View From The Couch - 31/Dec/2016

Just Guessing But...

I've been pondering this problem of global warming. First of all, we've run past 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're not even counting the CH4 Methane, and Methane is of course 4 times worse than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Our democratic processes in the first world are simply not getting anywhere near the results we need to curb the runaway emissions growth. If you look just at Australia for instance, the mining interests for fossil fuels have spent so much money to cripple the proper discussion of this threat that it has become nigh impossible to make any sensible progress on the issue. While nations around the world are moving over to renewables in a hurry, it appears that the USA and Australia are going to be the stupid holdouts sticking to fossil fuels.

The thing is, the massive problem of emissions isn't just a problem isolated to the climate, but something that will have a chain reaction in food production. Agriculture is going to take hit as a result of the effects of climate change, and the most vulnerable nations are places with big populations with very little food security - like China and India. If it ever gets to the point where not enough food can be produced to supply these countries, they are going to have riots on their streets, and in the case of China, the suppression of those riots will probably lead to a revolution - exactly the kind of outcome the current regime will want to avoid.

So if you work backwards from the pointy end of the problem, it's far more likely that an authoritarian regime will try and invest in technologies that will actively suck out carbon from the atmosphere in order to bring the problem back under control. I imagine that the Chinese government will spend whatever is necessary to create massive renewable power plants with the specific purpose of converting atmospheric carbon into liquid or solids.

Here are some examples of technologies out there already:

• Synthetic Photosynthesis.
• Nano Spike Catalyst lowers energy threshold to reverse combustion and harvest ethanol.
• Large scale carbon capture projects
• Capturing carbon and turning them into building materials

The thing is, Green groups would have you believe that this is futile and what needs to happen is zero economic growth or some such nonsense. Geo-engineering is a dirty word in the Green paradigm, but when you look at just how much runaway emissions are going on, and how capping emissions is still going to get us into a world where the sea level rises by meters and the weather patterns are going to be shot, then it's easily arguable that what needs to be done is to shove the carbon genie back into the bottle.

If you're running China - an authoritarian state that's not scared to crack a few eggs - one of the advantages is that you can send a directive out and it gets done on a massive scale. It is the most likely candidate to simply order massive solar and wind generators to power these projects en masse with the specific purpose of capturing as much carbon s possible, and lowering the parts-per-million figure back below 400ppm. And they may well do this while we in the first world are still stupid enough to be arguing whether Global warming is actually happening and whether we should do something a bit more serious than Direct Action in Australia as we keep digging up fossil fuels.

Worse still, the countries that don't move out of fossil fuel will end up paying for the fact that they keep emitting because China will send them a bill for all the carbon it is capturing, through an international emissions trading scheme.

Of course, China might not do any of this, in which case we're really going to be stuffed. But if you go through the ay in which the cards are stacked, you can see China would see the advantage in going hard in this direction. And if they do, the countries most committed to fossil fuels are going to end up paying up big time.

RIP Debbie Reynolds (1932-2016)

Away after Carrie Fisher passed away, her mother also passed away.

Starring in the legendary musical Singin' In The Rain and singing the hit song Tammy. Shining on Broadway and being nominated for an Oscar for The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Her own TV comedy show and an Emmy-nominated role in the sitcom Will & Grace. 

Debbie Reynolds' showbiz career exemplified an old-style versatility – singin', dancin' and actin' – that continued well into her veteran years. 

Her death at 84 a day after daughter Carrie Fisher added sadness to sadness. Son Todd's comments that "she's with Carrie" and that the stress of his sister's death was "too much" for his mother showed the paralysing impact of grief. 

Reynolds, who had a suspected stroke, will be best remembered as a luminous talent on stage, film and television - Hollywood royalty. Wholesome and charming in her early roles, she was later known as a brassy personality who was portrayed as an overbearing showbiz mother in Fisher's semi-autobiographical novel Postcards From The Edge.

It's just been a terrible year for celebrity deaths.

RIP Alphonse Mouzon (1948-2016)

This happened in the jam session of duelling deaths.

Alphonse Mouzon, a powerful jazz drummer who made his greatest contributions with a funk backbeat, forging a standard for 1970s fusion, died on Sunday at his home in the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 68. 

The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Jean-Pierre Mouzon said. Alphonse Mouzon learned this fall that he had neuroendocrine cancer and used a crowdfunding platform to help pay for treatment. 

Few other drummers were as integral to the development of fusion as Mr. Mouzon, who combined volcanic intensity with a brisk attunement to dynamic flow. He played in the first edition of Weather Report, and was a charter member of another defining jazz-rock band, the Eleventh House, led by the guitarist Larry Coryell. 

Mr. Mouzon had a productive association with the pianist McCoy Tyner, playing in a volatile acoustic setting on albums like “Sahara” (1972) and “Song for My Lady” (1973). He also served as the propulsive engine on notable fusion albums by the keyboardist Herbie Hancock, the flutist Bobbi Humphrey and the guitarist Al Di Meola, among others. 

Outside of jazz, Mr. Mouzon worked with major touring acts including Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. The drummer John Bonham of Led Zeppelin acknowledged him as an influence.

I want to write more about Alphonse Mouzon, but I'm really bummed about all of these deaths.

RIP George Michael

As everybody with a heartbeat knows, this also happened on Christmas Day.

I kind of refrained from writing about George Michael because his cause wasn't exactly mine and his music never really did much for me. But seeing that all these other people are dropping like flies, I figured I may as well acknowledge it here.

Ugh, what a year

'Straight Outta Compton'

The Moment We Weren't Privy To

Did you ever dream of there being a kick butt youth movement that you could belong to when you were young? Something really underground, anti-authoritarian, socially meaningful and far-reaching in its frankness? I did. And when it actually happened, I hated on it because it wasn't my shit. That's life in the slow lane for you - but I'm being brutally honest about it with you and myself. It was there for the taking except I was taken elsewhere by different things. You see, when Rap music broke, I was neck deep in Rock, playing in bands, recording demos, knocking on doors, and I was *committed* elsewhere.

The way Rap music broke was too far away from me in Sydney - I only got the reverberating shock wave of other rock musicians disapproving it before I got the real deal. It's amazing in retrospect that the negative view of Rap travelled to Australia far quicker than the medium itself. That's the post-modern global village for you.

Anyway, it's kind of cool to relive the crucial moments, even if one was on the wrong side of history and got bulldozed, and even if it is vicariously through a "historic reconstruction" of a biopic. 'Straight Outa Compton' is a triumphant film that spells it out. These kids were alright too.



What's Good About It

Sometimes all a film needs is a strong cast that can sell a mediocre script. My overall reaction to this film is that the script isn't too good, but the performances in this film are extraordinary. There's a furore going on about how black actors were totally disregarded in the Oscars nominations. I can feel the righteous anger in that indignation. This film has several performances that are breathtaking as they are complete.

It also captures the zeitgeist that was the late 80s and early 90s. It puts you face to face with the exact social angst that was writ large as it unfolded. It has the scope of 'Quadrophenia' and its Brighton Riots as well as moments that seem like riffs on'A Hard Days'Night'. N.W.A certainly were a socially important phenomenon, and that aspect is captured very well.

The music - yes, the brazen Rap music - is great.  I mean, bone-crunchingly, soul-shakingly good.
Really, warts and all, I loved this movie; so much so I watched it twice.

What's Bad About It

The directing had a few technical miscues. They cross the imaginary line a lot in this film, for no apparent reason so you can put it down to lack of discipline. Some of the shots are tricky but it's inconsistent stylistically so it ends up being more confusing than artistic. A film of this calibre shouldn't have problems like this, so you have to put it down to slackness. It's a shame because they're distracting moments.

The cinematography isn't particularly flash either. There's something generic Hollywood about the camera and lighting work. If anything the good bits were let down by the technical bits that Hollywood wouldn't necessarily get wrong in other movies. It could've been an excellent film, but it doesn't get there because of these blemishes. Instead, it's a kickass movie, but it's a shame that it could have been even more transcendent.

What's Interesting About It

What's truly interesting is the distance we've all travelled since the mid-80s when police brutality towards the black population was largely ignored or sweet under the carpet. I remember sitting in the AFTRS library and of all the printed material they could have, they had a copy of the Village Voice. You know, far, far away from America, cut off from information because there was no internet... I was glad I could get my hands on a Village Voice. So I flicked through the pages and what I discovered was a dystopian America where none of the racial tension made absolutely clear after the Civil Rights movement, had been addressed under Reagan and then Bush Snr. It was a stunning realisation that the black population in America had been economically cut adrift and persecuted through the police.

The rise of Rap was the black community talking back, making explicit the record of the anguish and humiliation. It was exactly the same impulse as the Blues, except it took a more sonically aggressive form. The realism - the social realism - of Rap lyrics was a sharp break from the entertainment mainstream, and the message it sought to convey was confrontational because there was nowhere left to run. Ice Cube was working in the best tradition of journalism, an astute observer who wrote down exactly what he witnessed and captured its full social meaning.

I look back on my band days and I think about what Ice Cube managed to capture and I have to take my hat off to him. He deservedly found a place in the world through his writing; it is no accident or anomalous turn of luck that made him succeed. When you listen to it altogether, it is impressive work.

