I Feel Love

Chris with a cheeky set in response to this comment:

1) What is the difference, if any, between mathematics and cultural studies?

Cultural studies gets you out of the house more, but I have a feeling maths makes you a better DJ.

2) What is the difference, if any, between Perth and Melbourne

I think Barry Humphries summed it up best when he wrote of

Our gorgeous modern cities so famed throughout the earth,
The Paris end of Collins Street, the Melbourne end of Perth.

3) what is the difference, if any, between a wannabe academic and a real academic?

Wannabe academics work in call centres and blog about Big Brother. Real academics work in universities and blog about Big Brother.

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Come on, you know you want to.

More questions, first of all from Scott:

1) as EITHER a Melbourne Aussie Rules fan OR someone who (i’m presuming) appreciates the Aussie national team at the Olympics, please tell me all about ONE of your greatest sporting moments (as a spectator etc.).

I like that “etc”; my only sporting moments are as a spectator mate! But it’s easy for me to select the greatest: the 2000 2nd qualifying final between Melbourne and Carlton. Great for three reasons: (1) Melbourne came back from a five-goal deficit in the final quarter to win the game; (2) winning the game virtually guaranteed us entry into the Grand Final (where we would get spanked by Essendon but that’s a different story); (3) I was sitting directly behind the goalposts we were kicking towards in the final quarter, so it all unfolded metres from my eyes. It was deliriously exciting. (Greatest “Aussie” moment would be, predictably, Cathy Freeman in the 400m at the Sydney Olympics.)

2) can you think of a novelist, dramatist or poet you think wonderful and hold in much esteem but – as far as you know – much critical opinion, popular views, and the perspective of others says is basically crap all-round?

That’s a difficult one actually; generally in literature (unlike music!) when there’s a widespread consensus that someone is crap all-round, they probably are crap all-round. The literary canon punishes people by quietly dropping them and not talking about them any more, not by putting them on lists of the 20 Worst Novelists Ever. So if I can be permitted to pick a novelist who is these days just considered irrelevant, not really part of the Premier League, but who I think is one of the greatest, I would have to go for André Gide, especially on the basis of Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), which I think is one of the key novels of the twentieth century and one of the best metafictions ever. Unfortunately it’s only available in a very dodgy translation by Dorothy Bussy (Lytton Strachey’s sister!) but it’s worth reading anyway, as is pretty much anything by Gide.

3) i crash land in Melbourne with not much cash in my back pocket. gimme three eateries where i’m guaranteed a great meal for less.

1. Camy Shanghai Dumpling and Noodle House, Tattersall’s Lane, City: I’ve seen this referred to as one of Chinatown’s best-kept secrets so often that I don’t think it’s really a secret any more, but it’s still great, jolly good food, dirt cheap, in primitive surroundings.

2. Globe Cafe/Bar, Chapel Street, Prahran: another old favourite, a bit pricier but the portions are so big they’ll do you for two meals. Amazing cakes in particular.
3. Bratwurst stall, Queen Victoria Market: great atmosphere, Australia’s best food market, a spicy bratwurst with mustard, onion and cheese (or if you insist sauerkraut), how can you go wrong?

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And from whitebait:

1) Not strictly your nineteenth-century literature bag Angus, but knowing what a delightfully widely read individual you are I’ll ask anyway. Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913)–where the titular character stumbles upon a transformative event in the country called ‘The Strange Fete’ (in the English translation)–is the most brilliant proto-rave narrative of the early twentieth century? Discuss.

Sorry to disappoint, but I haven’t read it! However, the most brilliant proto-rave narrative of the early twentieth century would have to be the “Circe” episode in Ulysses. Especially as it’s followed by the very Mike-Skinneresque proto-post-rave-comedown narrative of Leopold Bloom’s and Stephen Dedalus’s comradely amble through the streets of Dublin, culminating in the latter having a piss in the former’s back garden.

2) Where will Essendon finish on the ladder this season?

Third, after being beaten by Melbourne in a Preliminary Final. We’ve been saving it up from 2000 mate! (See above.)

3) Give the least convincing explanation for the strange event that occurred in Brunswick last Sunday night: for at least an hour or more, at about 10pm or so, a large number of car horns and the odd police siren blasted away somewhere in the vicinity of Sydney Road. Any ideas?

