Linkblogging For 11/11/10
Too tired and migrainey for a proper post today, so here’s some links.
Caron looks at all the changes in the benefit system.
Heresy Corner says that the Paul Chambers trial has made being English illegal.
Abhay, under the guise of a review of the comic Moving Pictures, talks about the representation of the Nazis in the media.
The aporetic on Eddie Lang, minstrelsy, and appropriation versus support by white musicians in black genres. (via Gavin Robinson)
Neonomicon 2: Someone Stage An Intervention For Alan Moore
I’m a little late to writing about Neonomicon 2 – and Jog and the Mindless Ones have said a lot of what needs to be said here. But I felt the need to put my oar in…
Taken as part of a larger work, Neonomicon 2 may turn out to be worthwhile. However, as a single issue of a comic book – which is, after all, how it’s being sold – it is a vile, vile thing.
Alan Moore’s use of rape in his comics is well-known at this point, as are the arguments over it. One side says, with some justification, that having rape be a plot point in every single major work for 30 years suggests a possibly unhealthy fascination with the subject, while the other side argues that in most cases it’s justified and making a point, not just to shock or titilate.
I’ve tended to side with the latter, because Moore is, firstly, the greatest writer the medium of comics has ever seen, and possibly the greatest writer in any medium the English language has produced in the last fifty years, and secondly someone who is a very outspoken feminist. But my patience with this trope in his works has been getting ever thinner.
But what I want to say, and something that unfortunately hasn’t really been said explicitly in the reviews I’ve read of this, is this:
If you are a rape victim/survivor, even if you do not normally mind too much about ‘triggering’, please think very carefully before you read this comic
I say this because there are at least two people I know of who read this blog, read comics, and have been raped. There may very well be more – those are the ones who have chosen to let me know the fact.
The use of rape here is qualititavely different from anything Moore has done before. Even From Hell, for all its explicitness, showed a certain amount of restraint, but while I would never say that anyone should absolutely refrain from reading anything, still less that someone should avoid any subject, I actually think that this comic could seriously upset and possibly mentally harm vulnerable people.
What Moore and Jacen Burrows, the artist, give us here, is an extended, six-page, explicit depiction of someone being brutally gang-raped. I found it disturbing and mildly sickening, and I am both an insensitive clod and someone who’s been fortunate enough never to have experienced sexual violence myself. This is several orders of magnitude nastier than anything Moore has put in any of his previous work – this isn’t just a couple of panels, with a close up of the victim’s face looking anguished, this is something altogether worse.
Now, it may be that the comic as a whole will be so good, so profound, that it justifies this – I suspect not, but it may be. I certainly wouldn’t rule it out – Moore at his worst is a better writer than most writers at their best, and Burrows is a very underrated artist, primarily because he mostly works for Avatar, not a company known for putting out good work. But as a single issue of a horror comic, this feels closer to something like the issue of Tarot with the haunted vagina. The difference is, Tarot is not something that anyone will pick up unless they’re actively looking for sexualised violence. Neonomicon, by virtue of its writer, is.
Someone needs to sit Alan Moore down and talk to him about this, because while for each individual occurence of rape in his work you can make excuses, it is something that makes his work, when taken as a body, have the effect of trivialising rape – when I’m absolutely certain that the whole reason he includes depictions of sexualised violence is because he thinks it’s an important, awful issue.
My bet is that when Neonomicon is completed, it’ll be an important comic – imagine Moore doing The Filth but in a Lovecraftian vein and without the humour – but taking this issue on its face, without giving Moore the benefit of doubt, it reads like something written by the worst kind of nasty misogynist, like the arsehole who once found my blog by googling “supergirl rape stories”.
But I’m becoming increasingly worried that getting Moore to write a story without a rape scene is like getting Frank Miller to write a female character who isn’t a prostitute, and then I start to think about Dave Sim, and then I start to worry if there’s something intrinsic to this medium that I love that does this to people, and then I think about “supergirl rape stories” again, and I wonder if I should get a different hobby…
New 8tracks playlist – Albums Of The Year 2010
I’ve now downloaded and listened to my penultimate eMusic set for the year, so given that I won’t have enough time to absorb next month’s in time to make a reasonable judgement, I thought I’d do my Albums Of The Year now. If nothing else doing it this year will give some googlejuice to the post, which will in turn hopefully bring some attention to these artists, many of whom are very obscure.
My criteria for this are simple – the album goes on here if either I’ve obsessed over it and listened to it repeatedly (even if I didn’t think it was very good at first) or if I’ve not listened to it as much but have listened enough to know it will one day be a favourite.
