Things have been quiet here, but then again not. Sometimes only music heard on the radio as I'm driving to and from Bedlam brings a faint and flickering glimpse of creativity in this dark desert of braindeadness.
Believe me, this is not what I bargained for.
I'm wondering, though, whether it's counterproductive to expose yourself when in this state to recordings of Lou Reed forgetting his own lyrics:
Having said that, the lack of words is what makes this here YouTube trouvaille kind of nice:
I'm off tomorrow to participate in a media history conference on 'social fears and moral panics' in Aberystwyth. I'm looking forward to it: not only do the papers look very good, but I've also spent hardly any time in Wales, so this is a chance to remedy that.
But it has brought out a concern (indeed, a social fear) all my own: I have this quite overactive dread of mispronouncing foreign words, names and places. (Is there a word for this anxiety?)
And Welsh...well, lets just say I don't know where to begin:
Genir pawb yn rhydd ac yn gydradd â'i gilydd mewn urddas a hawliau. Fe'u cynysgaeddir â rheswm a chydwybod, a dylai pawb ymddwyn y naill at y llall mewn ysbryd cymodlon.
This is the opening text to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I believe.
I assume, though, that English of some variety will be spoken by the natives. And that they are, at least in large measure, friendly.
(Post title: 'My hovercraft is full of eels'. Source for that and other Welsh on this page. There, you will also find sound files.)
In a comment on my posting of a couple of late 80s favourites, mikeovswinton (who I believe has achieved the status of Most Frequent Commenter here at OD...not all that difficult, when you consider it, but still worth praising) pointed us to the music of The Blue Ox Babes, especially the song 'There's No Deceiving You'.
It is, really, quite good.
I haven't found a video link to what he calls the group's 'scorching' cover of Al Green's 'Take Me To the River', but I'll take his word on it.
I mean, the Al Green version is hot enough as it is:
I like this clip, not least since it's from Soul Train, which I used to watch quite a lot of between the ages of about 6 and 14.
Believe it or not. It used to be broadcast on our local Chicago TV station, I think, after the last of the Saturday morning cartoons. Alternatively, it might have tended to come on after the classic movies--usually Charlie Chan or Sherlock Holmes--on Sunday mornings.
It's not that we're ever at a loss for entertainment here in this household. Indeed, we spent a thoroughly enjoyable quarter of an hour earlier this evening watching a couple of bats in the backyard. I mean...bats! How cool are bats!?
Well, they're much cooler than you non-bat-watchers think they are.
And then, at those times when it gets too dark for those of us without echolocation to really enjoy the outdoors, I tend to turn into a bit of a film trailer addict. I admit it.
And I ran across a couple today that made me actually look forward to going to the cinema. Which doesn't happen all that often.
Now, Roland Emmerich is, I think, one of those very particular directors who manages to make that elusive creation, the good bad film.
I mean, yes, his films have implausible storylines, thin characterisation, sometimes questionable politics and interludes of often tiresomely preachy dialogue.
But he destroys things in wonderful ways.
And he apparently has a new film coming out in which he destroys...well, everything apparently.
But...'the government is building these ships'.... Yeah, whatever.
On with the breaking of stuff:
I find that to be a particularly nice touch at the end: having the White House (so memorably exploded by an alien death ray in Independence Day) be crushed by an aircraft carrier named the John F. Kennedy.
For a somewhat more intimate form of apocalypse, we have the upcoming film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I have mixed feelings about this, as the book (like a lot of McCarthy's writing) had something powerfully bleak that I'm not sure can be transferred to the screen. The trailer shows this to be a bit more of an adventure story than it actually is, but, you know, trailers can do that.
It still looks pretty damn bleak.
But for a truly disturbing film, I think we're better served by Cat Ladies. It manages--with nary a special effect, apocalyptic Mayan legend or hungry horde of cannibal rednecks--to truly send chills down my spine.
And if that's not enough for you, check out a selection of the fifty greatest trailers of all time.
(It occurs to me that, given the temperatures outside, The Sundays' song 'Summertime' would be more appropriate, but given that didn't come out till the mid-90s, it would mess with my organising framework...)
Far from wanting to diminish the talent of Michael Jackson (he was, after all -- at least for a long period of his life -- a very talented and charismatic figure), I thought this video of earlier choreography helps to make the point that what he was doing, while innovative, was not entirely new. (It is also, on its own, quite an enjoyable few minutes.)
I've been interested in historical continuities recently. Human nature, standing on the shoulders of giants, and the like.
It's the end of a rather full couple weeks travel, conferencing and research in various bits of this fair isle and I'm not up for much serious thought on a hot and far-too-humid evening in London.
