Greek Tragedy

The end of civilization may well have been sealed by the third series of 'Take Me Out', and any logic overturned by copywriters who have gone mad with utterly absurd adverts showing mums needing to check out the appliances (!!?) in student residences (meaning bandwidth !!!) but it might have caught it's last breath last night by the showing of The Reader. This film, and I don't watch a hell of a lot of films apart from re-runs of The Dambusters and exhaustive brain mash such as the Battle of the Medway, was fucking fantastic.

Caught on the horns of a dilemma, that's it, that's everything in that film, from whether nazi guards should have released prisoners from burning churches, to whether young lawyers should spring ex-nazi guards on the basis of their illiteracy, to things generally being, well at best, unfair, to dealing with who you loved long long after you loved them, to the right and the wrong and the law, all absolutely brilliantly done while reading The Odyssey (of course). A brilliant exercise in the virtue for those in my Ancient Greeks class who didn't quite get it.

Postmodernism in Rock 3

Actually it was Iron Maiden and it was Paschendale (see below) But I've got the first two Boston albums coming my way for a pound each and I can't wait. Boston are clearly the unhippest band in the world right now but in 1976 you couldn't have moved without More Than a Feeling, and the fact that the Darkness copied them....well!

1977's Heroes by David Bowie was the first album I bought that I knew my older brother had no interest in. Heroes is a modernist enterprise. Berlin blotted out the rest of the landscape. Lyrically it is pretty much pure 'cut up''fold in' whatever, the WS Burroughs technique that jumbles things up to make a strange kind of sense if you enjoy his cocaine fueled detective show; 'Somethings going down the chips are down I'm under Japanese influence and my honour's at stake...You wake up and sleep, You can b(u)y god, it's monday, slither down the greasy pole.... ' Robert Frip played guitar however he wanted and Eno was still interesting. The bloody things been reverberating round my head for weeks after one playing on Christmas Eve.

Of course, punk was also a modernist enterprise, busses going to Nowhere and Boredom, no longer 'Further' like the Merry Pranksters school bus. Very apt, and the best singles, such as The Ruts 'In a Rut' a pure reinterpretation of the blues even if they didn't give a damn (see also The Stranglers).

Postmodernism in Rock 2

Julie and I are doing our taxes. It is a ritual of paper shuffling, shredding and eventual disposal done to the tunes of Planet Rock. From this mornings listening I can confirm and enlarge upon yesterdays prognosis. Certainly modernist rock, as exemplified by Zeppelin's Heartbreaker or the Stones Gimme Shelter, both from 1970, are straightforward blues mewings put to astonishing effect, meanwhile it is clear that ACDC are the SOM of modernist Rock, ever to be relied upon to give the dog a bone forever and ever.

Beyond this, the post modern rock trajectory suddenly demands the need for story telling. Weirdly architecture did this too, we called it narrative. Usually, for rockers, these are everyday stories of roads, Armageddon or fairyland. Archetypes heard this morning include Bon Jovi's Dead or Alive but could include almost anything from anybody hacking down rock verse from 1974 on. Here Jethro Tull are exemplary (in an awful way) and became at one dreadful point in history the biggest live act in the USA, and Yes who remain indefensible. A further extremity of lyrical garbage would be reached with Rush, who even bring in quaintly Disneyesque motifs (Tom Sawyer). However I'll save that for later. I think it was Def Leopard who actually tried to do the Somme.

Meanwhile remember Judas Priest's 'Breaking the Law' is exactly the same as Thin Lizzy's 'Boys are Back in Town'.