The only album to be released this year that I haven’t listened to but think I might include is Joanna Newsom’s new one. It’s not on eMusic, and I use that for pretty much all my new music these days. I’ll get it one day.
I’ve created an 8tracks.com playlist, containing my two favourite tracks from each of these albums (8tracks is a legit streaming service and pays royalties) here . Take a listen and let me know what you think, and if you like them I’ve included links to the eMusic pages for most of the albums.
EDIT Didn’t embed properly, but you can get to it here.
1) Kristian Hoffman – Fop (emusic link)
Kristian Hoffman’s last album, &, which I wrote about here, is a very strong candidate for best album of the last decade, and while I’m not sure Fop is of quite that quality, it’s definitely the album of the year.
Hoffman writes about religion, politics, sexuality and the intersections of the three from the perspective of a gay, liberal (in the USian sense) sceptic, but manages to avoid polemic – there’s nothing as strident and obvious as Dear God or Tramp The Dirt Down. Rather, he’s one of the most subtle, moving lyricists I know of.
Those two songs are not chosen at random though – Hoffman is a unique talent, but XTC and Elvis Costello are two of the reference points I would point to to give some idea of his music. The others, though, would be Queen, ELO, Sparks, The Kinks, 20s revivalists like Janet Klein, Rufus Wainwright, Candypants (and the rest of that LA powerpop set of musicians, especially the Wondermints), Corn Mo, Van Dyke Parks, Stephen Sondheim, Abbey Road era Beatles…
Basically if you like witty lyrics, a glam feel, a sense of fun, intricate arrangements and strong melodies, that manages to do bombast while still showing restraint where necessary, buy Fop – straight after you buy &.
The two songs I’ve chosen from Fop are Imaginary Friend, which starts out as a foxtrot with fairly accurate 20s-style instrumentation before going into a gigantic Queen big ballad chorus, about the solace that can be gained from religion even when the religion in question is controlled by people with less than benign motives. Hey Little Jesus on the other hand is a fantastic strutting rocker, a 50s pastiche melody (with more than a touch of Stupid Cupid to it) about the crucifixion, from the perspective of someone taunting Jesus, with a wonderful arrangement, far more subtle than it first sounds (a harpsichord, hammond organ and steel guitar solo, just for starters, and the string part is wonderfully detailed).
2) Blake Jones & The Trike Shop – The Underground Garden (emusic link)
Some might accuse me of bias here, because Blake is a friend of mine, and guested on my last EP. He’s also, though, a wonderfully talented songwriter and performer who gave the single most impressive live performance I’ve ever seen when he and the band played the Love Apple Cafe in Bradford to an audience of less than ten paying customers but still played an hour of everything from Zappa pastiche to a performance of Harlem Nocturne on the theremin. His songwriting is astounding, reminiscent of Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and Harry Nilsson – but *ACTUALLY* reminiscent of them, not just copying their musical and lyrical tics in a pale imitation. Rather, he’s doing the same thing as them. While the two selections I’ve chosen here don’t show it, as well, his music is also remarkably varied, showing influences as varied as Dick Dale, Frank Zappa, old horror films and the Beach Boys, often in the same song.
Sing Along is my personal favourite of the songs on the new album – the lines “sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still play guitar/It’s not like they’re in line to be rock stars/There must be some kind of belief in a better world/Where we can strum and smile and get the girl” got to me especially. And Christmas Sale is a nice attack on the people who complain about the “War On Christmas” – “Your money don’t say feed the poor/And your courthouse won’t say blessed are the merciful/And your fences don’t say love your neighbour now/But you’re mad ’cause Macy’s won’t call it a Christmas sale…”
3) The Asphalt Orchestra – Asphalt Orchestra (emusic link)
The Asphalt Orchestra are a marching band from New York, but one that plays fiendishly complex jazz and art-rock covers. Their debut album features pieces by Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Charles Mingus, Bjork, Frank Zappa and Goran Bregović among others, and they just recorded a single with David Byrne. They make very good skronking noises indeed.
The two tracks I’ve chosen here are Zomby Woof, a cover of the Zappa track from Over-Nite Sensation, and Carlton, a specially composed piece by Stew & Heidi of the Negro Problem (which is how I first heard about them), which sounds like TV theme music, but in a good way (Tilt will know what I mean).
