Back in my halcyon post-art college days, some friends and I put these cool little gigs together. As well as an immense pool of local deejaying talent **cough cough** to draw on, there seemed to be this never ending supply of local bands and musicians who would turn up and play for free, or almost free.
Sometimes you forget how many talented people are out there, and how few get anywhere near the recognition they deserve. I say deserve, but I guess that kind of thinking is where the problems start, as soon as you try to commoditize a talent, put a monetary or acclaim-based worth on it, everything gets kinda distorted.Maybe that’s why those days were halcyon, no-one had any cash and everyone was just glad to have a chance to play for an audience.
Out of this crowd, a guy named Jacob Fletcher, stood out as someone who (if there was any kind of musically justice) could make a name for himself one day. Last time I saw him he gave me a couple of his tracks (one of which I’ve posted below) and it kind of hints at that deep-burnt nostalgia you feel for places that are a long way ago.
He’s playing at the social in a couple of weeks (the 15th)-I might see you there.
the gap between expectation, desire and cold hard reality is rarely easily broached.
which might beg questions about whether those three should ever (could ever) meet. or whether the gaping divide between quixosis and the quotidian it might just be another previously insurmountable hurdle to look back on when you’re curled up in that still so distant home.
while with every day that passes i’m becoming surer of what i hope for and more certain of what i do not see, real life is a hard slap in the face for my daydreamy nature and inherent laziness. i let myself feel like i’m stuck in a holding pattern, watching a patchwork landscape revolve below me, feeling as detached from the ground as i am from the sky above and no nearer to the drop zone now i know its coordinates.
i guess the way to resolution is about planning to make contact with the safe and solid ground. the descent is likely to be gut-churning; my ears’ll pop and i might close my eyes and whisper silent prayers for the some of the journey but when all the wheels have touched the ground and i step, blinking, onto the tarmac and the clouds i’ve been suspended in for what has been years are finally above me that’ll all feel like a million miles away.
so having poached a neil young album title for this post i figured i’d better follow through with some of his music. young’s an artist i can still go back to in a way i’ve not managed with other former obsessions - i listened too heavily to the rolling stones, bowie and the who way back when i was building a record collection to feel like seeking out listening to them much any more but neil young’s different.
even harvest has survived those student-stoner cliches (in ways which the doors and hendrix hasn’t for me) and neil young’s successfully and comfortably passed into my adult life thanks to tillman covers and nights in paris, he’s the soundtrack to a quiet night in with a bottle of wine or a wild night out with a quart of bourbon. but this, this is more where i’m at today…
A couple of weeks ago I got all hot and bothered about the utter rubbishness of Live Earth.
Thankfully calmer heads were on hand to provide a counterpoint to all my green-wash negativity. Kevvy-K from hl fav dilated choonz posted his response to my post and it was so good it seemed a shame that only people who obsessively read the hl comments section (that would be me and juliet!!) would get a chance to see it.
So here it is, a little inspiration to take us into the weekend.
Over to you Kev;
“Somewhere along the line we have lost our ability to engage with
any kind of radical action and replaced it with the misplaced sense
that it is enough to spectate.”
Who’s ‘we’ Kimosabi?
Later this Summer (14th to 21st of August), London is going to be
hosting the UK’s biggest ever, grassroots, self-organised response to
the threat of climate change, in the form of the second annual Climate
Camp, from the 14th to the 21st of August… Combining three strands of
workshops and popular education, a practical example of sustainable
living and low-carbon alternatives, and days of kick up the arse of
direct action to disrupt Heathrow as much as possible and draw
attention to the fastest growing source of emissions.. the aviation
industry.
All self-organised by people coming together because they are tired
of the corporate appropriation of the climate change discourse in the
form of bloated, irrelevant spectacles like Live Earth and the pseudo
solutions being feebly peddled by ineffective governments.
I can’t exhort people enough to get themselves down there.. it is
going to be incredibly inspiring, empowering, and effective… pretty
much everything that Live-Earth wasn’t. Don’t waste energy moaning
about the crappiness of Live Earth, come down and do something real and
meaningful about climate change instead.