It was a flash mob that was initially misinterpreted by police as a gangland murder. It was Brunswick, after all! Oh, sorry, you said the least convincing… (Well, I guess flash mobs are a bit last year aren’t they.)

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More! More! More!

Thanks to rgable and Nick for getting the ball rolling.

Here are rgable’s questions:

1. What work of American classical music do you like best and why?

Thinking about this question made me realise how little American classical music I actually know! I have the usual smattering of Copland, Gershwin and Barber, with maybe some slight daubs of Reich, Glass and Adams, but my classical music tastes tend to be overwhelmingly European, unless you count adopted Americans like Varèse, Weill or Stravinsky. I have an impression, no doubt completely unfair, that American music is a bit too brash and brassy for my liking. I should listen to some of the stuff you recommend at your excellent blog, rgable, which I haven’t come across before.

Anyway, so I’m answering from an impoverished position, but the works of American classical music I listen to most often and with most pleasure are Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. If I have to pick just one I’ll say No 48b, but that’s almost random, they all have their moments. (True that Nancarrow did spend much of his life in Mexico, but he was as American as Stravinsky was Russian.) Why do I like Nancarrow? Well, first of all there’s the cultural hero aspect—he took something quintessentially middlebrow, a fixture of middle-class homes, and used it to create some of the most uncompromisingly experimental music of his time, music that in its asynchronous method, its blurring of the distinction between composition and performance, anticipates contemporary electronic music as much as Stockhausen or Xenakis do.

With all that going for him, I’m predisposed to like Nancarrow so much that it would be a great disappointment if I ended up not really finding the music appealing. But I do! With its spidery melodic lines and intersecting, impossible-to-parse rhythms, it’s immensely seductive to someone like me who finds confusion one of the most libidinising of reactions.

2. Should John Cale’s experimental music of the sixties be considered “classical”?

Well, does it matter? There’s all sorts of music these days that seems to exist quite happily in a liminal zone between two or more of the categories of classical, pop, rock, dance, folk, jazz, world music, etc; it’s true that taxonomies perform some important functions (they tell record stores where to shelve stuff, for starters), but does anyone still believe they perform the function of telling you whether the music is any good or not? Well, some people do of course; in a world where you get the likes of String Quartet “tributes” to The Cure (!?!), clearly an association with “classical” music is thought by some to confer some kind of prestige. It’s a pretty debased kind of prestige though, more an effect of marketing that of old-fashioned cultural gatekeeping. There’s an issue too, as many people have pointed out, with the very unsastisfactory use of the stuffy-sounding “classical” as a name for the entire traditional of Western notated art music.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I’m not much bothered either way. Does John Cale want his experimental music of the sixties to be considered “classical”? If so, then by all means; if not, the question is moot. (I don’t actually know the music you’re referring to and suspect I wouldn’t much like it, but that’s neither here nor there…)

3. If Oliver Stone hadn’t selected Barber’s Adagio for the movie Platoon, would it still be popular today?

Yes, because someone else would have used it in some other film! (They already have, of course.) It’s too soundtrack-friendly a piece of music to lie fallow forever. Which isn’t a bad thing, although I could quite happily never hear it again.

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And from Nick:

1) What are the four principal causes of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) in order of relevance to an average Perth maths teacher? (Bonus question: why do I feel such an irrepressible need to be a smart-arse?)

I’m going to ignore the question proper and head straight for the supplementary, Nick: you feel an irrepressible need to be a smart-arse because you grew up as a skinny kid with a mischievous face who, if I’m not mistaken, went to a private boys’ school (am I wrong? [Update: Nick writes to point out that I am in fact wrong. My apologies for this vile calumny, fellow state school self-up-by-own-bootstraps-puller.]). You don’t have to be a maths teacher to do the adding up on that one.

2) How did your blog make it from utter obscurity to semi-notableness?

A couple of more-than-semi-notable blogs, namely Worlds of Possibility (or The Astronaut’s Notepad as it then was) and k-punk, linked to stuff I had written; I then found myself being linked by a succession of well-known music blogs (despite my frequent protestations that in fact I know almost nothing about pop music and only own about 2 CDs), and voilà semi-notableness. No doubt the same thing will happen to you now that I’ve linked to your fabulous new blog, Nick, although two pieces of unsolicited advice: (1) get an RSS feed! (2) stay away from the political blogs, it will end in tears mate!