4) Imagined Village – Empire And Love (emusic link)
The Imagined Village are a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, a loose collective of musicians brought together by Simon Emerson of Afro-Celt Sound System in an attempt to reinterpret the English folk tradition in a way that incorporates elements of all the different cultures in the UK today – partly as a gigantic “fuck you” to Dickibegyourpardonnick Griffin, who tried to link traditional folk to the Bastard Nazi Party. (Incidentally, apparently Dickibegyourpardonnick is in hospital at the moment, with suspected kidney stones. Apparently they can be very painful…).
Their first album, a few years ago, was interesting but suffered from too many cooks – it featured Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah… basically everyone who anyone who read the Guardian in the 80s likes, and so was a bit amorphous. This one, on the other hand, while still featuring a large backing band with English and Indian traditional instruments mixed with electronic music, limits the vocals to folkies Martin & Eliza Carthy and Chris Wood.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are Space Girl, an old Ewan MacColl song about the dangers of copping off with a spaceman, and Scarborough Fair.
5) Roky Erickson – True Love Cast Out All Evil (emusic)
This was the real surprise here. For those who don’t know, Roky Erickson was the leader of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, a seminal mid-60s psych-rock group, but was arrested for marijuana possession, took an insanity plea, and unfortunately, because of the state of psychiatric medicine in the late 60s, became severely mentally ill. His music since then has had moments of power, but has been for the most part best judged as ‘outsider music’.
This new album, though… it’s still clearly the work of an ill man, but for the first time in decades he’s working with musicians who are sympathetic to his songs, and a producer who knows what he’s doing. The result is something close to Skip Spence’s Oar, The Beach Boys Love You, or Syd Barret’s early solo work, rather than to Wesley Willis or someone. Still the work of a fractured psyche, but one with the tools to express himself properly.
The two songs I’ve chosen are the first two from the album. Devotional Number One is deliberately recorded in the style of a field recording, and features the best vocals I’ve ever heard from Erickson. The organ coming in on the line “Jesus is not a hallucinogenic mushroom” sends shivers down my spine. Ain’t Blues Too Sad is a short alt-country song, and the difference in vocals is astounding – Erickson sounds like a totally different singer here, but an equally good one. And anyone with any knowledge of his personal history will be moved to tears by the line “Electricity hammered me through my head, til nothin’ at all is backward instead”.
This is raw, harsh music, borne out of immense torment, but still beautiful.
6) Al Jardine – A Postcard From California
I wrote about this here, but in brief this is a Beach Boys reunion album in all but name, featuring the full band on one track and Brian WIlson and David Marks on several, and better than any Beach Boys album since 1979′s LA (Light Album). That still doesn’t make it great, but it’s surprising what a grower this one is – a lovely, pleasant, relaxing album, that has absolutely no ambitions other than to be nice background music, but fulfils that ambition admirably.
The two tracks I’ve chosen are Looking Down The Coast, the most interesting song on the album, if overproduced – a miniature suite originally dating back to the late 70s, and a remake of Jardine’s old Beach Boys song California Saga, done as a duet with Neil Young, and also featuring Crosby & Stills, Jardine’s son Matt, and a sampled Brian Wilson. They’re probably the most representative tracks from the album, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
7) Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson – Gift (emusic)
Emusic lists this as being an Eliza Carthy solo album, but it’s definitely a mother-and-daughter collaboration – Emusic just seem to randomly label albums by the members of the Waterson/Carthy family, but that’s fine, because they’re all worth getting. Singer Norma Waterson and her daughter, vocalist/fiddler Eliza Carthy are two of the greatest interpreters of traditional English music alive, though they occasionally venture into other territory.
While this album is mostly folk, the two tracks I’ve chosen aren’t. The first is a medley of the 20s song Ukulele Lady and the old Amen Corner song If Paradise Is Half As Nice, while the second, Prairie Lullaby, is a solo vocal by Eliza Carthy backed by Martin Simpson on banjo. When I say this version stacks up well against the versions by Jimmie Rodgers and Mike Nesmith, you’ll know what high esteem I hold it in.
8) Brian Wilson – Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
I wrote about this here and my opinion pretty much stands – this is a fundamentally flawed album. But it’s a fundamentally flawed album by one of the great creative forces of modern popular music, interpreting music by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.
Of the two tracks I’ve chosen here, I’ve Got Plenty O’ Nothin’ is a showcase for Paul Mertens, Wilson’s principal collaborator on the album, who provides the various lead harmonica parts. But the clanking, banjo-driven arrangement calls back both to Wilson’s own Smile and to the ‘hot jazz’ early arrangement of Rhapsody In Blue, and makes this easily the most successful track on the album. Someone To Watch Over Me, on the other hand, is the most ‘Wilsonesque’ track – while one can, again, question how much input he had into the arrangement (which sounds like someone trying to be Brian Wilson, rather than like Brian Wilson), the subject matter is so close to Wilson’s other work that this still sounds the most heartfelt track on the album.