Make Me Scream

I have to digress a little. There's this beautiful line in 'The Last Boy Scout' directed by Tony Scott, starring Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis plays a gumshoe named Joe; the villain captures him and ties him to a  chair. The gloating begins. The bad guy says, "you know Joseph, I'd like to hear you scream."
Bruce Willis' Joe replies, "that's easy. Just stick my head next to speaker and play Rap."
It's a great moment from an under-rated action movie.
That's how Rap music was viewed by the mainstream, even as late as 1991. We've come a long way since.

I think about it today, and I realise it's just a case of you can't be everywhere at once. Things are happening all the time, but you're not necessarily going to be able to get to it, because you're busy doing other things which are of no less importance. Nonetheless, the flip side to the regret is the understanding that I missed something really important as it rolled right by.

Rap As Poetry

Sometime in the early 90s, the esteemed literature academic Don Anderson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that poetry wasn't dead, it was alive and kicking in Rap. Around the same time, Neil Young made the observation that sometimes he doesn't want to sing a melody, he wants to rap his point, plaintively. To get to that point, Rap had to claim a platform. The film covers that battle to claim  platform from where they could speak their subjective angry truths.

What becomes clear in this film is just how much Ice Cube was switched on to his writerly mission. It's remarkable that he set out to capture the rhythm of speech and vernacular of his surroundings, and sublimate it into something he could deliver on stage. The stoic realism of that process puts most young writers to shame.

Is something that starts with "fuck the police" art? Many people think not. Indeed, they were so offended they tried to run N.W.A. out at many a town they toured. At each juncture, when asked about it, Ice Cube got up and took the line that it was indeed art - radically so - and that he made no apologies for something that stood as freedom of expression under the first amendment of the US Constitution.

It's hard to assess popular works; and by that I mean works that operate in the un-rarefied air of pop culture. Yet if one thing is a good indicator of the value of the work, it is the commotion it creates. If it were radically bad art, it is highly unlikely to have galvanised so many people. Instead the work done by N.W.A and other Rap artists essentially rewrote the social rules of engagement for the black population with the rest of America. Compared to the hope-filled beginnings of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the 1980s were the ugly confrontational decade where the nitty gritty was sorted out. N.W.A. essentially provided the hymn book for the re-constitution of black power politics, right for the picket lines.

So if a generation of youths found their identity in this phenomenon, charged by the words and meaning conjured by its authors, could it really not be art? We're at the point in history where we're finally seeing the outline of what that phenomenon was, and with it what meaning it carried.

But Most Of Us Rockers Missed It

This film is quite educational, if you are a student of Pop Music. It sounds so clear and present that you can actually feel the very architecture of the music mix. It's one of those rare films that just listening to the music alone is cool enough.

The stripped down sound of Rap is a highly calculated move. Pop Music had been going through man phases of construction and deconstruction and reconstruction. Through that process, Pop Music moved ever closer to a streamlined production with fewer filigrees. There is a fundamental issue of economic competitiveness inherent in the development of Pop Music that dates right back to jazz orchestras. Before electric amplification, you needed an orchestra to fill the concert room with sound. As jazz developed and played in smaller venues, this allowed for smaller combos. By theme Bebop came about, band sizes shrunk down to quintets, quartets and trios.

With the advent of rock music, the band sizes stayed at quintets, quartets and trios but the music itself became ever simpler. As early as the mid-60s, Paul McCartney mused of a possibility of a one-note pop song, even though he could not conceive of what that would sound like back then. All the while, the rhythm was getting more complicated. Rock'n'Roll started with a regular 4-beat, but eventually evolved to 8-beat; but then funk came along and were working 16-beat music.

When electronic music came about, it removed the band of a drummer with its machines, and ultimately gave rise to the DJ, who effectively fronted all the music through a record. And so, there was no longer a musician required. Merely the recorded sound being used against the economic interests of the musicians who recorded them. This is why rock musicians were so hostile to Techno, Dance, and Rap - those forms of music did away with dexterity-expertise,  and the entire vernacular of music that went with that dexterity-expertise. When that was gone, there was no more justification for a band to be a band. The writing was on the wall.

At Rap and Hip-Hop, Pop Music reached the point where a DJ would programme the rhythmic and harmonic content, and the vocalist would submit vocal sounds that did not feature a melody. It was (and probably still is) the ultimate end point for Pop Music's structural deconstruction as it reassembled itself for its own economic imperative. With Rap, you have music with only one musician-composer who essentially works off rhythm with minimal harmonic content. The vocalist raps. The rest is an elaboration of this structure. The way the five guys you see on stage for N.W.A. work the music, is nothing like the five guys you might have seen with say, jazz or rock quintet. Interestingly, it has more in common with how Kraftwerk work their music.

To join in with the phenomenon, rock musicians would have had to trade in their equipment for something else totally, abandon the complex accretion of the subculture, discard the musical vernacular that they loved, and go to the new music empty-handed. Some people made that move and became wildly successful. Others did not, and there is not a rock musician who didn't get left behind and becoming obsolete by staying with Rock. I do remember that moment when I was in a record shop (remember those?) in 1992, where the tough choice was going with the Public Enemy CD or The Baby Animals' CD. I ended up buying both, but through the 90s, I was acutely aware of the bifurcation in my engagement with Pop Music.

That aside, listening to the music track in this film is a singular treat. It plugs you right in to the energy and power of Rap when it was dangerous. It would have been something special to have been young and black in America, and to have N.W.A. blasting out of your ghetto-blaster as your anthem.
Then again, there's this advice from Chris Rock:

'Begin Again'

The Music Biz In The 21st Century

Surprisingly, there seems to be a music biz worth making movies about, leftover in this decade of the 21st Century. It's almost quaint how you can re-run the tropes of a 70s-style 'a star is born' sort of story line and give it a twist.

Keira Knightly as a singer-songwriter in search of an earnest, authentic expression plays off against a down and out gonzo-looking label boss and producer played by Mark Ruffalo. All sorts of things could go wrong with such a set up and I was dead cared of watching because you can just imagine how awkward a rom-com could get when music is involved.


Spoiler alert, because well, it's hard to talk about this one without talking about the spoiling sorts of things.

What's Good About It

Let's start with the good news- it's not a Rom Com. The bad news? I think it's an ill-formed musical.
In any case, it passes the time nicely enough. Mark Ruffalo's character and Keira Knightly's character don't exactly end up as a couple and that's good enough for me. It smacks of a bit of integrity even.

The handful of songs around which the story evolves are actually good. They're not the kind of songs or arrangements I'm a fan of, but they're surprisingly smart enough to keep you watching and listening.

What's Bad About It

Quite a number of scenes go by as music montage sequences which makes part of the film indistinguishable from a cheesy indie hipster film clip. It's as if the director doesn't really want to delve into the emotional issues, he wants to short hand it with the songs. The songs are good, but the movie-side of things sort of comes off the boil at times. 

I also don't buy the band coming together in a matter of scenes thing. I guess it's a personal prejudice based on my own life experiences but bands take a long time to gel even with good musicians playing in them. It's seductive watching scenes where the music just comes together, but it may be the least realistic thing about this whole exercise. 

Also, the character backstory of Mark Ruffalo's label boss-cum-producer makes no sense. You can't tell if he got kicked out of his marriage for being a drunk or being obstinate, but then the back story turns out to be something different and then you scratch your head wondering if he would have ended up so down and out. I can handle lack of reality with the band thing, but I can't really handle a character's backstory being this unbelievable. 

What's Interesting About it

The film offers up a slice of the discourse to do with artistic integrity and authenticity as a public figure. Being a film, it's busy demolishing the notion that any recording artist in recent memory is anything but confected, manufactured and handled. The music, on theatre hand was making its case for a posture of authenticity hard. I'm not a big fan of these really girlie songs, but certainly I can see how we've come to this point where songs have to be sickeningly earnest and emotionally bare. 

There's an interesting bit towards the beginning where Mark Ruffalo's character is listening to demo CDRs in his car and we get snippets of music - and the sentiment behind all of these songs are either bad, stupid or wrong. It is frustrating to be the artist submitting your demo work, but it is also frustrating to be subjected to them. The world is full of unwanted music. And yet the movie progresses with the notion that the world needs more music.

'Lone Stars'

Every album has a flagship sort of song and this song is the central number of this movie. On the soundtrack, I imagine it's the main song they play 3-4 times as they do in the film. What's interesting about it is that it has 4 versions that come and go and they never feel like the same song. This is because Keira Knightly sings her version with a wispy-girly voice in C-sharp and Adam Levine sings his in C with a falsetto in the verse. The semitone difference and different registers makes it just enough to make them sound quite unalike as songs. It took me until the third rendition to realise they were singing the same song over and over again but in different keys.
Up to that point I thought the songwriter had some patterns he liked repeating in his work.

Anyway, there's a really tricky little move in the verse where the vamping is between the IV chord with a major7th and the III chord minor with a 9th; and this obscures the I chord for a very long time. It's quite like 'Flame Trees' by Cold Chisel that way. Very jazz-influenced writing in a way and also strategic in building the interesting arrangement out of fairly mundane instruments.

The chorus is a I-IVvamp until it come to a change the the II chord, but then the II chord modulates to the minor II and then goes to the V. It's really clever and artful songwriting but there's no way it was composed on guitars. I sat there wondering which chord was getting the old major to minor key thing before resolving on the V.
Again, the songwriter was pretty tricky there and it's worth mentioning as one of the more interesting things in this movie. 

