I Feel Love

I’m going to have to come out as a fan (perhaps the blogosphere’s only one) of Anthony’s haircut, and indeed Anthony in general. The pretty boy backlash ends here!

Meanwhile, yes I am disappointed Ngaiire didn’t get through, but the top twelve is looking pretty good. I probably would have dropped Emilia myself; yes she’s lovely but I do think Marty is pretty good, nice voice (a bit similar to the Norwegian hobbit bloke), and in spite of myself and everything I believe in, I really like that Keane song he sang (except for the lyrics).

I’ve been listening to “The Day Before You Came”, which must have the most brilliant lyrics of any ABBA song. ABBA’s lyrics have been underrated in general, perhaps ever since Clive James’s sneering dismissal of “Waterloo” when it won Eurovision, the theory being that because the authors were (1) Swedes and (2) pop musicians, the reference to Napoleon’s defeat must be fatuous gibberish rather than what it actually was, a clever and funny tongue-in-cheek metaphor. Anyway, “The Day Before You Came” achingly reimagines the routine dullness of a life, the singer not having dreamt that everything was about to change with the arrival of a lover (the whole thing feels so sad though that you get the feeling it’s actually being sung after the lover has subsequently departed).

“Reimagines” because of course the singer has no specific memories of the day, she’s reconstructing it inductively, by analogy with every other day, so every event in the song is introduced with the words “I must have”. You’ve no idea how exciting this is to a narrative theory geek! Gérard Genette famously divides the treatment of “frequency” in narrative into two categories, the “singulative” (accounts of events that only occur once) and the “iterative” (accounts of events that occur more than once, or habitually). But the narrative mode of “The Day Before You Came” doesn’t seem to fit clearly into either category; it’s a singulative account (it refers to one specific day) that draws its force from being identical to any number of similar potential accounts in every respect except its retrospectively apprehended position as the last in the series. But not only that, it’s also a singulative account that relies on an entirely iterative pretext for the narrator’s competency to tell the story (she only knows all this happened on this particular day because it was, it must have been, a day like any other day). Is there any other work ever written that has precisely the same narrative modality? I can’t think of any!

One of the fun things about the song is the way its cultural references carbon-date it to the early 80s (it was released in 1982, one of ABBA’s last singles):

I’m sure I had my dinner
watching something on TV
there’s not, I think, a single
episode of Dallas that I didn’t see
I must have gone to bed
around a quarter after ten
I need a lot of sleep and so
I like to be in bed by then
I must have read a while
the latest one by Marilyn French
or something in that style

Which was still quite a rare thing in the pop lyrics of the early 80s, wasn’t it? (The other example that springs to mind is Prince’s “You don’t have to watch Dynasty to have an attitude”.) By contrast, what a rich archeological site today’s pop landscape will be for the cultural detritus of the early ’00s! Future pressings of A Grand Don’t Come For Free will have to come with footnotes! (Mind you, a friend of mine is already in the process of annotating the album for the benefit of Americans…) And imagine the scholarship that will go into retrospectively documenting the internal politics and rivalries of hip-hop as reflected in rap lyrics, it will be like glossing The Dunciad.

Lee Caulfield’s MP3 blog The Number One Songs In Heaven continues to delight, especially with the “Friday Boogie” selections. If you don’t know “Spacer” by Sheila and B. Devotion then I DEMAND that you download it right now. It’s probably my second-favourite disco tune ever (after “I Feel Love”), yes the lyrics and singing are very um “Euro” but it’s utterly beautiful, that often-sampled piano riff giving a wistful edge to the whole thing that almost transforms the lyrics into a John Ford-like meditation on the Sublime Solitude of the Lone Hero (yeah well perhaps not quite). Amazing how often one’s favourite songs turn out to be Chic productions; in my new mood of actually buying stuff (remind me to talk about my new virtuous regime sometime, it will amuse and perhaps even gratify the anti-downloaders), wouldn’t it be great to have a box set or at least a double-CD compilation that covered not only Chic themselves but also their productions? No doubt there would be licensing issues but such mere logistics need not concern us here.

“Supernature” by Cerrone from last week is a killer track too of course.

I thought it was about time I had a proper blogroll again. My revolving list of quotes wasn’t being updated very often, and a change is, as you know, every bit as good as a holiday, so there it is on the right hand side. A rather long and unwieldy document perhaps, but I’d hate to have to submit it to the totalitarian strictures of “categorisation”. (Or: I can’t be bothered.) It’s in reverse alphabetical order: a bit of affirmative action for the W’s out there. (I don’t seem to know any X’s, Y’s or Z’s.) If you think you should be on the list and you’re not, then let me know, it’s probably an oversight. Or a deliberate snub, but don’t let that possibility put you off!

what i’d be interested to know is is there a slash interest for Dawson’s Creek? Er, Scott?

And yes, slash is strictly boy-on-boy or girl-on-girl but it’s just one subgenre of the vast field of fanfiction; it’s kind of amusing to come across this question in a blog cos I’m used to hanging around online with people who know all about this stuff (including some who write it…)!

