I Feel Love

Somehow I knew before I even looked that I’d find one of those “defend the indefensible” threads on ILM about The Manhattan Transfer. Like lots of people, it seems, I grew up with Manhattan Transfer records in the house courtesy of my dad, who discovered them I think through their regular guest spots on one of our viewing staples, The Two Ronnies (Barbara Dickson, another favourite, was introduced the same way). But it wasn’t just my father, the whole family really liked them, we used to listen to the records constantly.

It now seems pretty clear that a lot of their stuff was pretty bad, largely due to their lack of any humility or discrimination in choosing which genres to “revive”–their faux-gospel mode, for instance, as heard in “Operator”, was teeth-grindingly awful, smug and patronising-sounding in the way white people singing gospel almost always is, and the less said about the faux-calypso of “Wanted (Dead or Alive)” the better. They were best heard in the neo-doo-wop of “Boy From New York City”, or in their close-harmony versions of jazz numbers, which was after all their core concern. My favourite song of theirs is, for its sheer audacity, their version of Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” from the Mecca for Moderns album (great album title that!), a mixture of (very silly) lyrics–which to my mortification I find I can still remember off by heart!–and scatting. A vocal performance of this kind of fast, abstract bebop is a pretty bold undertaking–imagine for comparison’s sake someone writing lyrics to, say, Drexciya. But, yeah, here are some sample lyrics:

I’m here to just confirm what I’ve been really always sayin’ about modern jazz
It’s the saviour of the nation
And I’ll believe it if you do too, the rhythm and blues
Like Bird! When he thought of this melody the message he played on his horn
Was a steady confirmation that he’d discovered
The sound that makes the music be free!

Um, quite. And it goes on in a similar vein. (Sample Drexciya lyrics accepted via the comments box.)

(These days you kind of expect an MP3 after a post like this don’t you. Sorry everyone, but I may well be doing you a favour.)

Excellent post at k-punk where Mark joins Zizek in lambasting the infatuation of Westerners with Eastern spirituality, which has become such a default position that it’s now the first port of call for anything you want to normalise–like, here, hilariously, vampirism, which in practice turns out to be the most boringly hygienic and consensual practice imaginable, one step up from flossing your teeth. (Although vampires still have “closely guarded rituals” apparently, probably taken from the Big Booke of Very Secret Magickal Incantations.)

In a similar vein to Mark’s swipes at Zen crap, there’s an assertion you still hear sometimes which seems to me the very pinnacle of dimwitted bourgeois individualism: “I’m very spiritual, I’m just not into organised religion.” Surely if you have to have religion, it’s better organised than disorganised? Cf: “I’m very ideological, I’m just not into organised politics.” “I’m very tuneful, I’m just not into organised music.” “I’m very hungry, I’m just not into organised food.” (etc.)

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You really must follow the links here and read Tom’s descriptions. “Own a slice of indie history” indeed (this of The Soup Dragons)…nice to see Tom using his Evil Marketing Skills in a good cause. (By the way I have a couple of things I would donate if I was closer; yes, I had an indie phase too!)

“…at times this disc plays like the dancefloor manifestation of the film, Hellraiser, feverishly bumping, throbbing and gliding along the velvety edge of a nightmare. Perfect for home listening as well as the dancefloor.” Two rather special sentences from a discogs review of James T. Cotton’s enticing-sounding new album The Music Box. (Thanks to Andy K’s brilliant cheat sheet, you too can sound like you have your finger on the pulse. Am even planning to check out the new Moodymann if Andy says so, although I confess I found his Silence in the Secret Garden album from last year a complete yawn…)

Rolf? Really? (Actually, I see it all too well…)

(Check out k-punk’s though; heads will roll, forsooth!)

(Welcome back to the light Matt!)

At Dragonfly Discs in Elizabeth Street, Sly and the Family Stone – Greatest Hits (1970) for $5! They have lots. You need this.

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Is there anyone in the world still without a gmail invitation? If so give me a shout, I have some. I’ve been forwarding my mail to gmail for a week or so now and I love it. (If you want to write directly and smell the geek cachet it’s angusg at gmail dot com.) Why have I been organising my mail into stupid folders for years? As Google have realised, every time you need to find an old e-mail you search for it anyway. And the threaded conversations feature is good too. Not having broadband I’m not yet partaking of the send-your-friends-entire-albums possibilities, but if anyone actually feels inspired to send me music, well, go for it, share the love!

Why do I persist in going to Brunetti’s? It must be the most stressful place in Melbourne to have a cup of coffee, especially since it was renovated a year or two ago. First you have to negotiate fourteen or so different counters and make sure you order from the correct one (the coffee counter, not the sandwich counter or the gelati counter or the cakes counter or the biscuits counter…), then you have to carry everything yourself (it’s like one of those big barnlike cafés they have in Adelaide), then you have to find a seat, which will not be very comfortable and the chances are you’ll end up next to nine screaming bambini, or (as today) you’ll end up out on the (uneven) footpath. Yes, I had to sit outside, and if you were in Melbourne today you’ll already be shivering sympathetically–is it normally quite this cold in September?