Silly Love Songs

Quite some time ago, I hit a moment where I had no more to write about love, in a song. For all the greatness of it, there's only so much you can write about love. The pain and suffering that comes from having your heart broken offers up a few more aspects, but in the long run, one finds oneself unable to contribute any new insight into the phenomenon worth singing about. The'Fuck-Off' song on the other hand offers a lot more hope. And so in this film we see a splendid 'Fuck-off' song - which led me to believe that  whoever was writing the songs for this movie was actually quite a deft and experienced songwriter. 

Recording In The Streets

I think the idea of doing this recording in the streets of New York thing is a lot better than how it would actually turn out. It's hard recording anything in public spaces. This is why even the most spontaneous live albums have overdubs. So, ten points for the visually arresting idea but it's just entirely unbelievable.

You can record great demos in a rehearsal studio with a couple of good microphones. That's different. Most rehearsal spaces are dismal, dark, unattractive spaced only fit for rock musicians and desperate rats.  And it take a really desperate rat to like them. Hence you can see why the film makers opted with the fanciful notion. 

I do give it points; it is cool. 

'Mad Men'

The Nostalgia Machine

I've been away from writing about films for a number of weeks because I've been working my way through the 6 seasons of 'Mad Men'. I had the DVDs piled up all year and sort of traipsed past it because there seems to be a deluge of good TV content that has to be surveyed and unlike movies, they all demand serious time commitments that come in tens of hours. Six seasons consisting of 78 episodes is a lot to digest. That's in the ballpark of the original Star Trek episodes. Consequently it has taken me 6 weekends of binging through seasons to watch the whole damn thing, bringing me up to date.

The other reason I had avoided it is because the world of advertising, even set in the 1960s didn't really seem like a novelty. Having worked for an advertising giant once-upon-a-long-time-ago, I've had my fair share of awful anecdotes that came from hanging with hard-drinking advertising execs. There are some truly awful things that you can witness when you get into the accounts servicing end of the business and layering it on with nostalgia in a bid to explore classic sexism racism and generally unpleasant sexual misconduct didn't seem like a recipe for much fun.   So truth be told, I resisted it as long as I could until I found I had cleared the decks of all other viewing material. Maybe that it is what it takes to be receptive.

We all think we know what the show is about. What is surprising is what it actually is.

In an early season Don Draper is asked to brand the Kodak carousel projector and when he finally explains it, he hits upon the device being a time machine that takes people back through nostalgia for moments. What the show does is effectively service everybody's nostalgia through these fabricated episodes of people that might have been there. The experience of Mad Men is to evoke an era with as much verisimilitude as possible while attempting to dissect the origins of our own mores. In one sense it's a 'Downton Abbey' for 60s fetishists, but on another level, it is a show that boldly goes to a place that brought us our contemporary consumerist culture. It is a 'Back to the Future' trip back to the 1960s where we in the audience are Marty McFly.

What's Good About It

Just about any part of the craft from cinematography and production design through to choice of music and sound mix are extraordinary in this show.

The casting is equally impressive. There are some great actors putting in some extraordinary performances.  The characters they inhabit are filled with unspoken angst and desperation. It is an amazing show that allows us to be Buddha-like, feeling a compassion for all these people for their weaknesses foibles, doubts and self-loathing.

The scripts are always surprising, witty, insightful and compelling. The sense of existential agony sits side by side with the banalities of consumerism, giving rise to a beautiful aesthetic irony.

What's Bad About It

In the earlier series you feel the budget doesn't stretch far enough so you end up seeing a lot of interiors and hardly any exterior shots. It doesn't get claustrophobic, but you get the feeling the limit of the show's misc en scene, is just beyond the frame of the shots. At times this feels quite hokey but as the seasons progress you can see more money being thrown at it and it becomes less of a problem.

Considering all the naturalism in the acting and realism in the production design, you get the feeling that Don Draper's sexual stamina is superhuman. Especially when you watch the episodes back-to-back. As the seasons progress, these sense of the exaggerated sexual stamina becomes utterly laughable that it begins to tear at the carefully crafted fabric of the show's milieu.

Apart from that odd sort of unintended hilarity, the plot lines can meander into the kind of soapiness one associates with things like 'Days of Our Lives' or 'Beverly Hills 90210'. Sometimes the performances are a little spotty and you notice it as the tenor of the performance jumps from one shot to the next. Maybe it's bad editing, but it leaves you a little cold because it takes away from the otherwise perfect, seamless presentation.

What's Interesting About It

Quite simply, ALL of it, actually.

1960s Through The Po-Mo Glass

The year 1960 where the series kicks off is quite a foreign place to us. We think we have a great grasp of what exactly happened in the 1960s thanks to the mass of media artefacts form the 1960s but Manhattan in the year 1960 is closer to Holden Caulfield's hatred of phonies in 'The Catcher in the Rye' than the Manhattan of Lou Reed and then Punk rock - That is all in the distant future and what we witness are the dying embers of the New York City in 'The Age of Innocence'. America is at its peak power, the pinnacle of its omnipotence and New York City is the crown jewel in this prosperity. The city then slowly goes into decay as certainty in social cohesion and cultural unity begins to break up.

The six seasons combined - as we still await the seventh to be fully concluded - traces the fall of Don Draper, white male top executive against the rise of Peggy Olsen, the proto-feminist creative executive into the top offices. And it is against this double dynamic we see all the other characters essentially flower into their full weirdness. Through this process we come to understand what the events we know in the 1960s, such as the Kennedy assassinations and the Martin Luther King assassinations as well as the Vietnam War did to American society. America reached the top, and then quickly turned the corner into a decadent phase just as had the Roman Empire. In one sense, having reached the top America had nothing better to do but to fuck around, which is exactly what Don Draper does as he slowly loses touch with the America that allowed him to succeed. In its place emerges an America with which he can only loosely relate.

It's a curious thing, this change. Over the years white conservatives have unleashed the culture wars against the progressives as if they are the disenfranchised. This has manifested in accusations of 'reverse racism' or 'moral decay' but what the show presents to us is that economic growth happened in such a way to enfranchise the other more rapidly than it presented more growth to the established white demographic. It wasn't the white establishment that got disenfranchised; it was that America grew so fast it enfranchised everybody beyond just the white establishment. When you consider 'the other' as a group, it includes women, immigrants, Blacks, Jews, Italians and eventually the gays. The show doesn't show too many instance of affirmative action. It does however capture the bewildering change, season by season. At first it is like a whisper. By Season 6, the change is like a roar.

Beyond Memory, Beyond Broken Homes

American cinema is decidedly about the formation of families, just as American TV is about the maintenance of families. This is true of things as broad as 'Bewitched' and 'Brady Bunch' through to 'Game of Thrones' and 'Breaking'Bad'. The glaring exception to date was 'Seinfeld', which was revolutionary in the sense that no families were formed, and the central quartet were decidedly not a family but a coalition of disparate single entities. They were disparate single entities because they were in some ways all exiles from the ideological construct of family, trying to avert the mistakes of their parents. Thus, 'Mad Men' arrives as an explication of how American families fall apart.

The trope of 'First Wives Club' is that the husband cashes in his success by divorcing the first wife with whom he has a family, with a much younger wife with whom he just has fun. This is no ordinary trope, because there were many kids I knew through my childhood who were from these 'broken homes' where the "father ran off with the secretary" and other such narratives. It was a phenomenon that silently ate away at corners of our existence - how some of our friends had fathers who would never come home, and their homes would never be whole again. And all the while the engine of desire for being whole or for your friends' families to be made whole is there. The yearning and the pain that gets repressed and folded into interactions is exquisitely rendered. The show goes through the various scenarios on which the classic nuclear family setup is torn asunder by the very consumerist society that purports to support them through wondrous products. It leaves one devastated exactly because failure is more common than success, and so many people fail so willfully in the show. Except you come to realise that this is also true in the people who populate our real lives.

The show sheds a light on why the institution of marriage in the American nuclear family of the 1960s failed so spectacularly, so often. Nothing so schizophrenic can survive without actuating the schism.

The Dream Of The World Of Our Parents

I only have a sense of the 1960s through old photographs. My memory of the 1960s is too far back to make any kind of sense. The Vietnam War was there by the time I had any inkling of the world. Demonstrations and marches were regular news items. The context for the sturm und drang has always sat behind records books and movies. Robin Williams joked that if you could remember the 1960s, you probably weren't there. There's a weird compelling quality to that joke because as a toddler at the time, I hardly remember it. The 1960s I know of lives in my head through the media construction but strangely there is nothing in it that offers a wider view of society. The fragments of first hand accounts that have actually come down to me through anecdotes remain blurry. The Cuban Missile Crisis, day President Kennedy was shot, Beatlemania, and the day Martin Luther King was shot - these events only form a kind of diorama in my head without the context of the world. Thus it is singularly enlightening to see these events at arms length, sitting in the lounge room with these characters.

The 1960s sits at the precipice of the moment when human history goes from having more people dead than alive, to having more people alive than there ever lived. The post modern explosion happens at 1970, necessarily as the ancien regime of hierarchies begin collapsing, disintegrating bit by bit. As such, the rigid certitude in things such as gender roles and social rank that characterises the earlier seasons seem distant and alien to us, but as the show moves through the decade, we sense the accelerating change barreling towards our contemporary awareness. If the world changed this quickly on our parents, then it sort of makes sense why our upbringing for Generation X was so fractured and cognitively dissonant. They must have thought they were raising us for a world that had the certitude of 1960 when in fact we were always going to grow into a world of ever increasing moral and ethical relativism.