Postmodernism in Rock

Did my 'Postmodernism in Rock' lecture today. Postmodernism being a fraught subject to define precisely, and these being first years, 'Rock' is an obvious and visceral place to start. First take some blues, delta blues or whatever - poor black men doing whatever they can on the very edge of existence itself. I chose 'Peetie Wheatstraw' for excellent songs like 'You ain't goner stop me drinkin' and 'I want some seafood' (or whatever- find 'em on You Tube). Now this is your original rock, and to non aficionados, all the tracks sound the same (handy). This is the bedrock of rock. To develop from these beginnings the modernization process has to somehow turn these characters in to Led Zeppelin and make them GODS (Faustian overtones and modernist project). Now it's important to state that the lyrical content (sexual innuendo etc) remains basically the same as do the repetitive chord structures, but what is added is tremendous POWER and GESTURE (Bonzo's drumming and Percy's trousers). Once you have Led Zeppelin, then you let the ROCK mix bubble for a while and out pops anything from Motley Crue to The Darkness, these become your post-modern archetypes out a condition of massive over consumption. Motley Crue decide that it's all about acting, pure BE AM DO, be it, then you are it, and then you finally do it, then go back to being it again and doing it again and so on without stopping in ever decreasing circles. The Darkness, at least by death nell album No2 (produced by Roy Thomas Big Error) even calling the album 'one way ticket to hell and back,' decide to interrupt the spirit of becoming and crash and burn conspicuously in a huge cloud of cocaine within which no doubt writing a song about going bald (track 6) becomes HUGELY FUNNY all night long. However 'Bald' can be monumentally brilliant only in the ironic sense. With 'Bald' you can't get behind the ironic sense nomatter how good the riff is. Hair IS, after all, the ultimate Rock signifier!!!!

(so in both senses, you've lost the music)

Voila, there's your postmodernity for you.

Stingray's Beautiful Ones

Ate a whole pizza and ice cream, yes I did, as well as the house red, oh YES I enjoyed myself, and I'd no idea how good it was going to feel.

Stingray is a pizza joint on Columbia Road, we wouldn't normally go there but what the hell, it's populated conspicuously by new media youth, the sort in cheque caps and skinny brown jeans and big black crochet scarves and serious looks and that through the hedge backwards hair. They are the types who cannot yet afford Brawn down the street and sweetly lay their film scripts, treatments, or whatever, out on the tables to discuss.

It's a look, may be a whole way of life, that's so sweet it's almost Waltons, and none of them would be out of place on a '37 knucklehead Harley, her on the back with her hair bound washerwoman style in a tea towel, him in a duster, beard and goggles. Old? I could just see myself as Granpops. Still it did make me relish what it was to be young and so serious that if you split up you'd kill yourself, and I guess it's appropriate for them to feel that cool there rather than trying to do it in Bury St Edmunds. We were, after all, in the midst of the next generation of Beautiful Ones. They should enjoy that misery while it lasts.

In fact, thats exactly what they were doing. I have never quite witnessed a demographic who looked quite so conspicuously pleased with themselves.

Very good pizza, ice cream and house red.

R Crumb

Some things that arrive as a result of my midnight rambles on e-bay are a delight. Take this, straight from Sacramento, $100, the set of Crumb blues heroes (partially shown above) and this, fellow pickers, is one beautiful piece. There is something about Crumb, and there's something about 'small multiples', sets like this, that just blows me away. I fantasize that on seeing Crumb, Gerhard Richter did his 48 western philosophers, in grey of course. I once tried an alpine hut series of old post cards, didn't get far, my old professor painted nothing but sheds, until he moved backwards to nothing but trees. Julie's done endless 'Beauties of Today' and there's hardly a day without sets of 'men wearing watch chains' or whatever slipping through the letter box.

Multiples of the same thing, we like them, they allow us to establish difference.

I'm wondering if anybody's ever done an architects series like this? I suspect such an apparently simple idea is beyond the general consensus. Instead we have Hellman drawing architects like their buildings.

Retro

My e-bay enthusiasm for the retro seems contagious to many things, from paperback books to re-runs of The Professionals on TV, but I have to remind myself that for every Mini Cooper S there was an Austin Allegro around the corner, and that every canny e-bay seller knows this, and knows that I cannot necessarily tell the difference either, especially in the more esoteric areas of design. This much anticipated box of six tea spoons (teaspoons, fuck me, what AM I doing!) was a considerable disappointment in the spoon if not in the excellent graphic department. The spoons were overpriced tinny crap, the original box rather nice, but do I want to spend fifty quid on a small b0x? Meanwhile, if I translate retro design to 'things I'm doing now' I might find everything looking like a bad book on gestalt psychology from Pelican in 1973, and that wouldn't do at all.