September’s here, so all the art galleries around London are reopening after their summer break. This means one thing:
Large buckets filled with beer bottles, down every side street in the east end of London. If you’re not getting them for free you’re honestly not trying. There’s also new art, but you’re usually better off ignoring it. In London, anyway.
Most of it to be found in Vyner Street in Hackney, a short back alley near the canal with allegedly a dozen or so art spaces (no one person has ever found them all) tucked away amidst the warehouses and sweatshops doomed by imminent gentrification.
Early in the year some earnest soul had chalked on the outside of one of the galleries “Wake up Vyner Street! The world needs you!” An endearingly romantic sentiment, if obviously only half right.
* Actual note once left on a message board in the sculpture department of RMIT. Don’t worry, by second semester midterm break the system has ironed out these personal little kinks.
Filed under: Art by Ben.H
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The two halves of my brain are at war with each other!
Sunday 2 September 2007
Not so long ago I described the sight of the reopened Millennium Dome at night from my house. Very unexpectedly, I have now been inside the Dome. Even less expectedly, it was to see one of those Prince gigs I mentioned. Yet even less expectedly again, I got in for free. Most unexpectedly of all, I was in one of the corporate boxes.
My lovely girlfriend had scammed two tickets from her work, which holds a corporate box at the Dome to shmooze valued clients. “That all sounds perfectly awesome,” you’re thinking, and you would be right if it weren’t for one little thing. I like Prince enough to enjoy listening to his stuff, but not enough to lift a finger to hear any more of it, and the whole thing happened at short notice, just when I was in a fairly severe bout of depression. This made me probably the only person in the crowd heading out to the Dome with a sense of nameless dread.
This emotional disconnect between feeling pointlessly terrible and being at an exciting concert was compounded by another contradiction. I’m prejudiced against big arena shows in the first place, but there’s nothing quite so un-rock’n’roll as being at a rock gig seated in a beige lounge suite with a champagne flute in one hand and a plate of spicy chicken wings in the other. Please don’t think I’m complaining about being waited on at a free concert, it’s just that it’s a little weird. Like in those sci-fi movies where the astronauts land on a strange planet and the aliens are a little too nice to them, it puts you on your guard.
Each corporate suite holds about a dozen people, so the girl and I didn’t have the place to ourselves. Luckily there were only a couple of valued clients in the room – most of the others were co-workers who had also scammed tickets – but that was enough to deter me from trying to gee myself up by getting quickly hammered and screaming “Hello peasants!” or “Play Sexy Motherfucker!” over the balcony. Worse still, I couldn’t get lost in a crowd and indulgently mope somewhere without being conspicuous.
At least I could agree with everyone else in the room about something (most of whom were enthusiastic young things who weren’t even born when Prince was having his first hits): in a classic “playing with the box the toy came in” moment, we all thought the coolest part of the night was the way the lighting crew had to spend the entire evening hanging ten metres above the stage, suspended by cables from the roof, to operate the spotlights.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Thursday 30 August 2007
Buddy Greco, “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” (1969).
(3’25”, 3.36 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Keeping the Magic Alive
Wednesday 29 August 2007
Last year I wrote in praise of Magic 693 (now Magic 1278), the Melbourne oldies station with a playlist so vast and eclectic it barely qualifies as a playlist at all. This little known treasure is a cheery beacon of eclecticism in a dreary sea of conformity. Or, to arbitrarily switch metaphors, it is a precious resource which needs careful tending from the ravages of witless business practices.
Now Magic is offering YOU the chance to help keep the station on side with the forces of good, by joining the Listener Advisory Board (no permanent link – check the lower right hand corner). Remember, now that they have a somewhat improved internet service, anyone around the world can be a Magic listener. First of all, they will ask you to complete a listener survey. I have taken the survey, and would strongly suggest that other music lovers submit similar feedback to the effect that: we love you just the way you are.
Firstly, after a rather endearing question about your age group (the youngest category is “44 or under”), you will be asked some general questions about the station’s music mix and presenters. To keep the Magic magic, I made a point of saying I liked or loved pretty much everything they do, even including stuff that’s pretty damn evil (M-ch–l B-bl-), figuring that we need a balance of joy and misery in the world to make us appreciate truth and beauty all the more. Hope you keep that need in mind if you contribute.