De-Witched

The show that kept getting evoked by the earlier seasons was 'Bewitched' where Samantha was the perfect housewife and her husband Darrin was the advertising executive. It's funny because Samantha was played by Elizabeth Montgomery so the name Betty goes to the wife; and Darren was played by Dick York and Dick Sergent, and so Don Draper's secret identity is Dick Whitman. Don has a white-haired boss Roger Sterling, just as Darrin had Larry Tate. The rest of it is completely off the rails that flies in the face of the theme of maintaining a family. Instead of a happy housewife who uses magic to make things perfect, Betty is bored and un-empathic with her kids; instead of  being a bumbling doting husband, Don Draper is a philandering alpha male. 'Mad Men' posits an American household that disintegrates under the very desire stoked by advertising. The irony is that the central characters are deeply committed to the business of advertising and are fully aware that they are there to fan the unending fires of desire.

'Mad Men' effectively posits that the marriage of Samantha and Darrin from Bewitched is doomed to fail exactly because they are in a particular kind of nuclear family arrangement that maximises household consumption but dissatisfies more people than it helps. Darrin, if he were genuinely an ad exec of his times, would have had too may opportunities to philander. Samantha, without magic, would be too vulnerable to the pitfalls of being a suburban housewife, through isolation, boredom and depression. 'Mad Men' is partially a tart retort from the 21sst Century towards the cultural delusions of the 1960s. It is on the whole unsparing and unkind.

Don Draper's Elegant Existential Angst

It's interesting how the character Don Draper is laden with backstory. They place so many extreme situations in his background, he is practically the other even if he is white. On one level this makes sense because in order for a white male character to have insight into the other, they must be laden with elements in their life that would enable them to share empathy with the other. This gap in turn informs the degree of alienation the main character feels from the mainstream of society. As with the Great Gatsby, Don Draper has arrived at the Big Time in the Big Apple, but he has arrived as an imposter. His origins are worse than humble, his identity is fractured, and he is busy covering his tracks.

In order to portray the great sea tide of change in people's attitudes through the 1960s, they had to devise a character who is at once very conservative on the surface but is deeply mutable and given to impulses and therefore endless infidelities. What is peculiar as a protagonist about Don Draper is how he is consumed by a silent self-loathing quite unlike any other character in America TV except maybe Walter White in 'Breaking Bad'. At this moment in history, the most interesting aspect of American masculinity on screen is not self-assuredness, but the depth of self-loathing combined with a troubled existential malaise and affliction.

Jon Hamm is remarkable as Don Draper because he is able to milk the nuance of the character as well as deftly play apart the many, many fractured facets of this man. He seems to have so many different smiles, all of them memorable for suggesting different parts of his psyche. The leery lewd smile, the condescending patronising smile, the genuine seductive persuasive smile, the gimme-five smile; all of these smiles are played differently and with great control. The series is essentially an Odyssey through the 1960s with Don Draper who is a kind of Odysseus of advertising - except unlike the Odyssey, it is not certain just where home/Ithaca is for Don Draper. The vast number of episodes allow the story-tellers to really go into every episode of the man's life, with the sort of detail that would have made James Joyce jealous, for Don Draper is the 21st Century rendition of Odysseus/Ulysses.

Betty Draper, The Emotionally Austere Mother

January Jones' performance as Betty Draper is the other amazing performance in the earlier seasons. The character drops back significantly after the third season and she's not that great in season 3 as she becomes this sort of bitchy harridan ex-wife. What's extraordinary about Jones' performance is how much she loads into a casual glance or a look away. She raises her eyebrows, or wrinkles her forehead to show displeasure, and generally works through a quick array of conflicting emotions. As a kind of latter day Grace Kelly, she gives off the impression of the perfectly manicured ice queen but there is so much ironic layering in what she does. I don't think I'll forget some of the subtle gestures or expressions of disapproval.

The evolution of Betty Draper gives us a sense of how American whiteness preserves itself as an identity. She's a fantastic character in the fist two seasons. It's sad that she gives away the stage to Don's next wife as her 50s kind of beauty gives way to Megan's swinging sixties vibe. It is as if she is forced to retreat off the stage exactly because what she represents belongs in the past that has died.

The show is in many ways quite an exercise in metonymy. Don Draper in our parlance might just be a sex addict, but because we are watching a time and space where such language does not exist we end up witnessing the drama. Similarly with Betty she might just be a classic 'First Wife Club' member, but because she is operating in a time and space without that concept we witness the drama of her emotional disintegration and reconstruction in a different way. Don and Betty as played by Jon Hamm and January Jones are so perfectly matched with their beauty in their scenes in the car as they drive, you almost wish like Goethe's Faust that their time stands still. The grand tragedy of 'Mad Men' - as it is in real life - is that time simply cannot stop for anybody, and all we can have is memory and nostalgia.

Quick Shots 01/Jan/2014

Hey, First Post Of the Year From Me

I've been busy watching a few silly movies on FetchTV in between the seasonal obligations. It's pretty cool watching on FetchTV because it saves the on the trip to the video store if nothing else and it sure beats buying more media. I've been stuck in the bad habit of buying stuff because I still have the carry-over from the ear when DVDs were actually worth something. It was ever so brief, but they were important for a good half a decade there until Blu-Ray came along and scotched that little bubble.

My New Years resolution last year was that I shouldn't just buy more media, but a) sometimes it is easier to just buy the box set and b) sometimes it's better to own than rent and c) it's impossible to stick to arbitrary rules meant that I bought my fair share of stuff. It's a bit of a worry if you can't remember if you've bought something or simply watched it on a rented bit of media, but if I think I'm going to go, "you have to watch this scene!?" or "you just have to hear this guitar solo!" then it's better to own this stuff.

Still, it's weird having a pile of this media that grew to be irrelevant so quickly. At least with LPs and CDs, there's an argument to be made that mp3s are a their best worse than either LPs or CDs, and that moving on to just data on hard disks isn't really an improvement in your listening pleasure. Besides which, you can squeeze a hello of a lot more out of LPs and CDs by having better speakers and amplifiers. Video is different.

With 4k TV looming in the not too distant future, even the marvelous Blu-Ray 1080p format is going to look pretty outdated in the next few years. I'm sure there's 8k and 16k TVs beyond that, and without an NBN pumping at last 50mbps it's going to be difficult to run the IPTV services on 4k and up download services, so maybe buying media won't become totally extinct. Let me just say, 4k is gorgeous. You're going to want this much more than the time you went from SD PAL or NTSC to HDTV. (That being said, I do seriously  wonder if there's any joy in seeing 4k TV footage of Kanye West or Miley Cyrus twerking.)

Getting Bad Advice

The news this week that's been most grating has been this business of Maurice Newman proclaiming that climate science on global warming is delusional.

In an opinion piece in The Australian newspaper, Maurice Newman, the Prime Minister's pick as head of his Business Advisory Council, claimed high energy costs caused by the carbon tax and the renewable energy target, introduced by the Howard government, had eroded Australia's competitiveness. Under Labor and the Greens, Australia had been taken ''hostage'' by ''climate change madness'', Mr Newman wrote.

"Newman!!"

It's really no big deal except for the fact that it's wrong and willfully wrong, and that he is slated to offer up advice to the Prime Minister based on this kind of idiotic denialism. If nothing else, it shows Tony Abbott still thinks the science on this is 'complete crap'. What's even weirder is that because the first 100days of Tony Abbott's time in office was 'complete crap', we're not surprised in the least bit find that his business advisor is a highly motivated climate change denialist.

Can We Please Stop With The Government Debt Hysteria?

This one came in from Skarp last week but I've been a bit preoccupied. Paul Sheehan - he of the rather squeaky voice and reflexively right-leaning views - wrote this rather tawdry column.

At 12.30 on Tuesday, Hockey, who has also been the stand-out thespian of the new federal parliament, will unveil the real horror, dysfunction and narcissism of Kevin Rudd's contribution to Australian political history, disably assisted by Julia Gillard. Hockey will release the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook, known in the trade as MYEFO, which will show a budget deficit much worse than Labor led us to believe, probably close to $50 billion, debt obligations much higher than Labor led us to believe, and unfunded liabilities that are so irresponsibly crushing the government will have to walk away from many of them. The most monumental folly is the National Broadband Network, whose economic rationale was worked out on a piece of paper by Rudd. The scheme subsequently created by former communications minister Stephen Conroy would cost more than $70 billion and never recover its cost of capital. The Abbott government will have to start again.

The way that paragraph is written, you'd think that the sky was going to cave in. Fortunately, professor Steve Keen had this article as a retort:

I’m not going to debate (or defend) Kevin Rudd’s personality, but getting this hysterical over a $50 billion deficit in a $1.5 trillion economy? Oh come on: that is slightly less than 3 per cent of GDP (the precise GDP figure is $1.525 trillion, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics). Comparable figures for some of our trading partners are 5.5 per cent for the USA, 6 per cent for the UK, and 10 per cent for Japan. Australia’s deficit for 2013 is almost 50 per cent below the expected average for the OECD of 4.8 per cent of GDP.

Of course, finding that out doesn’t require a trip overseas: all you have to do is search the web. But what a trip overseas might alert Sheehan to is the economic performance of the rest of the planet – and especially of those parts of it that, as he does, make the size of the government deficit the only stick by which economic performance is measured.

