I Feel Love

The Ugly Duckling

What people think it is about: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it takes all kinds to make a world, different strokes for different folks, etc.

What it is actually about: Swans are way prettier than ducks, but ducks can’t see this because they’re philistines.

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The Emperor’s New Clothes

What people think it is about: “‘Modern art is all bosh, isn’t it, Charles?’ ‘Great bosh, Cordelia.’ ‘Oh, good.’”

What it is actually about: The emperor’s subjects pretend the emperor’s clothes are nice because he can have them killed. Please note, newpaper columnists, modern artists cannot have anyone killed, and neither (despite their considerable power) can gallery curators. So this metaphor doesn’t belong to you, OK?

A couple of excellent Melbourne blogs brought to my attention by Elanor and Guy (they read the opinion page in The Australian so we don’t have to!): A Wild Young Under-Whimsy, exuberant, witty and very indiscreet (all of which is to be encouraged), and Fop., which caught my eye with timely and justified praise for both Elephant (the film) and Gretel Killeen (the person). The Melbourne corner of the blogosphere (popular culture division) has really been humming lately, keep it up guys.

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Most life-changing compilation of the year so far has been So Young But So Cold: Underground French Music 1977-1983, from the label offshoot of the excellent, if impossible to navigate, Tigersushi.com site (which has only put out a handful of releases but the ones I’ve heard have been killer). 16 wonderful tracks of atmospheric/funny/spooky new wave; it’s a testament in a way to the success of electoclash in reorienting one’s listening expectations that a lot of it sounds like it could have come out last year, although it feels quirkier and more generically undecided than anything that did come out last year. The most immediately astonishing track is Bernard Szajner’s “Welcome (To Deathrow)”, which mashes together a synth pattern that sounds like Kraftwerk on steroids, a distorted gothy spoken-word vocal, and (this is the genius bit) a huge emotional piano/string/guitar riff straight out of an 80s power ballad. But the whole collection is wonderful, you must check it out. (So Young But So Cold would be a great name for a blog, by the way.)

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I’ve always believed that Strunk and White was for losers, and that “omit needless words” was a totalitarian dictum aimed at taking all the poetry out of life, but still it’s sobering to read some of your old writing (my PhD thesis, no less, a bit of which I’m tarting up for publication) and find yourself saying that something “provides a motivational basis for” something else. You don’t have to be a style fascist to feel that a simple “motivates” might possibly have done the job.

Have just had a brilliant idea which, amazingly, no-one else of my acquaintance seems to have had. I will emulate J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman and write a hugely successful children’s fantasy series! I will live for the rest of my life on the movie rights; in fact, I promise to buy every loyal reader of this blog a Porsche as soon as I make my first 100 million! Granted, I have no discernable talent for writing fiction; but come on, they’re only kids, they won’t know it’s crap!

In general I don’t agree with k-punk about the direness of the 90s as a musical decade, but in the supermarket today The Soup Dragons’ cover of the Rolling Stones’ “I’m Free” came on the PA and I admit I warmed somewhat to Mark’s point of view. Why are we still subjected to this appalling single on such a regular basis? The beat and delivery are like a bad Happy Mondays pastiche (ie, very much like the Happy Mondays themselves apart from their handful of good singles), but as if that’s not bad enough there’s that dreadful ragga interlude, which delivers the surprising news that “it’s nice to be free”, and then at the end comes the last refuge of the desperate, a gospel choir. Truly nasty stuff, it deserves to be locked forever in the vault of forgotten early 90s indie-dance alongside the likes of Jesus Jones. (Then again, Jesus Jones themselves aren’t quite as forgotten as they deserve to be.)

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Enough curmudgeonliness, it was nice to read some good news in today’s Sunday Herald Sun:

HAS Ian Thorpe found love? The Olympic champion has tongues wagging in the Australian team over his relationship with American swim star Amanda Beard.

Ahem.

I think one reason I share undercurrent’s dislike of magic realism is the regularity with which magic realist narratives are praised as examples of “the art of storytelling.” This is a turn-off, but why, exactly? Clearly I have no problem with storytelling itself. I like stories, and on the whole I think it’s a good thing that they are told. But something irks me about the kind of book that is described (usually on those little cards that alert you to staff recommendations in the more high-toned bookshops) as “an enchanting tribute to the art of storytelling” or words to that effect.

The only explanation I can come up with for this aversion is that perhaps storytelling for its own sake is not as terrific a thing as always seems to be assumed. Magic realist authors all seem to regard themselves as latter-day Sheherazades, but is there perhaps something a bit unwholesome about this identification? Sheherazade was required to produce stories nightly under pain of death; there could be better role models. (If she was required to grant sexual favours under similar circumstances, would we regard her as a personification of the magic and power of sex, I wonder?) To be a Sheherazade is, almost by definition, to try a bit too hard. As a result, in your desperation to find something to tell a story about, you plumb ever new depths of unmotivated whimsy, producing “enchanting” tales about Hungarian peasant women whose magical recipes for goulash reverse menopause and allow childless 80-year-olds to fall pregnant, or South American children who can communicate with cows, or unrequited lovers who spend decades proving their devotion to their indifferent beloveds by writing a new sonnet every day with a pin dipped in pollen (see how easy this is?). Such authors never seem to consider the possibility that the best tribute they could give to the art of storytelling might be to refrain from engaging in it.

Still, who am I to talk about Sheherazade complexes? It’s not that different from worrying that people will forget me if I stop blogging for a few days!

