I Feel Love

It had to happen: via Symposiasts comes news of a watershed in vanity publishing. “Turn your blog into reality” proclaims the title bar, making rather dubious claims for the ontological primacy of the printed word, but let’s get to the point: do I have any orders for I Feel Love, the book?

All teasing aside, the advances in print technology that allow this sort of thing to happen are actually pretty impressive. The randomly generated inspirational quotations on each page of the website contain some odd choices, though: Patrick Stewart’s “Wouldn’t it be great if 4,000 people showed up at a Shakespeare convention?” makes me want to throw up (I wonder, incidentally, if the printers of the First Folio assured the author that it would “turn his plays into reality”? Well, probably not because it was published after he died, but you see my point), but its relevance to the matter at hand at least seems clear enough: by publishing your blog you are elevating yourself into the company of the Bard! (They seem to be the kind of people who would call him “the Bard”.) The choice of Helen Keller’s “Literature is my Utopia” is in rather bad taste, though, since there doesn’t seem to be an option to publish your blog in braille. The curmudgeonly tenor of many of the quotes is weirder still; the claim that most people who think they can write actually can’t is an odd message for an enterprise like this one to be conveying. If I accepted Pascal’s advice that “Anything that is written to please the author is worthless” I’d have to give up blogging tomorrow! (Admittedly, I know of at least one blogger, coincidentally the dedicatee of the latest priceless effort from Simon, who would agree with old Blaise.)

Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut. Let me state for the record that I hereby renounce any desire, actual or implied, to quash other bloggers’ ambitions to write about Bonnie Prince Billy. Let close readings of Mr Oldham’s songs proliferate! I’ll go further: if the New York or London bloggerati wanted to get together to go to his gigs and then post lengthy disquisitions about how he “tore the place up”, who would I be to stop them? As far as I’m concerned, Tom Ewing could change the name of New York London Paris Munich to “Ain’t You Wealthy, Ain’t You Wise” and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid; indeed, he would have my approval and my blessing.

Overheard at South Yarra train station this evening, a teenage boy to his friends: “No, no, no, we’re not doing it! I don’t even like the original! Have you heard it? Sheena Easton’s a terrible singer!”

One surmises that the young lad was trying to talk his friends out of a plan to give an impromptu performance of “Morning Train” on the 6.24 to Flinders Street, in emulation of the current TV commercial for Connex trains. Sadly, Mr Wet Blanket Music Critic seems to have been successful, but this group of kids can’t have been the only ones to have had the idea, and it’s to be hoped that some have actually gone through with it. Melburnians? Reports?

Four in a row!

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Really, more than enough words have already been wasted on that silly Alexis Petridis review that I’m not even going to bother linking to. (If only we could manage to just ignore it for once when someone writes something fatuous about us or one of our causes…) One thing that I think has been lost in all the indignation, though, is the absurdity of the claim that we bloggers spend our time writing exegeses of Bonnie Prince Billy records! If that really was the case, we’d deserve all the derision heaped on us and more.

[Update: oops, didn't realise it was an actual example! But please note that I only meant we'd deserve derision if we were all writing about Bonnie Prince Billy! Naturally there's nothing wrong with one person writing about him, let's be clear about that. As if anyone cares what I say anyway. Ahem. Anyway, respect to Silverdollarcircle, it's a great blog obviously.]

Probably just as well for Mark’s blood pressure that American Idol isn’t being shown in the UK. What is it with this absolute obsession with correct pitch? I’m fairly sensitive to things being sung out of tune myself, but honestly, some of the stuff that Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul pounce on and pronounce as “a bit pitchy” sounds absolutely fine to me. Some of the greatest pop performances are a little bit out of tune; listen to anything by Jocelyn Brown for instance, and it’s not as if all that doesn’t corrected in the studio nowadays anyway! I’m beginning to think that Mark’s and others’ fears of robotic overperfection are completely justified. LaToya London is surely the ultimate example of this; I quite liked her early on, and undoubtedly she is technically very impressive, but after that dreadful performance of “Somewhere” last week, calibrated for maximum pathos-effekt while carefully avoiding any actual feeling whatsoever (NB Paulini sang it much better on Australian Idol!), I’ve decided she’s the enemy and must be stopped. Fantasia is obviously the person one wants to win (she has charisma to match the technique, and how superb would it be to have a pop star called Fantasia!), although I do have to give props to George Huff for courting ridicule by performing “Against All Odds” (and also saying his favourite film was The Wiz and he identified with Dorothy…bless!).

I was suprised but delighted to hear on The Movie Show tonight that Todd Haynes’s Safe (from 1995!) is finally getting a proper release in Australia. I saw it at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1995 and you can take it from me that it is the best film of the 1990s by a considerable margin. Here begins my campaign to get everyone I know to see it.

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Talking of good films, I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind today and it really is as good as everyone says. It doesn’t overplay its conceptual hand (arguably unlike the other Kaufman films although I love them anyway), and it’s just gorgeously romantic, the great thing is that neither of the main characters are people you would particularly want to have a relationship with yourself, but you still desparately want them to end up together. It’s quite amusing, though, how the film posits the idea of this company that erases people’s memories of specific other people, and then proceeds to demonstrate not once but several times why such a procedure would never work in practice, even if it was scientifically possible.

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A big hello to Amy, a reader who was nice enough to introduce herself after I gave a guest lecture today; sorry I was a bit all over the place, I always am after a lecture (some would say during as well), but it was lovely to meet you despite the two-worlds-collide aspect of things!

People were rightly critical of the second series of 24, but the third series, which I finally gave up on tonight, having given it more chances than it really had any right to expect, makes you long for the days when at least:

• President Palmer actually had some connection to the principal story

• We were not required to believe that Kim was a computer expert
• Episodes would end with cliffhangers; this year the writers seem to have oddly decided that it’s much kinder to the audience if you resolve any tension before the final credits every week
• I may be romanticising here, but didn’t the techno-speak at CTU make at least some kind of vestigial parellel universe semi-sense in the past?
• Jack’s morally dubious choices were actual morally dubious choices instead of part of some vast daft CTU double-bluff

Seeing an animated GIF at Woebot put me in mind of this…I can’t even remember where I got it from, it’s been sitting on my hard disk for ages, but it’s pretty fabulous isn’t it? (Of course, Matt probably did his own.)

[Update] It appears I probably got this from the redoubtable Nick Southall’s Auspicious Fish. Sorry about the belated attribution Nick!

Is “Through the Wire” the only song in pop history to extol the life-saving properties of seat belts? (”If you could feel how my face felt you would know how Mase felt/Thank God I ain’t too cool for the safe belt!”)

Speaking of trams, as I was a week or two ago, I’m sad to see that Melbourne’s own blogging tram attendant, Agent FareEvader, was a victim of the recent round of reduncancies in the wake of public transport restructuring. Boo! Not only has Melbourne clearly lost its best looking tram attendant, the tramways seem to have lost a rather special employee.

[Update: Compulsory reading!]

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Big love to Scott who has been so patient with all us Philistines using the visual arts as a…well, I’m not going to say “straw man”, that most direly overused term in blogging, but it must be rather irritating for an actual fan to see so many comments along the lines of “that Rothko stuff is a piece of piss, and anyway people are only faking it, and they’re all pretentious chin-stroking Volvo drivers anyway”. And I love Pynchon too of course.