The rest of the article is Keen dismantling Sheehan's stated position that all this debt is somehow crippling and wrong.Austerity i a terrible thing; not to mention the fact that it doesn't work.

You sort of wonder how people like Paul Sheehan keep jobs as columnists. It's like he gets paid not for his thinking and critical faculties - which on the whole seem faulty anyway - but for how hard his blowhard entries blow. And they really blow. Sheehan's symptomatic of what's making the media market worse in this era. You just can't trust what any of these sloppy commentators write.  but somehow they're up there with a public soapbox on the SMH masthead spreading his kind of nonsense. I mean really! Why do they have to give 'equal time' to stupidity and misinformation?

But back to Keen's take home message about Government debt:

I would far rather see governments acknowledging the problem of private debt, and doing something concrete to reduce it – since the financial sector should never have been allowed to create much of that debt in the first place. But as a second best policy, government spending should buffer the impact of the decline in private sector deleveraging. To do otherwise is to turn a serious recession into a genuine Depression – as Europe has done.

Behind the veneer of apparent fiscal prudence, that is what hysterical articles like Sheehan’s are encouraging – in utter denial both of the actual cause of the crisis and, more importantly for a journalist, in ignorance of what even casual empiricism shows has been the actual impact of austerity.

That, just about sums it all up.

A Poem For A Lost Soul

It's An Ode, So To Speak...

I don't write poetry normally. As writing/scribbling/doodling goes, it's not my strong suit.  I've written all of 2 poems in my life, ...and this is my second.

 

Farewell to thee, the blossom of youth,
Errant of soul, fragrant of flowers,
Sheveled, feckful, innocuous, couth,
gainly and gaumy; righteous upon the hour.
Thy kingdom cleansed of signs of hell
thine yacht has sailed to the Isle of Id
Look not back to thy towering success
'tis but a dream of deeds gone unbid
When ultimately thine remembrance comes,
Recall then thou were'st once young, dumb,
and full of cum.

The Zero Year Of Your Coordinates

Your Mother Should Know

I recently did a bunch of covers of side 3 of the Beatles' 'White Album'. What prompted it was a combination of coming off a 12 song set of fairly difficult and challenging tracks which exhausted me and the desire to just play a bunch of stuff I liked as a teen. After I posted them up, it occurred to me that the 'White Album' was recorded in 1968, placing it 45 years ago.

Now, I don't know about you, but that is actually an interminably long time in the timescale of pop music. Paul McCartney is about to come out with a new album (called 'New') so he's still going strong after the morbidly death-obsessed 'Memory Almost Full' album, but I sat and tried to figure out how music that old - 45years! - must look like to say, an 18year old today.

If I subtract 45 from the year I was 18, it goes firmly into the late 1930s. Now, I had no shot of owning any music from the late 1930s, let alone being more than passingly familiar with it. Quite frankly I - or my other music listening, record-buying friends- would have been extremely unlikely to be familiar with anything that old.

And yet, Walk-Off HBP went to see Ringo Starr earlier this year because his daughter wanted to see Ringo, so clearly the charms of music that's 45-50 years old is not entirely lost on kids of today. Obviously it's going to vary from person to person, household to household, family to family. Even so, you wonder about the distance of this time that separates one from the moment of recording.

Bono was saying in some interview someplace that each time U2 go into a studio there's a challenge of doing better than before but also an equally large battle to be relevant. So it can't be easy for anybody to be doing any recording 10years, 20years and 30years in. You sure don't see Led Zeppelin heading for the studio with Jason Bonham, you don't see a new album from the Rolling Stone every 2years, it just doesn't happen.

That being said recorded music has one advantage over literature and movies and it is the ability music has to be consumed over and over again. Even your most favourite movie can only be sat through a handful f times unless you want to make a total study of it. Your favourite albums will be by our side in decades to come, surviving multiple listens upon listens. I think the reason why music drags me back is that in the end I can control my output in a ay that is closed off to me in the cinema. I'm doing more and more recordings because I am able to complete thoughts, ideas, concepts; then execute and finish; and in finishing, I am able to move on to the next thing.

This is in stark contrast to the horrors of being a screenwriter and waiting for people to get back to you about your script; and in most instances, nothing gets made even if people tell you how much they like your writing. Frank Zappa certainly wasn't wrong when he said "music is best".  There's certainly a lot of wisdom in that observation.

Firebird VII

Firebird Sweet

My Big Guitar Project for 2012 turned out to be this red Gibson Firebird VII with gold trim like the picture above. It's a bit of confluence of things that led to this project but when I list to factors, you might grok in fullness the weird road to the Gibson Firebird VII.

The most familiar Firebird player in my collection of CDs is Clarence Gatemouth Brown. He had a swanky Firebird V, and there is no duplicating his clean tone without some Firebird under your fingers. It's just the way it is, because not only is the cut of the body an oddball shape, Firebirds sport minihumbuckers and walnut bodies, with through-body necks.

Other oddities in the Firebird design would be the through-neck design and the Cadillac-fin styling of the body (it was designed by a car designer Gibson Co. hired). It has had many variants over the years, but perhaps the most appealing to me is the Firebird VII with the 3 pickup with Maestro Vibrola arm. Yes, it's Gibson's copy of the Fender Stratocaster - even though they'd never admit the bleeding obvious - and being a dyed-in-the-wool Strat player, the one that resonates the most is the FB VII.

Of course, Gibson wares in Australia are always priced for lawyers, advertising execs and drug-dealers, so it was going to be hard to say, "Oh I'll check out the Gibson". Sure. On my way home from buying my Aston Martin Bond car.

Anyway, I thought if I could pick up an Epiphone version of the FB VII, I wouldn't mind loading it up with Seymour Duncans and giving it a red hot go. Of course, Epiphone stopped making their version some years back, so the opportunity seemed to be less than initially imagined. Then along came a full custom shop "body and neck only" in good nick, so that made me empty my piggy bank.

The thing about electric guitars is that you can go through life not knowing the subtleties of what goes into the sound and still be a great player. But if you want to be a unique player, you have to be willing to go much further afield than Strats, Telecasters, Les Pauls and Flying Vs. Similarly, with the choice of wood, you have to leave behind Swamp Ash or Alder or Mahogany. Walnut is the thing! (technically, there is mahogany sandwiched in the FB VII, but the 'wings' are Walnut).

Walnut warrants a bit of explication. Alembic use Walnut to build thru-body neck designs for their high end product. The grain is open but tight and so there is a fair chunk of density. It has a higher tone than Mahogany, Swamp Ash or Alder, but is not as bright as Maple. Walnut shows great resonance when you rap it with your knuckles. One of my pet dream projects is to build a guitar around a big Walnut body - like a L5S body - and a Walnut neck, to get the maximum wood tone of Walnut and call it 'Wally'.

The surprsing thing about the Firebird design is just how much wood there is in it. When I sit it next to a Stratocaster, it's clear it has so much more wood in the headstock and body. This is important because what gives an electric guitar distinctive tone is the wood; and the more wood there is, the more complex and rich the decay of the envelope. Add in the fact that there is no neck joint and you have the recipe for a very rich sounding guitar.

I installed Seymour Duncan SM-1n in the neck and S-M3n and SM-3b for the middle and bridge positions. They're all wound around Alnico V magnets instead of ceramic magnets, which gives them a warmer, 'rounded' tone. I guess one could dream about getting Alnico II versions from somewhere, but Alnico Vs should be good enough for now.

Wiring up was a little strange. The Firebird chamber is very small, and it sports 3 Volume knobs and 1 Tone, but only a 3 way switch. I tried using a 6 way switch but that didn't work out too well. The 3 Volume pots makes things  interesting, especially because there's effectively no Master Volume control, but there is a master Tone control. You do have more control over tonal combinations between the pickups but the wiring is convoluted as a result of the choice.

The tuning pegs were also an interesting problem. Because of the oddball design in the headstock and tuners, I had to get Steinberger Gearless Tuners. These are interesting things because they work like a clamp and a shifter rather than the traditional winding on to posts. They too were a learning exercise but now that they're on, they seem to be very stable tuners.

The weird thing about the Gibson Firebird is that there is nothing apart from the body and neck that can't be improved by third party parts. The Seymour Duncans are better than the Gibson minihumbuckers; the third party Vibrola copy is more stable than the original; there is a roller saddle bridge with locking posts out there that is an improvement on the Tune-o-matic bridge favoured by Gibson. All the same, when you string it up and set up the action, you're confronted by the great craftsmanship on the body and neck. It sure makes you wonder about the Gibson company.

Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III

Plastic Can Sound This Good?

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="665"] Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III[/caption]

For Christmas, my better half bought a Harmon Kardon Sound Stick III system for me to use in the kitchen. The original idea was to get a Boom Box so I could just plug in the iPod, but a bit of shopping around and auditioning led us to this contraption which has been around in one version or another for a good decade, but the current version really sparkled.

Truth be known, I was mean to most of the Boom Boxes and powered speakers on display in JB Hi-Fi - I ran original instrument violins and cellos sawing their way through J.S. Bach, which is not the kind of music those things are generally designed for. All the same, the Sound Stick IIIs were able to give a sense of timbre beyond the squeaky 'squeeeeeee' of the original instruments and the shop demo doof music seemed to have some kind of shape. it wasn't much to go on, but it was a loud shop at Christmas Shopping time.