Finally, in terms of Live-Earth bashing (a favourite hobby of mine)
and as a bit of a self-plug.. there’s a report put out by the
collective I’m part of, Carbon Trade Watch, called “The Carbon Neutral
Myth - Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins” with a chapter on the
hazards of gormless celebrities high-jacking and sound-biting the issue
of climate change. You can download it for free from www.carbontradewatch.org.
leslie feist sports the kind of bangs so fierce i begin to wish away my blonde ringlets and dream of long, straight dark tresses and blunted fringe but not even a weekend with a hairstylist could engineer me those killer cheekbones and from where we stood behind the mixing desk last night, feist’s low slung guitar nonchalance and laid back canadian stage presence channeled patti smith at her flirtiest or joni mitchell at her most confident. much as i hate lazy comparisons about female singer songwriters (and no, i probably won’t get through this without mentioning chan marshall either) the fact remains that its rare to see that delicate rock/folk/indie/electronica head-dress worn by a chick and easy to understand how all the stripey shirted, beardy blogger boys go weak at the knees in her presence.
since my darling companion and i might possibly have spent an evening earlier this year learning the dance sequence from the 1, 2, 3, 4 video we were well prepared for some formation dancing and well timed hand claps which we managed to bust out without spilling our cans of red stripe over the assembled throng of kids with delicately tousled barnets and unkempt facial hair. but feist was polite, enthusiastic and humble when faced with what must be yet another room full of vaguely familiar looking hipsters and hangers-on. opening her set with an stomping electric version of ‘when i was a young girl’, splitting the room into an alphabetical register so we could all harmonise the opening of let it die, chiming and chirupping through tracks from her freshman lp and the divine reminder the set whizzed by. and all the time i was left in wonder at her voice, sultry and light, gravelly, fragile and sweet. all of the dextrous melody of joni mitchell without the abrasive top end warbling, louche and seductive without being seedy or needy.
she’s back in town in september, playing larger venues across the uk and i’d urge you to go see her. in the meantime (while i wait for maurice fulton to remix my man my moon) here’s a little something which ties in with our love and admiration for all things wes anderson (see jak’s post below) to the lady of the day. here’s feist covering the kink’s ‘nothing in this world can stop me worryin’ bout that girl’ a track which appears to deliciously satisfying effect in rushmore.
Visual FX aside, Transformers is by no means a good film, but anything so relentlessly (and in this case, clumsily) attuned to the mainstream is bound to have some interesting things to say about the culture it’s been engineered to appeal to.
In the hands of a more gifted director, the cut and paste characterization, the ham-fisted slapstick, the soul destroying summer blockbuster box ticking might have gone largely unnoticed, perhaps a sam raimi could have even made it enjoyable. Such is the paucity of michael bay’s vision that all these processes are writ large on the screen constantly reminding you of commercial and idealogical forces at work shaping and directing the narrative.
I say ideological because this is a film heavy with pernicious product placement not just by corporate america, but most jarringly by the US military. At one time (maybe even a few years ago) or, once again in the hands of a more talented director, this mindless propaganda would have been barely noticeable. As it is slo-mo helicopters land in desert bases where arab children wait to embrace the returning warriors, keffiyeh‘d men join the americans in the defence of their land from outside attackers, a brave and valiant fight against great odds.
All of which makes you wonder who’s agenda these plot devices are choosing to serve? What price to the film-maker for the access to so much hardware and, more importantly, what price to the audience ?
Scariest of all (or what should be scary to the people who write the checks-to the military script advisers or whatever they call themselves) is that in a movie about 40ft transforming robotic aliens it is the idea of a competent, powerful, respected American Military that is hardest to swallow.
sometimes, when i think about posting and i’ve not got a track i’m desperate for you all to hear i like to indulge myself and imagine i’ve got a column in a broadsheet - that i’m so witty and erudite that people tune in to see what’s been going on in my life this week and where that might take them. so i make a mental list of things which’ve happened in the week; anecdotes or experiences; moods or meals, and see what could spark a post. as you might have gathered from our posts of late its been a hectic, almost life-changing month for the latitudes and for it’s writers. and out of all of this what’s sparked in me the kernel of an idea tonight is getting some new perfume.
feel free, all you opportunist blog pillagers to tune out now if that offends your sensibilities. if you only came here for a french house re-edit or new-folk meandering take your booty and run by all means but i like to think that you’re along for the ride so i’ll keep trucking with this idea.
for years now i’ve worn the same scent. available in high end department stores across the globe, it’s one of those designer spin off ones in a beautiful bottle. it smells of roses and i discovered it it in new york (just off 72nd & broadway) bought my first bottle after a day of obsessively (rapturously) snuffling my wrist to catch a hint of the glamorous sweetness and after a couple of years i started getting comments about how other people couldn’t quite bring themselves to buy it because it was too familiar as my perfume.
and that felt good.