The real meat of the survey comes when you are asked to rate a selection of songs. I’ve written before about the sometimes jawdropping sequences of songs that can crop up on Magic, but here we get an insight into how Magic sees itself, and what it considers to be a typical cross-section of its music library:
- Len Barry, “1-2-3”
- Fats Domino, “Ain’t That A Shame”
- Merrilee Rush, “Angel Of The Morning”
- Johnny Burnette, “Big Big World”
- Eydie Gorme, “Blame It On The Bossa Nova”
- Bobby Vinton, “Blue Velvet”
- Marcie Blane, “Bobby’s Girl”
- Bryan Adams, “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”
- David Cassidy, “Cherish”
- Frank Sinatra, “Chicago (My Kind Of Town)”
- Vic Dana, “Crystal Chandalier” [sic]
- Elton John, “Daniel”
- Air Supply, “Every Woman In The World”
- Julie London, “Fly Me To The Moon”
- Janis Ian, “Fly Too High”
- Sue Thompson & Bob Luman, “I Like Your Kind Of Love”
- Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton, “Islands In The Stream”
- John [sic] Farnham, “Rose Coloured Glasses”
- Dion, “Runaround Sue”
- New World, “Sister Jane”
- Linda Ronstadt & James Ingram, “Somewhere Out There”
- Hollies, “The Air That I Breathe”
- Sounds Incorporated, “The Spartans”
- Jigsaw, “Yellow River”
- Crispian St Peters, “You Were On My Mind”
That’s a big list! And not the most obvious list of recognisable hits. I told them I liked, loved, or was at least neutral on all of these – except for one, and you can probably guess which.
Once that’s over, you get invited to sign up for their Music Advisory Board:
Not only do you get a say in the music that’s played, but from time to time we give away exclusive stuff to our Music Advisory Board members that you’ll never hear about on air such as CDs, DVDs, movie tickets etc.!
I registered my email with them nearly two weeks ago, and haven’t been spammed with anything yet. I’m assuming that no news is good news.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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The Real Cooky La Moo
Monday 27 August 2007
Yes, it’s been a bit quiet here lately. Some background work is going on in the main site, with a few changes starting to show on the music page. Also, everyone else in the northern hemisphere uses August as an excuse to slacken the pace.
In answer to the question sent in by an anonymous reader: any resemblance between Cooky La Moo (patroness, muse, mascot, and namesake of the website) and Annita McVeigh (BBC News 24 presenter) is purely coincidental.
Filed under: Stupidity, Television by Ben.H
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RANDOM RERUN: Meanwhile, Back in the Ukraine
Monday 27 August 2007
Some associates of mine recently returned from a business trip to Moscow and brought back a box of what were allegedly, and thankfully turned out to be, chocolates. OK, so it’s not actually from the Ukraine; but it’s Russian, so it’s close – unless it was made in Vladivostok or one of the other ten time zones not next door to the Ukraine.
On the other hand, the writing on the wrapper may in fact say “Made in the Ukraine”. Attempting foods with labels and ingredients written in a foreign language is bad enough, but when you can’t even recognise the alphabet it gets particularly dodgy: there are no potential warning signs to deduce (TESTICALES CON LARDO!) and you start to worry that it comes from a culture sufficiently different from your own to consider tamarind pits coated in Vegemite a delicious treat.
Nor did the picture on the wrappers inspire confidence. Here is a typical picture of a child on a sweet wrapper from the rest of the world:
Note the smiles and general impression that the contents are good to eat. Now here is the picture of the child on the Russian Mystery Chocolate wrapper:
Three thoughts spring to mind:
Note the smiles and general impression that the contents are good to eat. Now here is the picture of the child on the Russian Mystery Chocolate wrapper:
Three thoughts spring to mind:
- The poor kid just ate one of the chocolates.
- This is as happy as a Russian child can get.
- ALLERGY ALERT: This product contains Slavic orphan parts.
In fact, the chocolates were rather nice, so if you can read Cyrillic, please don’t tell me what was in them.