Even then you could hear this thing was head and shoulders above anything in its price range, let alone stuff for which they were asking twice the money. It was the only system where the strings sounded like strings and harpsichord sounded like harpsichord, and Glenn Gould moans sounded like Glenn Gould moans. The dude in the shop wasn't particularly impressed I was pumping piano music loud just so I could hear Glenn Gould moan, but ... you get that. Soon enough, we decided this one would do.

Once I got home and ran some full-blooded rock and full-hearted jazz through these things, the sound scape just expanded and filled the space like some bit of proper hi-fi equipment. And I found myself staring at the marvelous plastic object, honestly wondering from where in the good name of the lord, this sound was being summoned, because the clear bits of plastic just don't look like they should be doing this well.

When you look at it closely you can see the sticks are in fact little baffled speakers in their own right, while the main sub unit is like an alien dome with its own baffle design. The design itself has been around for a few years now and it's allegedly in the New York Museum of Modern Art for its design, which tells you it ticks the Modernist chic box nice and well. I remember seeing the original ones thinking, "oh, yeah, that looks interesting... but all that plastic?" I've got a lot of prejudice about materials that way - But the marvel is when you run a bit of King Crimson or Herbie Hancock or even the remastered Sgt. Peppers through it from the iPod. Yes, the damn iPod Classic running 192kbps AAC files. Plastic? You can not hear the plastic. Honestly, this thing has got me baffled with how well it works.

A clear plastic thing hurling out monster sound. Go figure that one out.

'Garni du Jour' Again

That Ain't The Music, They're Just The Lyrics

Here's good ole David Dale, frustrated by contemporary pop music's total inability to come up with a sophisticated lyric that tickles David Dale's fancy. The headline says 'the day the music died' but really, his complaint is about the poor abstraction and bad taste in the lyrics; and really can one blame him?

Australia's top-selling singles of the past 10 years (and typical lyrics)
❏ Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO (sold more than 800,000 copies): ''I'm runnin' through these hos like Drano, I got that devilish flow, no halo.''
❏ Somebody That I Used To Know, Gotye (700,000+): ''No, you didn't have to stoop so low, have your friends collect your records and then change your number.''
❏ Sexy and I Know It, LMFAO (600,000+): ''We headed to the bar, baby don't be nervous; no shoes, no shirt and I still get serviced.''
❏ Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen (550,000+): ''You took your time with the call, I took no time with the fall; you gave me nothin' at all, but still you're in my way.''
❏ Moves Like Jagger, Maroon 5 (550,000+): ''You say I'm a kid, my ego is big; I don't give a shit and it goes like this.''

Admittedly, those lyrics look pretty bad. But if the group is called 'LFMAO' then maybe it's not quite right to be expecting lyrics of any depth or meaning. Or maybe the apparent banality is implicit to the times in which we find ourselves living? In which case, should we be surprised?

Still, the whole article brought me to think about the real death of music, and I have to say it is these reality TV singing contest shows like X Factor' and 'The Voice'. For the love of god, if there is one place music is being killed, it's on these TV shows where people who have no insight into the songs they're singing are judged on rather subjective, obscure, arcane performance points while session musicians pump out 2minute abridged versions of classic songs.

No, really, they're terrible, and they have nothing to do with the qualia that makes music good. It's freaking glorified Karaoke put to the service of TV stations and advertisers, dressed up as music, with semi-pro singers fronting for the execrable business. So if David Dale really wants to take a hatchet to the death of music that he liked, well, he can have a go at these awful shows, one of which produced Adele (to whom he gives a free pass). No, Mr. Dale, it's worse than that.

Once upon a time, there was rock music, and it had a shot at being something tat could really communicate something important. Then, the cultural mainstream bought into it and the record labels sold the artists down the river, ever in the search of wider profits. And to this end it was all about packaging and looks and style; not writing and performing - As Frank Zappa called it, the 'Garni de Jour' phenomenon. You slap a piece of burnt meat between two bits of bread, and it's a burger. You add a tired piece of parsley next to it, and that's 'Garni du Jour' - and somehow this dried bit of parsley is meant to make the whole dining experience better.

Frank Zappa also made the observation that people also hate music, but love the packaging. People say they like music, but what they really like is the 'Garni du Jour'; and if the mass market is saying that the music business is crazy to focus on the segment of the market that -*gasp*- is actually interested in music being music for the sake of music.

That's how music died - when the music business decided the 'Garni du Jour' was much more important than the quality of the meat in between the bread making up the burgers they were peddling. Similarly, all these reality TV singing contest shows are all judging on the 'Garni du Jour' elements of each of these singer's 'marketability'. If they win, they can go on to sing the incredibly insightful lyrics David Dale so detests. It's not about the music, it's not even about the lyrics. Truth be told, it's all about all those *stupid* performance notes handed out by the likes of Simon Cowell and the rest of those 'judges'.

Blast From The Past - 'Asia' & 'Alpha'

Dragon Ball & Pyramid

I've got myself stuck in a weird rut at home where I've been listening to Asia. What I really should be doing is writing a crit of their latest album, the just-released 'XXX', but I can't say I've got my head around it enough to write anything insightful. The problem I'm having with 'XXX' is that it all sounds like rehashes of musical ideas they exhausted in their first two albums. Thus, I've been turning over these two discs with some morbid intensity, more than any kind of nostalgia.

I hadn't really noticed this but during the GFC, the original lineup of Asia had gotten together and put out a quick couple of albums in 'Omega' and 'Phoenix', both of which I haven't managed to get my mitts upon. It'll happen - 'Omega' is already on its way from Amazon. In the mean time, of course, the only reference I have are the original two albums, and it's made for some interesting listening.

Goodness those Roger Dean covers are beautiful. They're some of his best covers.

Way back when in the ole' mists of time, when Asia first came out with their eponymous album, they had a hit single in 'Heat of the Moment'. It got tons of airplay. I dare say there are 80s nostalgia stations still whipping that track out once in a 48hour cycle of their rigid playlists. I don't know which was more surprising; the supergroup lineup or the fact that the prog rock alumni went and recorded a hit single.  After all, Steve Howe has 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' on his resume, Carl Palmer has 'Karn Evil 9' with its three impressions and  John Wetton played on some pretty long improv bits on 'Larks Tongues in Aspic' and 'Starless and Bibleblack'. A punchy little hit single for the ages?

'Alpha' quickly followed and that was just as carefully confected pop as 'Asia' was carefully confected stadium rock anthems. I remember feeling an immense amount of frustration as I listened to them that these albums were definitely lacking in long pieces with big instrumental sections. It was harder to take because I loved 'Drama' by Yes and here were Geoff Downes and Steve Howe doing pop rock. The sum total experience across both albums felt like much less than the parts and ingredients going in.

Listening to both albums today, I feel like I've grown into these songs more. It's still prog rock, but less mannered, less figurative, less abstract, and less convoluted - and I'm old enough now to handle these albums being that way. I don't need all of my music to be chicanes and break-neck changes and diabolically convoluted time signatures. I'm finding I've got a lot of time for this stuff today.

I figure that in Steve Howe's mind, Asia is an opportunity to just go out there and rock. There's no whimsy like  'Circus of Heaven' or 'Madrigal' or 'Wondrous Stories'. Instead there's John Wetton singing about resenting undeserved medals for generals and generally living a rough and tumble life where people go on secret missions and trade punches. The singing persona he sports sounds like a Steven Seagal movie character; a bit like his previous work in the band 'U.K.'.

Carl Palmer's work stands up to the test of time the most for me. He's very crisp and measured without being machine-like; it's simply tremendous playing. Geoff Downes sounds like a catalogue of 80s synth sounds but I guess that's what makes Asia so punchy and pop. It's more amusing than anything.

Anyway, I'm just putting this up in a way as to get myself to writing something about 'XXX'. By the way, I went looking for a digital image of the 'XXX' album cover and typed in 'XXX' and 'Asia' into the Google image search and I have to tell you it's pretty unsavory.

 

Planet Terror Compendium

Replacement Level Parts, Playable Strat

Last year when I built Sexcalibur from parts, I have to say it was a pretty deluxe kind of operation. If there was a wonderful thing I could throw at, I wouldn't hesitate to grab it and stick it in. To date, it is the most elaborate electric guitar I own. It may get even more elaborate if I decide one day to put in the super-switch to replace the current 5 way switch. Sexcalibur was supposed to be the electric guitar to end all electric guitars for me, and it sort of was until after I finished, I got the bug to simply put together more projects because the assembly process was such fun.

This of course led me to the Moby Rick Rickenbacker 4001 re-conditioning project that ate my brain, and then a kit guitar and fixing my friends multiple guitars... In all of this frenzy I came up with the concept of doing a project where I would source third party guitar parts and create what is known as a Parts-caster. And being a bit of a sometime baseball stats nerd, I thought it might be fun to source particular parts; that is to say, source parts that were the least expensive but still reliable. In short, a Parts-caster made up of replacement level parts.

Working The Problem

There are some things in a guitar that demand a higher standard than other parts. The canoe jack plate should look good, but the variance in function between a cheap Chinese steel one and a nice chrome one from North America is not much.

The place where you cannot give up any performance on a guitar equipped with a tremolo is in fact the tuners. There are a lot of dodgy tuners available  out there for joke-like prices for Chinese tuners, but you want something that either locks or is geared at a high ratio, if not both. Fortunately Wilkinson make such a tuner. These babies have thumb wheel locks, much like the Spertzels on the real US Fender Stratocasters. The saving is only $20 compared to a set of Fender locking tuners, but this is the bit you just can't compromise.