Which, as The Wife has noted, leaves me in a perfect state of mind to match the silly state of the media mind (i.e., wall-to-wall, 24-hour obsession with all things Jackobury) that has blossomed all around me.
And I suppose that while my brain seems to have temporarily shut down (encouraged, perhaps, by drinking too much red wine in the sun at a retirement party for my boss this afternoon) I'm still left ahead of Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones, who seems to suffer from this condition on a more permanent basis.
That's just a surmise based on the evidence of her commentary in today's Waily Snail entitled 'What's really oppressing women isn't the burka, it's their breasts'.
It's really quite...appalling.
But educational: I wasn't aware that Victoria Beckham was 'oppressed'. I'm appalled that some worthy charity has not intervened and helped the poor woman.
And then there's this useful tit-bit that our Liz offers:
Believe it or not, I once had very big breasts.
I did not know that. But without a reason to think otherwise, reader, I believe her. And I urge you to do likewise.
And the learning (and tragedy) doesn't stop there:
I’d been anorexic for years and when force-feeding and threats of hospitalisation hadn’t worked, in my early 20s my endocrinologist started feeding me drugs and hormones to make me eat and to make me fat. My breasts grew rapidly. Clothes no longer hung properly.
Fascinating.
Also:
My drug-induced breasts were nothing like the ones you see these days on the covers of men’s magazines: natural big breasts hang, honeydew melon-shaped, towards your waist.
Thanks Liz. Truly, this is information we can use.
Also via the Vomity Pail (which is distributed free by my hotel), I encountered 'Miss Ellie', who has been voted 'ugliest dog' at some kind of fair in California that concerns itself with such things.
The pure-bred, pint-sized pageant participant -- who has as far as I know not yet expressed any opinion about mammarial oppression -- has a strangely endearing charm, I must say. And she also called forth an immediate (though cross-species) association:
It is a contemporary family tale; it is about isolation turning into madness. There are strong intimate ties between the characters, which will be revealed by the motorway. It becomes the screen onto which each of the characters projects their own neuroses. It is also a mirror of the world – violent, aggressive, and polluted – which enters the homes of people who thought they would be able to live alone, set apart from society. In this sense, it is a film about Switzerland.
Apparently some guy died and now everybody, including what counts in the UK as "serious" media, is in a frenzy. While I don't care about the dead guy per se (never have), I do care about the increasing silliness of the eulogies composed on the occasion of his passing death (Like George Orwell I seriously dislike the replacement of "strong primary words by feeble euphemisms" so typical of American English).
I also don't care a bit about Glastonbury, but apparently it's important enough to live blog about it at the Guardian. Oh, what a frigging juvenile place Blighty is!
Anyway, here's some music for Sunday. 'Fraid I have no time for more. TTFN!
Unfortunately, there are no proper videos to be had for these two songs, which I heard on my way to and back from work, but maybe that's a good thing: the songs are wonderful by themselves (though melancholia-inducing).
Boris Vian, "Le Déserteur"
June Carter Cash, "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?"
Among the stack of books I'm working my way through is E. S. P. Haynes's 1923 libertarian tract The Enemies of Liberty, which took aim at a broad range of threats, as he saw it, to traditional freedoms.
It's interesting to see in this period how frequently certain writers contrasted English liberties with their presumed opposites elsewhere, typically in Germany (a reasonably common epithet in this context seems to have been 'Prussianism') or, interestingly, America.
As an appendix to his book, Haynes prints an essay from A.P. Herbert on ‘Prohibition in America’, which he wrote after a sojourn of several weeks enjoying that blessed land's freedoms:
‘The truth is, I fear—and I hope my American friends will forgive the remark—that as a nation they seem to have very little idea of social liberty. They are not so much Puritan as persecuted. Formal political liberty and formal social equality they have ad nauseam, but these are poor substitutes. They seem to like it when an Irish policeman flourishes his club at a gentleman in the street and refers to him as “That Man,” for this shows that all men are equal, and the gentleman is a good as the policeman. But he is not—not by many miles. Anyone who shouts loud enough for a long time will put the gentleman in his place—and he seems to enjoy it. For he has no King and no titled aristocracy, and he flatters himself he is a sturdy, independent fellow, standing no nonsense. But in fact I found him a little cowed, with the habit of being dragooned and bullied and sitting down under it—under the policeman, the Press, the politicians, the literary critics, his wife, the Irish, the Middle-West, and any kind of tom-fool League or organisation that has the energy, cash and Publicity organisation to spread it abroad day and night, for years together, that black is white, or peppermints bad for the soul.’
Herbert, 'Prohibition in America', printed in Haynes, The Enemies of Liberty (1923), 179-80.