(First posted 13 July 2005.)
Filed under: Stupidity, Travel by Ben.H
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I’m setting up a committee to raise funds towards the construction of a giant talking brazen head of Pete Smith on Mount Dandenong.
Thursday 23 August 2007
Nothing to post today, sorry! Meanwhile…
- A heated discussion ensues at Sarsaparilla.
- Soho the Dog resolves the AC/DC Bon Scott vs Brian Johnson debate forever – with SCIENCE!
- Life in the Slough Lane discovers the wrong kind of Magic.
- Sterne realises Australians are getting weirder by the minute.
- Frankly, I Would Have Preferred the Sword loses her shoes. At work.
- I’m On Your Computer is on thine tapestrie.
- Straight from the Tated   is moving to a place without the luxury of context as prescribed by title.
- The Rambler has more death, which I know readers here can’t get enough of.
- The Supermercado Project is down right now so beats me what’s happening there.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Tuesday 21 August 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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What’s on top of the pile?
Tuesday 21 August 2007
Bongwater, Double Bummer (w/ Breaking No New Ground)
Never mind Ann Magnuson, I got this just because they sampled The Fatal Glass of Beer on the opening track. Once that’s over I usually wander off to do something else and leave it playing. I think there are some other good bits later on in the following two hours. One day I might check which tracks those are on.
James Tenney, Bridge and Flocking (Thomas Bächli, Erika Radermacher, Gertrud Schneider, Manfred Werder)
Warren Burt, 39 Dissonant Etudes
Yeah, I’m a sucker for retuned pianos, be they endearingly dinky simulations on obsolete home computers (Burt) or the real deal carefully adjusted to a full complement of major and minor harmonies (Tenney). The Tenney has a resounding majesty to it, that from time to time weirdly melts from one set of sonorities to another; the Burt, well, rollicks.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Australia as a Picturesque Ruin
Saturday 18 August 2007
…the Dawn and Dusk Society lobbied to set up a committee for the erection of fake ancient ruins around Australia.
The above note is just a passing comment in an article on another subject, found in a 1960s issue of Meanjin. I wrote this down several years ago, while I still had the issue ready at hand, but didn’t note the author, article, or issue number, and the journal is now in storage at the other end of the world. This is the first mention on the web of the mysterious Dawn and Dusk Society, at least as far as Google is concerned.
The Society is mentioned in such a casual way that it appears to have once been assumed familiar enough to readers to need no explication. Did it have much in common with other forgotten booster movements like the Wattle Day League or the Who’s For Australia Campaign? Was it more of a club like the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffalo? An Antipodean outpost of eccentricity like the latter-day Baker Street Irregulars? Or is it possibly a fictional entity from a popular story of the day?
As it was described, the Society’s motive was to inspire a sense of history heretofore lacking in Australians. As I recall, the reference to the Society was made in a gently mocking tone, for its misguided nature and unconscious ironies, but even at this point in time its forlorn wish would have seemed, on the surface at least, fairly straightforward in a way that is impossible now.
(Before dealing with the historical and cultural consequences of such a project, a more immediate cognitive problem springs to mind: without a historical context to set it against, how could you tell an honest fake was meant to be seen as a ruin, and not as a folly, a false fake?)
Even ignoring Australia’s long neglected indigenous history, the idea of concocting an ersatz heritage is one fraught with contradictions for all but the least reconstructed White Australians. The “sense of history” created would of course be a denial of history, of Australia’s colonial past. But if this true history were successfully erased and overwritten with the shiny new ancient fictional extended remix, what new mythology would we have of ourselves? I can’t imagine that modern Australians would be more confident and assured of their place in the world, having grown up surrounded by symbols of a glorious past now irretrievably decayed. We have had a hard enough time adjusting to the starkness of the Australian landscape as it is, without it being additionally littered with evidence of our failures.
We don’t have to ask if the heritage the Society had in mind was British – in one aspect, the plan is but one more transplanted artifact from the Old Country – but how far back would the grand project extend? Would we find a Roman bath in Balranald? A Viking ship part-buried in Vaucluse? I like the idea of a large network of pseudo-academies springing up across the country, like those of the Creationists, dedicated to reconciling these fantastic absurdities to the real world.