The search for a neck was interesting. There are quite a few third party makers for guitar necks, but it's actually hard to find the right price for the right neck. I guess that's the nature of most markets, but careful parsing of all the necks available yield a a Squier Fender neck from the 1980s or 1990s. It is a fairly thick neck with minimal camber. It is maple with a rosewood fretboard, and a badly done black paint job on the front of the headstock. All the same, the frets were impeccable and the rosewood fretboard was actually one of the best I'd ever felt. Rather ironic for a piece that as being sold for a give-away price.

The body also took me on a wild goose chase. the first body I tried was made of Paulownia, but it turned out the neck pocket was out of alignment an incorrectly routed. It was a shame because it promised to sound very good. This led me to a alder body out of a supplier in HK who sells these for an ungodly cheap price of $45. This one fit the neck like a glove. However, it is very heavy.

The other part I should mention is that there are quite a few manufacturers out there doing interesting things. They sport their own little brand names such as 'Guitarheads' and 'Diesel'. While I haven't fully explored their wares properly, I will vouch for their hot rail pickups. they're very gritty and have a healthy output with plenty of articulation.

The Parts, Costed


The neck was $50.

The body was $45.

Tuners are from Wilkinson.  $35

I got a pair of roller string trees. $5.

The Tremolo comes from Canada. It's the old style 6 screw version. $20.

The Knobs are from Japan. I got a full set of 3 pot knobs and 1 knob for the 5 way switch.  $15

The harness is some kind of Korean or Chinese Strat harness. The pots were in metric. It saved me a load of hassle, so it was worth just grabbing a whole harness. $20.

I pulled off the ceramic capacitors and put in a paper oil capacitor I got for $6.

The 'Planet Terror' Scratchplate and Backplate came in from Canada as well. $45

The pickups are generic Hot Rails. I don't know where they are made, but they're dirt cheap and actually sound really good. They even come with 4 wire config which means I could theoretically coil tap; for the life of me I can't bring myself to do it. Set of 3: $45.

That comes to about $286. Having assembled it and played it, I can tell you it's much better than anything you can buy for that price; it plays like something at least twice as expensive.

A Different Kind Of Truth

The Old Is Not The New, It's Just Good

Van Halen came out with a new album about three weeks ago. I rushed out and got it at Utopia records in town. May as well do these things the old way. I know people are downloading these things but being a fetishist (as Rob Gordon would have it) I need to own plastic. I don't know, if I ever wanted Lady Gaga, I might download that, but a new Van Halen album deserves my full purchasing commitment. The point is to not give into the ravages of time; not surrender to the seduction of the new. If you truly love rock music, there's no way you're not going to fork out the money for the CD. Mine even came with a free poster, so suck on that iTunes!

What's Good About it

The word out there is that these aren't even new-new songs but re-arranged and re-written old songs, some of which were on that legendary demo tape to Warner Brothers. From the first note to the last, the Van Halen you hear sounds as bristling and energetic as any and all of the early Van Halen records that featured David Lee Roth. And really, that's what we expect, and that's what they deliver.

The playing is superb, the engineering is great, the mix is lively, and it just plain rocks. At the heart of it is Eddie Van Halen, still doing his remarkable guitar playing that changed the landscape for guitarists for a generation. The whole package might not sound fresh to music critics, but it sounds real, and lived in. You know, being 'good' is fresh enough for me.

What's Bad About It

Are you kidding me? Uh... It's not a double album?.

What's Interesting About It

Well, that's an interesting title for a start, that poses some epistemological questions. I don't know how philosophical a bent David Lee Roth has developed - judging from his solo works, maybe not much - but the line evokes two discussions about knowledge. One is whether we can ascertain truth and one is whether truth is multiple and that there can be conflicting, contradictory but simultaneous truth. The song 'Bullethead' suggests that reality might be a bit more vague than any definition we give it.

I'm sure the guys in the band aren't thinking about this sort of thing to much, and yet you get the feeling from the record that fame and success actually wore on them a lot more than they admitted. truth, as they found out was a socially determined construct, so they want to throw it back on us saying absolutes are questionable.

The long absence between '1984' and this album for David Lee Roth is the stuff of rock legends so I won't go into it here, but it has to be said, he's slipped right back into the soundscape like he had never left. It makes you think, if it's so damn easy, what took you guys so long to get back? The answer to that might be the GFC wherein a lot of bands have hit the road again in order to scare up some cash after investments were burnt in the GFC.

At least this is the silver lining on that very black cloud - and it shines too.

Going Black And White

I've noticed over the years that when bands want to hit the reset button, they come out with black and white video clips. 'Tattoo' and the other bits of video that's been released are all in black and white. Unfortunately it reminds me of the time The Who took on Kenny Jones to replace the deceased Keith Moon and came out with 'You Better You Bet'; The time the Police came out with 'Every Breath You Take'; and the time U2 went all bluesy and did 'Rattle ad Hum', half in black and white. I don't know if it really means anything but the black and white thing always seems like a statement, but ends up being something else.

The band is resetting in the sense that they haven't had an album out since 1998, and they're doing this one with David Lee Roth so it stands to reason. The problem is that the Who only really had one more album in them and then stopped putting out material for along time, and the Police really only had the 1986 remix of 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' left in them. It's really not a good sign. Speaking for myself, I haven't done anything since I worked in black and white, so... I'm just saying.

"Can He Still Do The Splits?"

I've had a few people ask this question of David Lee Roth. Because the question never crossed my mind, it kind of took me by surprise that quite a number of people are asking this question. I don't understand how this comes to the forefront of people's minds when it comes to David Lee Roth rejoining the band, seeing that my own consciousness of the band totally revolves around Eddie' guitar playing. I mean, it's like asking if Dennis Rodman still has weird hair when the subject of the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls comes up. I mean, yeah, no, maybe, but were you watching what that team did at all? David Lee Roth's splits? Come on, this is Eddie's band. :)

'Brighton Rock'

Running Up In Front Of The Hundred Faces

I laughed so much I thought maybe I've become psychopathic. This is a great tribute film masquerading as a Grahame Greene adaptation. I knew the film was set in 1964 as opposed to its original period, and people have been wondering why it had to be, just to accommodate the youth riots. The quick and dirty answer is that this film has less to do with recreating Grahame Greene's novel so much as retracing 'Quadrophenia'. It's blatant, but knowing it helps you really enjoy this film. I know I did.

If you don't know or like 'Quadrophenia', this film is likely to fall on blind eyes, so to speak.

What's Good About It

There's plenty to like in this film. It looks like they made this film out of off-cuts from Quadrophenia in parts and then it segues into its own thing just beautifully. The cinematography, the production design, the editing, are all lovingly rendered. The performances are great and there's really never a dull moment as you watch Pinkie the psychopath cause havoc.

Also, the moment pictured above, where Pinkie on his stolen scooter with Phil Davis' Spicer in tow, finds itself leading the mod's scooters is priceless. Phil Davis of course was in 'Quadrophenia' playing Chalky. There is also a shot of the hotel steps which is the same angle as the one in 'Quadrophenia'. It was so close, I expected Sting - or somebody who looked like Sting - to come bounding out dressed as a Bell Boy. It didn't happen, but my heart quickened in anticipation. It's that kind of film. If you know and love Quadrophenia, then 'Brighton Rock' is a must-see film.

What's Bad About It

I think that for a film that works so hard to work in the riots and the Quadrophenia look, it might have y'know, slotted a Who song in there somewhere.

What's Interesting About it

Alas, I should have done a movie double with 'Quadrophenia'. Oh well... For instance, the landscape relationship apparently doesn't make sense, but only if you don't know 'Quadrophenia'. The reviewer above complains most bitterly that Dover makes an appearance for no good reason. Well, in 'Quadrophenia', Jimmy the personality-afflicted mod rides the lambretta he stole from Sting's character, right up to Beachy Head where he destroys the scooter in a gesture of identity suicide. So in this film, the psychopathic Pinkie takes his young wife Rose up to Beachy Head on a stolen lambretta to urge her to suicide. While I've never been to Brighton, I know the Brighton Beach in that movie fairly well. Once the riot breaks out, I kept expecting to catch glimpses of action that matched 'Quadrophenia'. The shot where some youths break a shop window shot from inside, clearly is in reference to the earlier picture.

There's Crazy And Then there's Psychopathy

What really pops out about both films is the apparent hands-off attitude to insanity. In 'Quadrophenia', it is quite possible Jimmy has gone schizophrenic because of his drugs, but it's never made explicit as an explanation. In 'Brighton Rock', it's never quite explained how or why Pinkie comes into the world, but it is clear that from the beginning, there is something deeply wrong with this character. Indeed, Pinkie is at once a total misfit from the get-go. He's a young hoodlum, raised by a hoodlum, who witnesses the death of his father figure, as well as getting facially disfigured.

Psychological problems always make for good drama, and in a sense this is why drama queens we meet in real life might be people harbouring a personality disorder or an outright insanity of some kind. One other thing that can be said for certain is that having crazy characters means he writer does not have to delineate a motivation that we find logical. In other words, you don't know what they're going to do next because if there's only crazy logic to it, then it means it's not going to be rational.

