To die of the cigarettes, that is a misfortune, no? But to have one’s skin look not so young before one’s time, that is the real tragedy.
The French have their priorities straight. The real mystery here is that this photo was taken in Estavar, where a 5-minute drive into the next village will see you over the border into Spain, where a packet of Camels will set you back only €2.50.
(First posted 26 October 2005.)
Filed under: Travel by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Sunday 16 September 2007
Laughing Clowns, “Every Dog Has Its Day” (1982).
(3’50”, 3.80 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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On Friday evening he stood around on the bank of the Thames for an hour. Then he went to the pub.
Sunday 16 September 2007
I went to see/hear Alvin Curran’s Maritime Rites on the river out front of Tate Modern, expecting to be slightly underwhelmed. I was either a real enthusiast or a slow learner, so it took me at least five years of regularly going to to events like this which combine:
- public, outdoor locations
- spatialised performances
- amateur scratch orchestras
- composition mixed with improvisation, and
- acoustic instruments and electronics
are more likely than not to be pretty bad. After it had finished I wondered if it was my lowered expectations that made me like it so much.
The piece made use of the brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra on a stage on the bank, Curran himself on piano with a group of improvisers on a barge in the middle of the Thames, and an orchestra of volunteers assembled along the Millennium Bridge. These first two ensembles were heavily amplified to carry across the water, also effectively drowning out the musicians on the bridge and any surrounding ambient sounds, which was supposed to be one of the features of the music. Mind you, any distinctive sounds made by the Thames around Waterloo get lost in the regular city noise.
Yes, the music tended to ramble, but it did so in a nicely discursive way, apparently getting caught up in one piece of shtick after another, from freeform antiphonal honking back and forth across the river, to passages of Handel pastiche, to long sax solos by Evan Parker out on the barge, disrupted by confusing outbursts of digital DJing.
More than the arrangement of musicians around the river, the most interesting spatial aspect of the music was the way the sound would echo, with only some sounds and frequencies travelling along the water, bouncing off the distant buildings in unpredictable ways. All the way through the live music was ghosted by transformed shadows of sound hovering in different parts of the air amongst the evening commuters, joggers, tourists, and drinkers on the riverbank while the sun set.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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The top ten photos in my Flickr account
Wednesday 12 September 2007
It took a while for me to notice that Flickr provides an analysis of how many times your photos have been looked at. I’ve never expected any of my stuff to have broad appeal, but it’s intriguing to see what people seem to be interested in.
With one exception, this is the fairly stable order of popularity amongst my pictures.
10! I still haven’t seen Patrick Keiller’s London again, so I still don’t know how close I got to guessing the particular location of the forgotten corner of the city that briefly appears in the film. Instead, I relied on Iain Sinclair’s description of finding the same place some years later, somewhere near St Andrew By The Wardrobe.
9! Trainspotters ahoy! The Tube’s inexplicable allure adds a cachet to even the most mundane snapshots.
8! Heh heh, I said ‘faggots’. I’m amazed this one isn’t the most viewed in the entire set, because half of my website traffic consists of kids on MySpace linking to the smaller version on this blog.
7! The promise of violence. Because people like violence. Especially when it’s close enough to enjoy but you’re safely out of the way.
6! The tastefully understated Colloseum photograph. One of very few taken on my holiday in Italy. I can’t help feeling people are mildly disappointed when their searches turn up my photos.
5! See? This is exactly what I mean. This a security guard outside the Sagrada Familia and is tagged accordingly, so I hope people turning up this one are more interested in handcuffs than Gaudi.
4! The only thing more exciting than an old Tube station is a derelict Tube station. Aldwych station, once briefly known as Strand station, is now a ghost station and frequent stand-in for real Underground stations on film and TV.
3! Now here’s the anomaly. A blurry shot at a graduate art show off Brick Lane, which has suddenly rocketed up the charts in only the past week. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s been discovered by a cabal of Ballardian fetishists who like to pretend this is Rosanna Arquette.
2! A street stall of nested dolls for the tourists in Riga. There’s nothing like Harry Potter, Stalin, and Osama Bin Laden tags to boost the hit rate, although I guess this photo must have disappointed many feverish authors hopefully searching for illustrations for their slash fiction.
1! Ah, the inanimate carbon rod of my photo set! These soothing wood tones and rich timber grain have brightened the desktops of geeks around the world. A pinnacle of repose and tranquility, which I thought had an unassailable lead over the others until the James Spader wannabes turned up.
Filed under: Art, Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Anything you can do, I can do better
Tuesday 11 September 2007
There’s a broken portable CD player under the bottom drawer of the kitchen dresser which isn’t doing anything, so I’ve decided to publicly launch the defunct device as my very own iPod Killer.
I figure all I need to do now is issue a press release announcing that this useless piece of technology is the first serious competitor to Apple’s portable music device and see if I can attract any investment capital. As I see it, my iPod Killer has the advantage over previous contenders by having no effort or expense put into the technical development or business model whatsoever, and yet being just as doomed as every previous iPod Killer.
Although my bold, innovative plan is already condemned to failure, I can unequivocally state that the past five minutes have been a great journey for me and my plucky little startup. Despite the completely forseen pitfalls along the way, it’s been a real learning experience which will immensely benefit me when going forward with my future doomed e-commerce strategies and worthless online business solutions.
As for the rest of you, I wish you nothing but success in developing your own DOA iPod Killers.
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please (special bonus edition)
Sunday 9 September 2007
Ingram Marshall, “Fog Tropes” (1979/82). Brass of the Orchestra of St Luke’s /John Adams.
(10’04”, 7.67 MB, mp3)
(By special request from people who guessed where the Morton Feldman piece came from.)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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It’s all harmless British eccentricity until someone loses an eye
Saturday 8 September 2007
Tonight I’ve been editing music while the girlfriend watched The Last Night of the Proms on TV. When the “Land of Hope and Glory” bit of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 kicked in, someone in a house up the street started setting off fireworks.
Filed under: London, Television by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Saturday 8 September 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Thursday 6 September 2007
Morton Feldman, “Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety” (1970). Orchestra of St Luke’s /John Adams.
(4’16”, 3.17 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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The secret history of the twentieth century, continued
Tuesday 4 September 2007
Of course Firbank was “the” great formal innovator. He invented modernism, more so than Joyce really.
Harry Mathews, interviewed by John Ash.
He developed lung disease and died in Rome in 1926, discouraging friends from visiting him in his last weeks because of the poor quality of his wallpaper.
Author blurb, The Complete Ronald Firbank.
Filed under: Writing by Ben.H
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Gone to the bar to talk about art*
Monday 3 September 2007
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.