“i have” i thought proudly “a signature scent. and when my friends meet someone else wearing it they’ll think “she smells like juliet”.
its no news to any of us that smell is a peculiarly evocative sense. i have a friend who’s mother lost her sense of smell in a car accident. its more devastating than you might imagine. with it goes most of your taste palette. not to mention the ability to sense elements of danger (no early warning that you’ve left the gas on or knocked over a candle) potency of drinks, or recognise the smell of cut grass, cooked bacon or a baby’s skin.
and deeper than that, she must be denied that particular key that smell plays in memory. the whiff of cloves which instantly transports me to childhood christmas times eating leibekuchen, eucalyptus to a corsican mountainside in 1989, pipe smoke to my grandad’s soft liverpudlian brogue telling me stories in his lounge. that proustian evocation of the oddest of memories sparked by warm tar, school corridors, printing ink, new leather or baked apples. smells which remind you of home, or an idea of home.
and now i have a new scent. an engraved bottle of decadence, of itself an extravagant gift which i get to wear everyday. according to experts (or obsessives but often i’m hard pressed to tell the difference) it smells of roses, raspberries and finally sweet tobacco. to me it smells terribly grown-up, comfortable and exotic, memorable and familiar and glamorous, of flawless well-educated women of a certain era who wore bespoke lipstick and hand sewn underwear but mostly, mostly it will always smell of the day i got it. so whenever i unpack a packing case or box of books from here on in to fifty years from now and i catch a glimpse of it, i’ll be transported back to this summer.
here’s a track which takes me back to last spring, my nose pressed against the window of a eurostar carriage, pulling in to lille station still wearing that old perfume and feeling like this is was a song for a grown woman to hear and that i still had a lot of growing to do.
I believe that people have internal ages, which don’t really change:
I’ve been something of an old man ever since my mother died. But my
father is an eternal teenager. And yet, my father is seventy now, and
every new thing I learn about him makes me that much more painfully
aware of how much I don’t know, and won’t ever learn about him. That
not only do most of us never, truly, know ourselves - but that neither
do we really learn about the ones we’re closest to.
It’s been a bit of rollercoaster week for me-one way or another-and, being of a mature disposition, my mind naturally turns quickly to escapism. Few things are better at putting a little distance between me and my daily funk than a good (or even not so good) movie. This weekend the stars have aligned and I have a potential all-winner triple bill of transformers, grindhouse and sunshine. It’s that classic scifi/retro-trash/fighting robot sweet spot.
Happy days indeed.
Sunshine looks to be my friday night selection-a bit of moody, thought provoking sci-fi (how often can you put that together in a sentence) from one of my favourite writer/director partnerships. The wonderful scifi gospel has a review of it here.(which I’m going to wait till I’ve watched it to read)
Lack of sunshine is the big concern for those heading down to Lovebox this weekend. Teacakes is there and a few other mates are playing on different stages. Personally I’m a little ambivalent (or boring, depending on you’re point of view) and (being at all times selfless) wonder if it’s all going to be just a muddy reminder of how far sly stone is from former glories.
That said if you’re going have a good one and if you’re not play this real loud, put on a pair wellies then get your dad to sing a couple of sly stone tracks , karaoke-style and it’ll be the next best thing.
a long time ago i put my thoughts into song. sometimes explicitly. sometimes subconsciously.
and they weren’t my songs.
now, i don’t think its a problem; looking for a way to say things that maybe shouldn’t be said - when an act or a word isn’t appropriate - losing yourself in music is good.
and before i try and dress this up any more let me make it clear i’m talking about making mixtapes. though itunes playlists now i guess have filled that space, and they sure make it easier to pull something together, to cut, paste and edit. a purist will tell you that you lose the magic of cueing a tape to needle drop but as two wise men agreed last week true innovators dont seek purity for authenticities sake but solutions to get them to where they want to be.
the elegant if detatched eloquence of a mixtape in forging new territory with friends or lovers is something i love to play with, and i’m one of those people who make artwork too so damn straight i take this seriously.
its been a long while since i put a collection together, partially because the hl fulfills more than a chunk of that purpose by being a slowly revolving dj set that says what i need it to when i need it. and partially because i’m free to speak my mind and i don’t need to accidentally drop songs about illicit liaisons into well metered whistful compliations but also as jak said, the passing of time and several other significant milestones give occasion to look back; to see how far we’ve come, no matter how tiring the climb’s been and even how much more of a struggle it will be. and it’s then that songs like this seem so so far away.
He’s got a whole stack of new edits that are either 90% there or so freshly baked they’re still warm.
I’ve been too busy with other things to get much time ‘on the tweak’, but if anything is going to get me spending my oh-so-precious free time hunched over my macbook it’s remembering how good it feels seeing your own version of track destroy a dancefloor.