Still, the film works very carefully as to why Pinkie does certain things. The father figure in the photo is dressed in a war time parka, so he puts it on on the important day. He steals a lambretta scooter, which combined with the war time parka makes him look the part of the mod. Clearly it's a gag. It's totally crazy-reasoning for the character that somehow lands Pinkie at the head of the mod crowd, who are in  one sense the expression of the dysfunction in British society; but the film works very hard to get him there. Now, the deeper question to ask is whether the craziness of the rioting youths and the hoodlum violence of Pinkie and his gangster life are interchangeably equivalent in English culture.

Is Pinkie violent because he's just born that way? Or is it a social problem of England that manifests itself as both the senseless youth riots and the psychopathic killer that is Pinkie? And that question might be the reason why the film makers decided to update Brighton Rock to the era of the riots. The cathrsis of death at Beachy Head in 'Brighton Rock' is not only evoking 'Quadrophenia', it is symbalically raising the issue of why there are such people. Is society headed over the cliff with Pinkie?

In light of the recent riots in the UK, it does make you wonder if there's a lot more crazy out there than we thought.

Teenage Wasteland, It's Only Teenage Wasteland

Pete Townshend made a million out of singing about how awkward being an adolescent can be. Indeed, the phrase "teeange wasteland" sums up so much of the angst and inadequacy of feeling these characters growing up and coming of age in the 1960s.  There's a little alleyway in Brighton that has turned into a shrine because of the sex scene that was shot for 'Quadrophenia'. It's all part of the emotional terrain that is worked hard in 'Brighton Rock', for both Pinkie and Rose are awkward adolescents who have only ventured into adulthood with the minimum of emotional equipment. The kiss in the rain is particularly awkward and strange, and it harks back to the awkward sex in the alley from the earlier film.

One of the unstated issues in the film is the inadequacy of both Pinkie and Rose in their inability to express their inner turmoil. Rose thinks she has made a connection with Pinkie, simply because he tells her they have a connection. She nary searches her own feelings before she's decided that she is going with him to the ends of the world. Pinkie doesn't even know how he feels because he's too traumatised and he's a psychopath. His stated reasons for doing things are ironically at odds with what he really seems to want. This dynamic of two inadequate people groping for a relationship finds a connection with the abortive sexual encounter in the alleyway in 'Quadrophenia'. Phil Daniels' Jimmy thinks he's the problem while he worships Steph, and it turns out Steph can only be described as a feckless girl with personality problems of her own. Rose and Jimmy are both yearning for the other person without knowing who the other person is, and in both films they finish up not knowing.

Is Pinkie Evil?

The world that is presented in 'Brighton Rock' is tangibly limited and the horizon for its characters are nowhere near as wide as the ocean. They swim in a small pond of a community, and are largely incapable of change. The gritty social realism in the film is enough to make you recoil in horror, just looking at the council building flat or the ugly backstreets. The England of 1964 is nowhere near as glamorous as the swinging 60s ought to feel. It is in this cosseted world that Pinkie has grown into being, perhaps like a tumour.

On the face of it, there's no arguing the fact that Pinkie is evil. But it's also pretty clear that Pinkie is a psychopath. It brings up the point whether criminality is a function of society and mental illness. Pinkie is at once a belligerently hostile young man who earns his angry young man epithet easily, but he's also incredibly recessive for his obvious moral weaknesses. Similarly, Rose is only socially normative to the degree that Catholic guilt has shaped her into a cowering woman, but we find in her alliance with Pinkie against Ida that her morality doesn't run all that deep. It falls upon deaf ears that she could be charged with being an accomplice. They're both far more crazy than they are criminal, although their criminality does cause problems for them; it's almost as if it is a side issue. They're rebels without a cause and without a clue.

It might seem like the same old depressing film making to some but this film does offer up some interesting insights into the socius of 1964 England. I guess my best advice is that you take in 'Quadrophenia' before you sit down to watch this film.

Memento Mori Theory Of Art

Depictions of Death Make For Important Art

Over the break I wanted to briefly write down some observations about the power of memento mori, but then I lost my post; then I tried to reconstruct it and lost my train of thought. Here is what remains of the wreck.

Memento Mori is of course the reminder of our mortality that is woven into themes and paintings. There's a theory going around that the purpose of artistic endeavor itself is a kind of memento mori, and what makes art truly important is how powerful this reminder can be. This would explain the persistent popularity of such genres as Gothic Horror in literature or Goth as a style, and even heavy metal music. What struck me about this is that it is actually difficult to make something lasting without memento mori. In turn, the most popular works of any artist picked at random probably deals with death.

Shakespeare's most famous play is 'Hamlet', and it has the famous "alas poor Yorrick" scene with skull in hand as well as the soliloquy about living and dying. If that is too literal, then at least it is worth considering that memento mori in literature marks most of the great books in any list. In the Iliad, there's Achilles' lament for Patroclus mirrored with Priam's lament for Hector. In the Odyssey, there is the episode where Odysseus talks to the dead in Hades; The epic of Gilgamesh is about Gilgamesh's search for immortality because deep down he fears death. It's everywhere in classical literature. This is a tradition in narratives that flows through to modern texts.

So it seems to work for the importance stakes by just inserting death. For instance, if Madame Bovary or Anna Karenin didn't die in those books, would they have been revered less or more? What makes every photo taken during the US Civil War so artistic but the intrinsic knowledge that all he people in it are dead, and that if they were soldiers, some of them likely died not long after the photo was taken. Doesn't Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series milk this for all its worth? This suggests you can have a pretty good work of art and add death and it probably adds profundity - and what else is this profundity but the sentiment that is provoked by the memento mori?

Try this for an example: Hans Christian Andersen's 'Little Mermaid' has a sad ending. When Disney gets its hands on it, it has a happy ending, and a spin off TV series to boot. Which is more profound? We know it's the original version with the death. I'm not really going anywhere special with all this except to say that it is a lot more ingrained in the arts than we might think at first glance. Is important Art then good art? The sizable audience to the Disney 'Little Mermaid' franchise might suggest otherwise. Critics always pick the less popular, but death-wedded original.

Modern Substitutions

I know I've mentioned this before that if you stick the Holocaust reference in to your film somewhere, it doubles your chances for an Oscar. This is suggested by some to be because the Academy is filled with Jewish people, but the more direct reason is that the Holocaust has placed itself as the ultimate memento mori that substitutes for all the massive death and destruction wrought in World War II. A film increases in importance simply because you have the Holocaust as part of the story; like a talisman it activates our awareness of death. Considering that Stalin's regime killed more of its own people than the Nazis did to their own and others, and the demonisation of Communism through the twentieth century, it's interesting to note that communism, gulags and the GRU don't have quite the memento mori effect of Nazis, death camps and the SS. By comparison, the dull utility of comunism and communist design has far less weight in fiction and the arts in general.

Of course, it is easier to understand Nazism in  light of memento mori because in most part it was an attempt to aestheticise ethics. Thus, Hitler and Himmler adorned the SS uniforms with mystical symbols and a deaths head. It's an instant fetishisation of death that is familiar to us. It is a familiar move because we've seen it before and since. But the allure of aesthetising death itself as a political act couldn't possibly have so much meaning without the power of death in art itself.

The modern world of media and pop culture is filled with more references to death than you can poke a stick at.

Here are some examples worth pondering. My favorite Pink Floyd album is 'Animals'; The best-selling work by Pink Floyd is 'Dark Side of The Moon' which in survey of ideas such as time and money, deals with death with the song 'The Great Gig In The Sky' (which I covered, by the way, here).

For all its celebration of sex, a lot of rock is a kind of memento mori, what with all the heroes who have died young. The list of dead rock musicians who didn't make it to a ripe old age is a significant list of names starting with say, Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.You only have to write the names of dead rock stars and it suddenly evokes the body of work in rock. Try these names: John Lennon, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, John Bonham, Marc Bolan, Keith Moon, Syd Vicious, Kurt Cobain. When you watch the Foo Fighters live, David Grohl himself becomes a kind of living memento mori in the memory of Kurt Cobain, which explains the morbid fascination surrounding the Foo Fighters.

Yet, of all the sub-genres of rock, the most enduring branches are in fact Metal and Goth because their visual motifs remain largely unchanged. Death features prominently in the oeuvre of metal and goth. Album after album by Iron Maiden is filled with ironic images of death. Death is central thematic unity of Metal. One could argue the excesses are a kind of kitsch but if you judge the sales of Iron Maiden albums to their die-hard fans, you'd have to conclude it is doing its job.

Recently I put together an electric guitar from Warmoth parts for a friend. It had one knob - a volume knob  and it was important that it had a death skull on it. The meaning of it was simply to imbue the guitar with a memento mori. "all shred axes should have a memento mori," he proclaimed. It makes some sort of intrinsic and extrinsic sense, not only because it is to play heavy metal, but because deeper down playing music makes you count down time; and thoughts of time inevitably lead to thoughts of death, vis a vis 'Dark Side of the Moon'.

The main character in the Star Wars cycle turns out to be Anakin, who is Darth Vader, and Vader's helmet is like a skull with a helmet. In the original three movies, Darth Vader is like the big memento mori character - who of course dies at the end of 'Return of the Jedi'; and in the more recent prequel trilogy, the audience grapples with Anakin's descent into being Darth Vader.  It's part of existentialism that the prior acknowledgment of one's one mortality enables one to take on the challenge that the remaining time in our lives present, and yet it actually has artistic roots in things that go back to pre-history.

The point of all this is to say, it is everywhere, if you simply choose to look.