By the way Scott, you must set yourself up with comments old chap.

(I’m going to be very kind and not even mention Harry Potter slash…)

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Courtesy of Drew…this is actually pretty easy but I still managed to get one wrong. (I’ve never seen Planet of the Apes, OK?)

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Down here one does get a perhaps rather overglamourised picture of the London bloggers, one pictures them constantly meeting up to go out to grime nights or to go hunting for obscure ‘ardkore 12″s and that kind of thing. But I gather the last big get-together was, er, a Deleuze and Guattari reading group??? Gosh, what I wouldn’t give to have been there!

(Kidding obviously, I would of course love to meet you all but would probably give the thousand plateaus a miss.)

Speaking of, apparently cnwb has a regular DJing gig? And he got engaged! Congratulations Chris! Apparently you have to read his LiveJournal to be in the loop these days…

Anyway, this DJing gig, possible site of mini Melbourne bloggers meet up, yes?

I adore The Gallagher Factor’s list of song suggestions for Daniel Belle. Here are some more numbers that would allow everyone’s favourite AI finalist to showcase his unique “flow”:

• Ian Dury and the Blockheads – Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick

• The KLF – What Time Is Love?
• Betty Boo – Doin’ the Do (this could be his gender-crossing number in the tradition of Cosima’s “When the War Is Over” and Guy’s “Crazy in Love”)
• Massive Attack – Daydreaming (duet with Chanel Cole)
• Dizzee Rascal – Fix Up Look Sharp

And then if he ever actually gets the chance to sing something classical it must of course be Berg’s Wozzeck.

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Without trying to do Language Log’s job for them, has anyone else noticed how ubiquitous the use of “said” in the sense of “the aforementioned” has been getting lately? As in: “I haven’t heard the new Dizzee Rascal yet, although I’m downloading said album as we speak.” You see it everywhere, especially in the blogosphere, and it seems to be quite a recent thing. The effect people seem to be aiming for in using this piece of arch legalese is a kind of tongue in cheek formality, but the problem is that it’s become so familiar that it always seems (to me at least) to miss the rhetorical mark. (Like when people say things like “I’m a tad upset” because they think that’s what smart people talk like.) I suggest substituting the far superior usage “same”, as in “I haven’t heard the new Dizzee Rascal yet, although I’m downloading same as we speak”. Although naturally if everyone took up this suggestion it wouldn’t work; just as well nobody pays any attention to anything I say.

Best sport = Synchronised Diving: the Daft Punk of sports. [Update: or…]

Dullest sport = Rowing: the Radiohead of sports.

Bugger. Opera just crashed and I lost a long post I was about to submit. That’s it, it’s back to cutting and pasting from Word. Anyway, the post was about two things: (1) the director’s cut of Donnie Darko,and (2) Australian Idol contestant Chanel Cole. I could type the whole thing again, but because I can’t be arsed I’m going to test how predictable I’ve become (my guess is very) by asking readers to speculate about what my point of view might have been on both the above topics. Any takers?

Interesting post on Crooked Timber about the way people choose movies when using online DVD rental services like Netflix (or Webflicks in Australia) vs physical video rental stores. I’ve been using Webflicks myself for about a year and a half now and I definitely agree that there’s a much stronger tendency to choose “virtuous” movies when you’re making a long-term rather than a short-term decision. But for me that’s been a good thing! Because, not to be all hoity-toity about it, I usually like virtuous movies when I actually get around to watching them; the “eugh, subtitles, yuck” reaction really is just a temporary effect of moral lassitude brought on by the atmosphere of video stores, which always seem to be lit so as to induce low-level panic. Thanks to Webflicks my acquaintance with some directors (eg Kubrick), genres (eg westerns) and eras of moviemaking (eg silent) has been vastly improved–not difficult, since in all these cases it was previously zero.

A friend of mine (who may wish to make himself known) had a lot of problems with Webflicks, but I’ve found them quite good overall. Partly I suspect this is because I live in Melbourne where they’re based, so the turnaround times are quite good (hint: if you tick the box on the website that says you’ve sent something back, they’ll generally take your word for it and send out your next DVD straight away). There are Sydney-based alternatives available, I believe, not sure about other cities. Also, of course the service doesn’t work well for new releases or very popular films; I expect to get Finding Nemo in about 2017.

But having issued all these disclaimers, if anyone has been meaning to sign up for Webflicks, you could always use this link which theoretically gets me a kickback! (Oh dear, he’ll be flogging his own merchandise next…)

Was perusing a David Stubbs article about bad performances by pop singers in movies, and I noticed he didn’t mention any rappers. Perhaps this is because there aren’t any bad performances by rappers in movies? I’m sure there must be but I can’t think of any offhand. Eminem, Ices Cube and T, Snoop Dogg, Will Smith, even Marky Mark; all have turned in performances ranging from good to extraordinary. Not so surprising I guess given the innate theatricality of hip-hop, but still, that does seem like a very good strike rate.