As successive waves of immigrants have found their place in Australia, would they get to make their own contributions in turn to the collection of fake national relics? If the plan had succeeded, we could now enjoy shattered Doric columns beside fallen pagodas, and vine-covered colonnades topped with minarets. As a nation still reluctant to admit to one invasion, Australia would now happily affirm a multitude of colonial incursions in its past, even though most of them were fictional.
Perhaps it is time for the Society’s design to be revived, albeit in a more subtle and insidious form. Throughout recorded history, societies have expressed a belief in a golden age before their own, from which their contemporaries have descended and declined. The historical reminders we erect should manifest our faith in the values of better times preceding ours. Monuments to whistling milkmen, statues of doctors making house calls, and shrines to schoolkids who walked sixteen miles to school each day, immortalised in bronze in a pose of deference to an elder. An obelisk to those who left their homes unlocked. A plaque to a policeman older than you.
Amid these reminders we could go about our business confident that times are bad and will get worse, but once there was a better life which we have abandoned. And beneath these thoughts still lies the double truth we carry in our heads, of what we would like to believe our country to be, and what we know it really is.
Filed under: Art, Writing by Ben.H
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More Stained Melodies and Gratuitous Noise
Friday 17 August 2007
I was going to put up some new music I’ve been working on, but I’m at that awkward stage where everything’s so close to being finished that it all sounds ghastly. In the meantime, here are mp3s of a few old pieces I still don’t entirely dislike.
Stained Melodies Nos. 3, 11, & 17.
Three more from the series of 24 short piano pieces written a few years back. Each one of these pieces was written using the same method, so they share a similar overall sound and feel, but the method allows each piece to develop its own distinctive character. Number 11 is the emptiest, and most contemplative in the set; whereas Number 17 is the most crowded and frenetic. Number 3 manages to be almost a blues number.
I mentioned before that the flipside to the semi-listenable cassette Disposable Guitar Play Once Throw Away was a guitar piece that did away with guitars altogether. The music on the B-side was created by a crude feedback oscillator made from a chain of borrowed guitar effects pedals. Instead of plugging a guitar into the setup I decided it would be simpler to plug in the last pedal’s output jack, thus making a closed circuit and initiating an continuing quest to systematically rip off every idea David Tudor ever had.
Shortly after recording the cassette (direct to tape in a single, half-hour improvisation) I made a digital copy, divided the track into four sections of equal length and plonked them on top of each other. The resulting arbitrary mashup, with some minor tweaks, became the piece Ola-R, which I think got played once at the old Musicians’ Club in St Kilda, and a few copies popped up in a slightly different form on CD-Rs. Since that time I have been working toward making more sophisticated use of the principles of feedback oscillation, that I first learned when making this crude tape.
This mp3 file keeps the original’s dynamic range and stereo separation, so it may not come across well if you’re listening through built-in computer speakers.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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30 years on, Leo Sayer is still alive
Wednesday 15 August 2007
Perhaps it’s the steady rain outside that’s making me more melancholy than usual and thinking about Melbourne, but I kind of wish I was around the Melbourne Cemetery to see what odd little ceremonies the faithful are up to around the Elvis Memorial right about now.
I remember where I was when I heard that Elvis had died. I was at home and my mum mentioned it. I’d never heard of Elvis before so I just mentally substituted the name of the first pop star I could think of.
Filed under: Music, Stupidity by Ben.H
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What did I get for my blog’s third birthday? I got it a bloody search engine at last.
Tuesday 14 August 2007
It’s in the right column somewhere. It’ll also appear on the main site pages too once I figure out the coding.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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More about the view out my toilet window.
Monday 13 August 2007
The Millennium Dome has started lighting up at night again. Until 11pm or so it glows portentously over Greenwich, as if about to disgorge Michael Rennie in an alfoil suit. In fact, it’s just hosting Prince’s series of 3,121 concerts or however many it is.
The sight of its ring of lights from across the ridge is uncannily reminiscent of being back in Brunswick, overlooking the Moonee Valley Trots.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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I am the passenger
Thursday 9 August 2007
