “No! OzKnits at Ringwood!”)

I know it’s hard to imagine a station that plays “La Paloma Blanca” for serious, but look at their song choices for ONJ, Gene Pitney, and the Bee Gees! All that’s missing is Gary Puckett, and not spinning in either “Goodbye” or “Tema Harbour” for Mary Hopkin, but these are equally likely to happen at any hour of the day.

Also, Lonnie Lee has recorded a musical tribute to Steve Irwin, available for download! Lyrics printed for singalong with your kiddies, or anyone else’s kiddies.

It’s been a while since we all enjoyed a really hostile review, so please enjoy Heart On A Stick’s reaction to seeing a gig by indie wannabe-darlings Ra Ra Riot:

Stand back, he’s just warming up.

What do you do when your hard drive gets clogged with “temporary” files that never go away? You play them through a sound editor to hear what they sound like. One day I hope to record some music which takes less time to make than listen to: this piece gets pretty close to that goal.

This unedited file was subjected to four types of randomised filtering through parametric equalisers in Ross Bencina’s fine program AudioMulch, and then mixed by rapid, randomised crossfading between each of the four outputs.

So what does playing with 21st century technology get me? Maybe it’s the low quality of the sound from the original data file, or maybe it’s because I’m fifty years behind the times, but the piece sounds uncannily like the sort of tape music coming out of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studios in Köln in the 1950s. In keeping with this sound, the title refers to the human phenomenon of futile longing for a vanished world.

It’s 4 Meg, it’s 4 minutes long. It’s noisy. Please download and enjoy The Night We Burned Down Bimbo Deluxe.

Part of the slightly revamped Boring Like A Drill Hit Parade!

The good people at Sarsaparilla have invited me to join their crew of kulchur bloggers, so of course I immediately accepted. Every now and then I’ll be posting stuff over there, which will either be cross-posted or linked to here.

My first contribution is up now, and even though you’ve probably read it before I suggest you go read it again, what with the nicer formatting and other interesting things to read that they have on their site.

First it was the ravens, now it’s come to this. And always the pigeons pay.

Families and tourists in a London park were left shocked when a pelican picked up and swallowed a pigeon…. An RSPB spokesman said: “It is almost unheard of for a pelican to eat a bird. Their diet should be strictly fish.”
The bird got up and strolled along until it reached one of the pigeons, which it just grabbed in its beak.

Good.

Note for journalism students: the last two sentences of the linked article are a classic example of the inverted triangle in action.

On the tariff at the Tre Scalini café in the Piazza Navonna, Rome:
Coffee: €0.80 at the bar, €3.00 on the piazza.
Decaff: €0.90 at the bar, €4.50 on the piazza.

A number of people have written in over the past few months to inform me that Magic 693, the greatest radio station in the world, has suffered a traumatic change. At first it seemed the station had gone for good, but instead it had just been shunted by its owner, without warning, to the more cramped frequency of 1278 KHz.

It’s an oldies station, with a focus on what people would generally describe as “easy listening” – e.g. they’ll play “Something” but not “I Am The Walrus” – but within that ambit they’re about the most eclectic radio station in the world. If they have a playlist, it’s so vast I’ve never been able to learn it. I once heard them segue from “Imagine” to “Baby Elephant Walk”, which is reason enough to love them.

They have a fairly loose, philosophical concept of “easy listening”, in any case. No-one would consider “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back” as a soothing piece of muzak, yet it has turned up without warning, right after Barbra Streisand. Magic’s disc jockeys are fearless, indiscriminately spinning anything that once was popular, without regard for taste, political correctness, or continuity, let alone the selective, sanitised memories of the aesthetic judgements of baby boomers. Their attitude can be heard from their ads for their Fifties show: “the Fifties was more than just rock and roll, and we play all of it!“

Besides the music, there is added appeal in listening to the ads. Magic presents itself to advertisers as “Melbourne’s highest-rating station for over-30s”, which is adspeak for geriatrics. The commercial breaks are invariably filled with spruikers for retirement villages, funerals, cat litter (“Is your home a bit… phew-whiff?”), and those recliner rocker chairs that tilt forward to get you up out of them. Bud Tingwell tells you about the good works of the Spastic Society and asks you not to give generously now, but to remember them in your will. They can wait a little longer for your donation.

Finally, there is also the mysterious fascination commanded by their announcers. There seem to be only three of them, who alternate in shifts that rotate around the clock, and after listening for years I still can’t distinguish one from another. The same guy is likely to turn up at 9pm on a Tuesday, and then at 3am on a Sunday.