Now for some catching up. Warning: some of the links in this post will play music.

Shawn contents herself with one question:

You have to teach the world to sing; incidentally, it’s in perfect harmony. What song and why?

The first decision to be made here is whether on the one hand you should just select a song you happen to like (”24 Hours from Tulsa”, say), and teach the world to sing it, eschewing any concern for “relevance”, or on the other hand you should aim for a performance that (like an American Idol winner’s first single) deals lyrically in some way with the remarkable fact of its own existence, the watershed in international solidarity that it constitutes. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we’re going for the second, “meta” route. (Or if you prefer we can just declare “24 Hours from Tulsa” the winner, in which case please stop reading.)

Secondly, any overt religious or political affiliation must be avoided. Thus, this can be ruled out (despite the impeccable literary credentials of the lyricist), as regrettably can this.

Thirdly, we must find a tune that can feasibly be taught to the whole world, keeping in mind that for some this will be their first contact with an unfamiliar tonal/harmonic system (the Western one, inevitably, since it’s me who’s teaching them to sing). So while you might want to go for something like Mahler, perhaps you ought to save it for the second single, once you’ve found your level.

I know of only two candidates that fit all these criteria. The first is Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” as set by Beethoven in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony, which begins (in translation) as follows:

Joy, thou shining spark of God,
Daughter of Elysium,
With fiery rapture, goddess,
We approach thy shrine.
Your magic reunites
That which stern custom has parted;
All humans will become brothers
Under your protective wing.

Religious in a way, yes, but vague enough not to give offense. The other candidate is of course “We Are The World,” lyrics by Michael Jackson, which according to this site goes something like this:

It´s close to midnightand something evil´s
lurking in the dark
Under the moonlightyou see a sight that
almost stops your heart
You try to scream but
terror takes the sound
before yu make it
You start to freeze ashorror looks you right
between the eyes,
You´re paralyzed

Funny, that seems to be a verse I haven’t heard before.

Anyway, the question is moot, because Schiller/Beethoven wins. Yes, it’s a cliché, but some clichés deserve to be realised.

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ess kay offers the more traditional three questions, starting with a very curly one:

1) the ontology of australian-ness w/in australian blogs &c – how natural does it feel writing about aussie kulchur &c w/in the blogosphere’s US/UK axis?

This really deserves its own post. I’ll have to think about this more, but off the bat I’d have to say I don’t think of the blogosphere as necessarily having a US/UK axis. Perhaps it’s because before I started blogging I was posting on discussion forums that were almost completely US/UK based, but I’m so used to my internet discourse being aimed elsewhere that it sometimes comes as a surprise to realise there are bloggers out there in the same country, nay the same city as me. I could even, like, go out for coffee with some of my fellow bloggers! As I have done, although possibly not as much as I should (it’s a bit weird that there are Melbourne bloggers like Tim and Guy and Elanor who I consider to be online “friends” but I’ve never even met, at least not as far as I know. Let’s do it soon, dudes! Have your people call my people.) Anyway, none of this is really getting to the “ontology of australian-ness” is it. Let me get back to you on that one.

2) sexiest microhouse track? (alt : sexist…ist microhouse track?)

Sexiest = “International Snootleg” by International Pony vs Losoul. Combines the three sexiest elements of microhouse, namely glam-shuffle a la “I Walk”, breathy glitchy Luomo-esque vocals, and an overall Herbert-y intimacy, therefore by force of logic is the sexiest microhouse track.

Sexist-est = “Big Booty Bitches” by The Soft Pink Truth. Arguably not microhouse but it’s the best I can do.

3) yr favourite music-maker/author/artist/&c from aotearoa/new zealand (& is their being kiwi/&c central to yr apprehension of their art/whatevah)?

NZ is of course a cornucopia of artistic talent, but my favourite Kiwi is Jonathan Lemalu, a young opera singer with a beautiful bass-baritone voice who’s also a good comic actor (possibly dramatic as well but I’ve only seen him as Leporello), and a jolly nice chap.

[Edit: oops, forgot the second part of the question. No, I couldn't say Jonathan being Kiwi is central to my apprehension of his art. It's amusing, though, the way all male opera singers from NZ seem to have chosen opera instead of a potential alternative career in professional rugby!]

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I’ll keep the box open in case anyone still has questions; for all I know you’ve been spending all this time getting the wording exactly right. Thanks to everyone who’s contributed so far. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

A couple of bits of randomness, will get back to proper blogging soon including answering unanswered questions.

Firstly, here’s a good trivia question: name three movies whose directors also composed the musical score.

Secondly, I was in Dick Smith’s today looking at the vast array of plugs and leads and things (things with confusing labels like “SVHS plug to 3RCA plugs” or “bi-directional coaxial switching box”, and yes I do quite often spend time in shops looking at this kind of thing, like say looking at all the different staplers they have at OfficeWorks, or comparing prices and specs on blank CD-Rs, for some reason I find it comforting even or rather especially when I have no wish to buy anything, but I digress) and it occurred to me that somebody could really make a living by going around to people’s houses with a vast selection of these items, allowing people to work out which ones they actually need to connect their TV to their video to their DVD player to their stereo to their speakers to their digital box etc etc etc, rather than making people go to a shop and try to work out what it is they need and inevitably going home with the wrong thing. They could do computer cables too. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was just someone you could ring up for these things? Especially after hours? Is there anything more annoying than getting a lovely new appliance and realising you have to go back to the shop to buy more stuff in order to actually use it? Am I wrong?