3) Where will blogging be in 10 years?

A very good question actually, the glib answer is “the same place e-mail is today”, ie an accepted but unremarkable part of everyday life. I’m not so sure though; in retrospect it seems obvious that the mass deployment of e-mail filled an existing need for cheap, instantaneous worldwide communication, but is the same true of blogs? Have all these people really had an unfulfilled wish all these years to publish their random thoughts for the world to read? Or is the orgy of self-expression merely a temporary effect of the novelty of the technology? I suspect the latter; there will actually be fewer bloggers in 10 years than today, and blogs will have diversified to the point where it’s no longer possible to see blogging as any kind of singular, synthesisable phenomenon (which it hardly is now, in fact). But you won’t be able to put the genie back in the bottle altogether: there will still be people, the likes of us, who feel the need, for barely articulated reasons, to write crap down and put it on the web (or whatever has replaced it).

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Keep ‘em coming!

OK, it’s a “meme”, but all the best people are doing it, and I’m feeling a bit starved for things to write about lately so…

Anyone who wants to, please use the comments in this post to ask me three questions of your devising on any subject or subjects. I will post my answers over the next few days, with an absolute honesty mediated only by the limits of taste, legality and amour-propre. Just kidding about the last one. Sort of.

So ask away! No pressure. None at all. Anyone? (Drums desk impatiently.)

Admittedly I haven’t posted anything much about Big Brother 4, not because I want to be seen as deserting reality TV in its time of need, rat-from-a-sinking-ship style, but because my working hours have prevented me seeing much of it, and what I have seen hasn’t really grabbed me so far. I’m sure it will by the end, and in fact the current crop of housemates is already seeming a bit less boring than I first suspected. The major event so far has been the big fight where Paul (who along with Igor has been filling the role of ambassador for Victoria on this year’s show; how proud I am) accused Merlin of not being a Proper Aussie because he wasn’t an Australian citizen. Yet again an actual serious issue yets aired on BB, although presumably this won’t stop TV critics from sniffily describing it as trivial, superficial etc.

Paul of course is certain to be evicted next Sunday—Big Brother voters have a tendency to punish working-class people for expressing intolerant attitudes, cf. Kim’s racist joke last year—but without dwelling on the fact that he did reveal himself to be something of an arsehole (although the really revelatory comment was Wesley murmuring to Merlin that he was “an educated person arguing with an uneducated person”; people like you are the reason people vote for Pauline Hanson, Wesley!), I did just want to engage in a minor bit of fish-in-a-barrel shooting. The thing that’s always struck me as most obviously, perversely silly about comments like Paul’s is their complete lack of reciprocity. If people who migrate to Australia ought to make a demonstration of loyalty by becoming Australian citizens and severing all ties to their place of birth, what about Australians who move overseas? Isn’t it appalling how Kylie Minogue and Heath Ledger keep talking about how they still think of themselves as Australian, coming over here whenever they get a chance, and promoting Australia at every opportunity! What disloyalty to the countries that have given them economic opportunities they could never have dreamt of if they’d stayed where they were born! If Australia is so great, why don’t they move back here? And by the same token, when Australians do alter their citizenship/residence status, this is always assumed to be a purely pragmatic move, nothing to do with loyalty or patriotism at all; who wouldn’t want an EU passport with the attendant rights to work and travel all over the place? It doesn’t mean you stop being an Aussie.

Perhaps that’s simply too obvious a rebuttal (not, admittedly, a consideration that tends to deter bloggers), but no-one in the BB house seemed to think of it, did they? Instead, the only actual argument mustered, or so one hears, was Krystal’s insistence that “Of course he’s Australian, he wouldn’t be on this show otherwise!”, the Big Brother producers being of course the ultimate arbiters of nationality.

Thoughts occurring when at the football yesterday with friend and loyal IFL reader Lorien: there are of course many frustrating things about being a Melbourne supporter at times, but it must be even worse to be a Melbourne supporter who believes that players should never under any circumstances handpass after taking a mark. For better or worse, moving the ball quickly by handball to a running teammate has been part of Melbourne’s game plan for at least as long as Neale Daniher has been coach. When it works, as it mostly is at the moment, the results are scintillating: fast, skilful, entertaining football. And yet still one hears cries of “just kick the bloody thing!” several hundred times a game from about 75% of the supporters. Perhaps Neale could run seminars?