The station’s indiscriminate inclusivity has put them far ahead of the cultural curve in a number of instances. Without realising it, they have perfectly implemented Negativland’s “Moribund Music of the Seventies” project on a mainstream, commercial station. They are also quite probably the only station which unironically plays records featured in the 365 Days Project, and always has done. A couple of times each I’ve heard them spin Jesse Lee Turner’s “The Little Space Girl” (see July 18) and Jack Clement’s rather fine “My Voice Is Changing” (see August 23) – an obscure B-side, according to the website.

It’s such a pity they’ve been shunted to a frequency with worse reception, and had to ditch their catchy station ID jingles; but on the upside, they’ve just introduced an internet streaming service! It sounds like someone’s holding a transistor to a styrofoam cup on the end of a taut string 16,000 miles long, but the one thing I have been wishing for since I left Melbourne is a reliable source of Joe South and Vicky Leandros broadcast into my house at any hour of the day or night. Now you, music lovers around the world, can share in the Magic.

Also, while looking for links for the above article, I discovered Bud Tingwell has a blog! I love the 21st Century.

Scrawled in biro over a poster for the movie of The History Boys on the platform at Euston station*: “Alan Bennett is an overrated poof from Yorkshire.”

* Northern Line, Charing Cross branch.

The final instalment of the online reading of Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector. Previous posts here and here.

We remember it too, because we were told about it only two pages earlier. Even then, it was carefully spelled out to us that if a man is carrying a sack of cats to water, he means to drown them, do you see? The first sentence of The Da Vinci Code should be enough to convince you it’s not worth reading, yet it’s scarcely any worse than passages like the one above which litter The Vivisector.

There’s an old dictum that writers should show, not tell; but White has an exasperating compulsion to show, and then tell what he’s just shown. Perhaps he didn’t trust, or recognise, his own abilities as a writer. Perhaps he was pitching his writing toward an envisaged audience of reluctant students. Perhaps he was afraid that not quite everyone would appreciate his Depth of Feeling, and so had to keep reminding people that he was a Serious Writer, at the expense of the writing itself.

Just in case we’re too thick to get that the cats are Symbolic, Hurtle and Hero then proceed to argue about them for no-one’s benefit other than our own. Ridiculously, this carries on for several pages. Every subsequent, inevitable reference to cats for the remainder of the chapter (including one otherwise effective moment when Hero addresses her “adopted” Aboriginal child as “kitten”) comes across as phoney and heavy-handed as, well, something out of Dan Brown. An especially self-important Dan Brown.

For those wanting to keep track, Hurtle’s previous clichéd lover, the Maternal Whore, has been disposed of by authorial fiat and replaced in unconvincing circumstances by Hero, another clichéd lover, the Slumming Patroness. (Her husband is that other great cliché of the novelist’s time, the Greek Shipping Tycoon. Perhaps White was trying to forestall silly questions about where he gets his ideas from.) There is, of course, another patroness on the scene, and so another cliché, the Triangle, inveitably ensues, thus fulfilling the need for a section about The Artist And His Women.

Strangely, neither woman has apparently ever shown a personal interest in any other bohemian besides Hurtle. He is that most infuriating of stock protagonist types, the Guy Stuff Just Keeps Happening To.

The last three chapters of the book improve dramatically, inasmuch as they begin to play with our expectations more than fulfil them, albeit in a way that renders the preceding seven chapters superfluous. Hurtle is such an inert, narrowly defined character in the novel’s first 400 pages that there is nothing in him or the limited depiction of his world that enlarges upon our appreciation of the final 200. In fact, knowledge of the earlier chapters may even hinder our taking seriously the latter part of the book, with its plot heavily based upon a series of reunions of sufficient improbability to make Dickens blush.

White’s description of people and places is so thoroughly squalid that it becomes unintentionally comic; you could almost make a drinking game out of the number of times a character eats food that has spoiled. Ultimately, his unvarying determination to depict the vulgarity of everyday life is revealed as a veneer of bourgeois titillation to disguise the utter conventionality of the author’s thoughts behind it; a surface of exaggeratedly gritty reality to distract from the dishonesty of the characters and plot: the Crucified Artist Hero and Redemption Through a Child. The noble overreach of the book’s ambition is hamstrung by White’s self-regarding redundancies and need to assert the profundity of his unexceptional insight.

The Readers’ Group is planning another online reading of a White novel soon, which I won’t be joining. Reading this book put me off White more than I expected, and I don’t want to return to him in a hurry, when other, doubtless better books sit unread on my shelves. In particular, I don’t want to reread a White novel: I rather liked the ones I read years ago, and I’m afraid it will spoil my memories.

New on the blogroll: Straight from the Tated . It has excellent taste in links.

(Related: Take Every Day as it Comes, Brothers and Sisters)

Now we’ll really see some action around here!

The real reason the war in Iraq is still going. Also, a rare sighting of the old Blogspot banner.

The name and subject indices have finally been updated, to the end of September. At last you can find out what El Lissitsky, Juvenal Habriarimana and Sally Thomsett have in common.