Boring Like A Drill.

If you’re on the New Magic Listener Advisory Board, you’ll have had the chance to rate over 300 easy-listening, MOR, AOR, mouldy oldie, and long-forgotten novelty hits. As suggested before, Magic listeners have excellent taste in judging what people really want to hear, not what dickhead hipster ironists think people want to hear.

1. “Runaway”, Del Shannon
2. “Then He Kissed Me”, The Crystals
3. “Ramblin’ Rose”, Nat King Cole
4. “Spicks & Specks”, The Bee Gees
5. “El Paso”, Marty Robbins

Anyone who would not be stoked to hear any of these five songs on the radio is an enemy of music. Bonus points are in order for bigging up a Bee Gees single the rest of the world would find hopelessly obscure.

1. “Since I Fell For You”, Kate Ceberano
2. “Jolene”, Olivia Newton-John
3. “Ben”, Michael Jackson
4. “Please Don’t Ask Me”, Johnny Farnham
5. “Route 66”, Natalie Cole

It’s not explained whether this list is counting up or down, but still a clear picture emerges of what your average Magic listener does not like: ageing pop stars trying for second careers as lounge singers, off-brand cover versions, or pedophiles singing about rats. Take that, ironists.

In these troubled times, at least one corner of the world is in safe, sensible hands.

Conlon Nancarrow, “Study for Player Piano No.36 (Canon 17/18/19/20)” (1965?-77?).

Difference between London graduate art show and Melbourne graduate art show, 2007. Neither were hugely interesting, but for different reasons. The art presented by Melbourne students was sketchy, unfinished: they were still working through concepts rather than making fully-developed work. The British students were showing artworks which were complete, finished objects, but which functioned mostly as decoration or superficially imitated other artists’ ideas.

Nowadays peripheral countries like Australia are artistically affected less by the isolation from the circulation of cultural ideas, than they are by the isolation from the circulation of money.

Telly Savalas, “If” (1974).

This blog has a small, unfortunate reputation for giving anti-semitic nutbags an easy ride, so I should mention the death of Bobby Fischer, who was the subject of the first ever Filler by Proxy way back when I was desperately scratching around for subject matter.

There are plenty of detailed obituaries to choose from. Andy McSmith in The Independent manages a concise survey of his madness and his brilliance:

I know it’s wrong to say this, but listening back now he sounds a little bit retarded on those earlier records. Was it just the drugs, or that the Eighties are now a foreign country?

Along with a magazine subscription as a birthday present. Thanks babe!

I’m beginning to get a sense of the shape of the year in London. The year truly begins with the concurrence of the composer weekend at the Barbican and the world darts championship on the telly. For various reasons I’m giving the Barbican a miss this year, but I still look in on the darts now and then.

Two years ago I wrote:

… it dawned on me that I was watching one of the great endangered species of popular culture, a type of television that the next generation of children will never know: the professionally-produced, relatively major television event that is completely unphotogenic. I cannot imagine that in ten years’ time a large, Western television network will be making any shows where fat, balding men in polo shirts and sovereign rings are watched by a clubhouse full of attentive smokers.

In fact it lasted only one more year; the smoking ban introduced last summer took care of that. Now instead of anxious women huddled next to their kids with a fag in one hand and a pint in the other, you see anxious women chewing furiously and dashing in and out of the hall between legs.

The fat blokes with the gold bracelets and prison tatts are still on camera offering their insights into the game while standing in the middle of what is obviously a bar; but if the reports that the game’s popularity has never been higher are true, then the homogenising influence of corporate money cannot be far from banishing them and their world.

Speaking of the photogenic new face of darts, I would like to apologise on behalf of my country for the hairstyle of this year’s Australian finalist, Simon Whitlock. He can’t help it, he’s from Queensland.

Someone reminded me that it’s Morton Feldman’s birthday today, so here’s a little bit from a talk he gave in San Francisco in 1986, ruminating on whether or not music is really an art form. (5’58”, 2.5 MB, mp3)

Carl Stalling, “There They Go Go Go” (1956).

Jodru at ANABlog imagines how Stockhausen would describe riding the subway in New York:

“Through a process I invented of experimenting with the New York City subway system, I have discovered a new borough called Queens.”

What follows is a useful introduction to the peculiar musical and theatrical world of Stockhausen’s LICHT, complete with photos and musical examples. A world still shrouded in mystery.

Despite being chock full of astonishing music, the ultimate strangeness of the staged opera obscured the continuing quality of Stockhausen’s writing. If Gesang der Junglinge, Hymnen and Mantra were wrapped into some cosmically trashy concept album (say, Kilroy Was Here), their aura would certainly dim.

Soon after arriving home from Australia I caught a few minutes of a TV show on one of the more obscure digital TV channels available in London. An American couple were walking lost around some empty streets in – a town. (I’m tempted to say an inner suburb, but even that statement is too revealing.)

According to the story, the couple had just been married in America and had come over to London to spend their honeymoon in Crouch End – you know, the same way tourists flock to New York to go sightseeing in Queens. Even though this was one of those cheap TV programs which always frames the actors’ heads as tightly as possible, and even though I’ve only been to Crouch End once, and then at nighttime, I instantly recognised where these two were; and it wasn’t Crouch End.

They were in Melbourne. North Carlton, to be precise. My girlfriend’s from south of the river and so thinks it was Middle Park, but I’m feeling cocky and reckon it was around Station, Fenwick, and Canning Streets. Something about the houses, the light, the width of the streets, immediately made the place unmistakable, even when partially glimpsed in the background.

I wonder if anyone in Britain would have been fooled by the substitution? No Londoner would have, even if they had never been near Crouch End. It’s possible, however, that they might assume it was filmed somewhere else in England. An American wouldn’t have a chance in picking this deception.

In time you come to know a city the way you come to know a face. It’s not just in the skylines, or the streetscapes, but in the way the people inhabit their space. On another TV show years ago, an Australian documentary, a friend and I watching immediately called out “Melbourne” when the film cut to a brief shot of a group of people walking down a street. The narration later proved us right: it was something about the way they were casually drifting off the pavement onto the street itself that couldn’t happen in any other large Australian city (except Adelaide, but that city always gives itself away.)

With the increase of Hollywood-funded filmmaking in Australia, these places have been turning up more and more often, the streets and buildings as actors, playing a fictional role. Sometimes they play disguised under heavy make-up – I once watched a corner of the University of Adelaide transformed into a Parisian street for a TV commercial – but often they appear as they are, expecting the viewer to mentally substitute the fictional location for the real (or is it the other way around?)

For the non-Australian majority, these urban locations act effectively as generic Western cities, shot without any readily identifiable landmarks in sight. Their acting function is less as a supporting role, and more as an extra, faceless and interchangeable. If Peter Jackson made New Zealand a stand-in for the otherworldly, then Australian cities have been made a stand-in for the real world.