Also, courtesy of the Footy Record: did you know that the St Kilda club song has only been “When the Saints Go Marching In” since the mid-60s? Before that, it was “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside”!

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Americans, count yourselves lucky, you kept Fantasia in, so this week you are spared my wrath.

Damn, I was going to post the exact same thing as Tom does here but then I forgot. Tom’s absolutely on the money of course; anyone convinced to convert to Christianity by the Narnia books would be sorely disappointed by the absence in even the most liberal congregations of talking animals, magical feasts (no, that Eucharist isn’t kidding anyone) and Dionysian orgies. And of course Aslan is just much better than Jesus in every respect.

Turns out I can’t leave comments at this or any other TypePad blog due to anti-spam measures that TypePad have introduced. It seems to be a problem with my ISP’s proxy server. It’s rather disconcerting not to be able to leave comments at one’s own blog, but of course I’m in favour of anti-spam measures, and TypePad have (as usual) been very helpful about responding to the problem; apparently they’re working on a fix for genuine commenters who’ve been affected by the new filters. In the meantime, they recommended using Unipeak to access the site when I want to post comments, so you might want to try this too if you’ve been similarly affected.

It’s a bit depressing that measures like this are even necessary. What possible strike rate can comment spam have as a marketing technique, I wonder? I know e-mail spam works because it costs virtually nothing to send so even one buyer out of tens of thousands makes it cost-effective, but does anyone ever click unsuspectingly on a marketing link in a blog comment and then go ahead and buy the product? Presumably they do, otherwise the cultprits wouldn’t bother devising ever more ingenious methods of spamming. It does seem however that commenting will increasingly go the way of the new (and long-awaited) inbuilt Blogger comments system, which requires you to have a Blogger profile to leave a comment. There are rumblings that TypePad comments will go a similar way. I hope not; I love getting comments and don’t want to make people have to go through a registration process in order to leave them, because my guess is that at least 50% of people wouldn’t bother.

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In other news: nooooooooooo!!!!!

K-punk is one year old! I can hardly think of adequate words to offer as a tribute to Mark’s blog; if I was in a pompous mood I could say “si monumentum requiris, circumspice”, since there’s no doubt that I Feel Love wouldn’t be half the blog it is without k-punk as a continual source of ideas, inspiration and all-round enviability. Not to mention readers! Along with Jon, Mark was one of the first people to link to me on a regular basis, so whatever “readership” I have I owe in large part to him…God, listen to me making this ALL ABOUT ME!!! But really, there’s nothing I can say about k-punk that most of you don’t already know. I will say, however, that’s Mark’s comments about the reasons why he does it struck a big chord.

Speaking of k-punk and, er, me (oh dear, here I go again), Mark has another intriguing reading of The Truman Show, this time as an allegory of the death of God! Admittedly Mark’s reading would still require the Ed Harris character to be present, although presumably in a much reduced role (as befits a contemporary deity).

Regular readers of undercurrent (and if you’re not a regular reader of undercurrent, then what on earth is wrong with you?) will be aware that I’ve lately fallen victim—if “victim” is the word—to a bizarre new mutation of comment spam. Someone has been taking passages seemingly at random from this blog, and posting them as comments at other blogs, interspersed with links advertising credit cards, Caribbean cruises and satellite TV (mercifully, to this point I seem to have been spared Viagra and penis enlargement).

Being plagiarised in this particular way is naturally a rather unsettling experience, although I’m still unsure whether I feel sorrier for myself or for the unsuspecting bloggers who’ve been subjected to my unbidden and not particularly brilliant thoughts on Iain Sinclair and American Idol. (Including my rather peremptory denuciation of LaToya; I’ve been thinking I went a bit too far with that, especially since the poor thing has just been eliminated, leaving the very very mediocre Jasmine and Diana behind.) The thing is, short of withdrawing my blog from the public gaze altogether, there’s not a single thing I can do about it, is there? Apart, I suppose, from trying to work out what it is makes my prose so attractive as a subliminal marketing tool and eliminating it. Any ideas?

Then again, caribbean cruise maybe I could just instant credit card try jamming satellite TV the signal a bit.