9) Jeremy Messersmith – The Reluctant Graveyard (pay-what-you-like download)
I only discovered Messersmith this year, but my wife’s known about him for ages – he’s from her home state, Minnesota, and very popular on their NPR affiliate. He seems to be popular in ‘geek’ circles too – he seems to have done a song about Star Wars or something, and gets webcomic artists to design his T-shirts. Don’t let that put you off, though, there’s some genuinely good stuff here. Unfortunately, all the comparisons I can come up with are people like Elliot Smith or the Eels, and he’s not really very like that either. I don’t want to put people off, so just listen.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are John Dillinger’s Eyes, a Big Star-esque powerpop song about John Dillinger, and John The Determinist, a chamber-pop song about determinism, with a nice string backing (obviously going for an Eleanor Rigby feel).
10) Mark Bacino – Queen’s English (emusic)
This is actually the kind of music I criticised earlier, in that this album sounds exactly like a Harry Nilsson album. I could honestly believe that Bacino has never heard an album other than Pandemonium Shadow Show, Aerial Ballet and maybe, maybe, Nilsson sings Newman. Maybe.
But the music sounds so exactly like those albums that it’s hardly fair to criticise him for it – because I like Nilsson, and this really is like having another prime-era Nilsson album.
Of the two songs I’ve chosen here, Happy sounds like a Harry Nilsson song, while Middle Town is the least Nilssonesque song on the album, sounding closer to Squeeze or Marshall Crenshaw.
Bubbling under – Thom Hell – All Good Things (sounds like 70s soft rock crossed with the Beach Boys – for fans of ELO and LA-period BBs, but a little derivative) Heaven Is Whenever – The Hold Steady (they’re missing Franz Nicolay’s keyboards), Apples In Stereo – Travellers In Time And Space (sounds like every other Apples In Stereo album, which means it’s great but breaking no new ground). Belle & Sebastian Write About Love (sounds like every other Belle & Sebastian album, which means it’s pretty good but breaking no new ground)
Where I’ve Been, And A Favour To Ask
Some of you are wondering why I’ve not blogged for a week or so. The reason is that I have actually written the same amount of stuff I’d normally write, but just not posted it here.
I was asked about two weeks ago, by a writer whose work I enjoy, to contribute a story to a shared-world anthology s/he’s working on, involving several other writers whose company I am very proud to be in. I emailed the story off yesterday, and it’s been accepted.
I can’t tell you much about the anthology yet, because it’s not been publicly announced and I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder, but I can tell you a little about my story. It’s called Twenty Voices, it’s 5000 words long (so about as many words as I normally turn out in a week and a half here, but much more work, as it had to fit in someone else’s world – I actually wrote at least 10000 words for it…) and it consists of eighteen monologues and a dialogue. Those who’ve read my previous fiction will see several of the same themes I’ve used before recurring – rather nicely, the theme of the anthology is a perfect fit for my kind of stuff. I don’t want to give too much away, but when I tell you it features at least two Popes, two murderers and a Campaign for Fictional Rights I might whet some of your appetites.
As always when I write fiction, I was very unhappy with the end result, but the editor seemed very pleased, and Millennium’s Daddy Richard (to whom I emailed a copy to give a quick look over) was positively effusive, so the consensus seems to be it’s my best piece of fiction to date. I don’t know what the publication date is going to be, but I hope to be able to announce more details some time in the first half of next year.
This is quite a milestone for me, actually, as I’ve written stuff on commission before (for example for the High Hat and Prism) and I’ve written paying material before, but it’s the first time anyone has actually sought me out and asked me to write a story for money. It’s a nice feeling.
And now the request – as I said, the story contains eighteen monologues and a dialogue. *ONE* of those monologues is, to my mind, problematic. Without giving away too much, it portrays someone who has had gender reassignment surgery, but not for the normal reasons, and I am worried it may come across as transphobic. That’s certainly not the intent, but it might do. For various reasons, I can’t cut that monologue out of the story, but I *would* like it if any of my friends who are trans or in other ways don’t conform to normal gender binaries could have a look at it and see if there are any ways I could improve it without getting rid of the main thrust of it? (If any of you don’t want to out yourselves but also don’t have my email, just leave a comment with a fake name – all first-time commenters are screened, and I’ll see the email address…)
Normal posts resume tomorrow.
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