Anyway, I suppose I keep going there because the coffee is, admittedly, good, and the cakes are great of course (although I agree with Lord Marchmain that Italian cakes and desserts are rather overrated), and because there really aren’t a lot of good eating options on Lygon Street, as everyone in Melbourne knows except the tourists. (And Timothy Spall, apparently, although I didn’t spot him today.) Has any street seen such paltry gastronomic dividends from gentrification? Some positive signs, though; there’s a new place called Carlton Espresso which, although the decor resembles the canteen in a forced labour camp, has excellent (if expensive) food; pizza by the slice with toppings like taleggio, potato and leek or speck, pear and gorgonzola, let’s have more of this kind of thing please.

Anyway, I was in Carlton to see Zatoichi, which was terrific, although the plot featuring a blind person with mad fighting skills was stolen from an episode of Angel. Kidding! Just having a Jim Schembri moment… (Check his review in The Age where he says the spurts of blood were a homage to Sam Peckinpah; geez, even I know they’re a stock convention in samurai films…)

Brilliant, coruscating post on the Penguin “Great Ideas” series, all you need to know about which is contained in its press blurb: “Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.” That’s civilisation safely shaken (past tense) then; thanks for making us who we are, great thinkers, now pass the cigars!

Watched Fellini’s Roma, and I’m gradually realising that I don’t actually like Fellini all that much, apart from a handful of films (Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita, well make that two films). That said, he does endings so well (with the odd exception of 8 1/2) that I always end up feeling warm towards him in the immediate aftermath. This one was, as they say, a curate’s egg: for example, the scene where a crew building an underground train system (was that a real thing, by the way? and did it ever get finished?) are excavating and come across a perfectly preserved house from ancient Rome, complete wish frescoes, statues, mosaics etc, is astonishing, but then I couldn’t quite work out why there were two adjacent extended scenes set in brothels featuring grotesquely old and ugly prostitutes. Then there’s an odd but endearing appearance by Gore Vidal, who, just as in La Dolce Vita, is introduced by excited Romans exclaiming “look, it’s the American writer Gore Vidal!” And a lovely score by Nino Rota (who controversially might be my favourite Italian film composer ever), although it was a bit annoying that the only subtitles on offer were those for the hearing impaired including a description of every single sound: the subtitler made stabs at describing the music despite knowing nothing about music, thus we had “music becomes atonal” when the music wasn’t even particularly dissonant, and worst of all “a flute plays” at the sound of a clarinet which we could actually see being played!

BTW it’s debatable whether one should be allowed to use the phrase “curate’s egg” of films. The thing is, “parts of it are excellent” is a stupid thing to say about an egg. It’s not such a stupid thing to say about a film and therefore the metaphor loses its ironic point. This applies a fortiori to pop albums; only the most extreme Taliban-like rockist would deny that it’s possible to divide such works into discrete parts and weigh the value of some against others. “Curate’s egg” should therefore only be used as a way of backhandedly disparaging objects that are properly considered aesthetically indivisible, like paintings or handbags. Anyway, meet my petty brain and the trivial things that occupy it.

Ha ha, could there be a more pessimistic thread title than this one? “So far” indeed!

Via Elanor, was interested to read this article in The Age (that’s right, I don’t read politics pieces in The Age unless they’re linked by other bloggers, what’s your point?) since I’m one of the very voters concerned: I live in the electorate of Melbourne and I’m one of the disaffected lefties who’s considering switching votes to the Greens (not to mention the fact that my vote is part of the “significant gay vote”, could I be any more niche?).

On the one hand this is quite exciting; as Elanor says, living in what’s traditionally been a safe seat it’s quite novel to feel like your vote actually counts for something. On the other hand, I do feel torn: I think Lindsay Tanner is a very good local member and more importantly a good front-bencher (incidentally he doesn’t neglect the little people either; he’s been round to my place before every election since I’ve been here, unfortunately I’ve always missed him but he’s left a card). And I’ve always had a mild dislike for the Greens, a bunch of holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes who can enjoy the luxury of having the most ideologically impeccable set of policies evah in the knowledge that they’ll never actually have to implement them. And in the last state election they almost unseated Bronwyn Pike (another good local member and minister) by pandering to the most nimbyish, alarmist anti-development sentiments of the locals (”We’ll save Royal Park” was their slogan–ie they’ll save the residents of Parkville from the incursion of a Commonwealth Games village on non-parkland adjacent to Royal Park which will subsequently become public housing–yeah, very progressive.) Obviously they’re nowhere near as bad on this score as the Democrats, but I do wish they’d learn to act like a political party rather than a lobby group. But the vacillations of the ALP on asylum seekers (how great to be in an electorate that can be described as “pro-asylum-seeker” incidentally!) made me almost ashamed to vote for them at the last election, and now their refusal to take a stand about gay marriage has almost become the straw that broke etc etc.

If I still vote for the ALP as I suspect I will, it will be the decency of Tanner that’s the decider. Elanor’s quite right though that the notion that “erosion of Labor’s socially progressive constituency would lead to the Labor Party changing, probably to a more right-wing, populist party” is complete rubbish. It relies on the entirely false presumption that political parties represent the views of the people who vote for them; clearly if people of the left start voting for the Greens they don’t thereby cease to be part of “Labor’s socially progressive consituency”! Does the ALP give up on attracting the votes of aspirational home-owning swinging voters in the suburbs just because they might occasionally vote for the coalition?