Four good things today

1. Starting work on the two Russian translations I have at 8.30 this morning.
2. Wong Kei for dinner.
3. 12.08 East of Bucharest.
4. Mike Leigh in the next urinal at the cinema.

Greta Garbo

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

Schopenhauer

Today’s albums

whilst cleaning the flat:

The Clash – London Calling 25th anniversary edition

Various – Dynamite Dancehall Style

Barrington Levy – Shaolin Temple

Koop – Koop Islands

Neu! – Neu!

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.’

You can read the rest and generally Poe yourself to death here.

Chocklik

is making me feel better – shame they have not yet released one with NightNurse.

Is it normal?

Find out here…

This week’s CD

Is not going well with the fuzzy headache I have as the latest strain of the flu struggles to overcome my immune system. New York in the late 1970’s – mid 1980’s was a real melting pot of musical styles and fashions. I’m sure all of us know the clumsy cross pollination between early rap, disco and punk/new wave in the ever blissful ‘Rapture’ by Blondie, whilst Talking Heads were again melding soul, jazz and funk with rock guitars.

Anyway, I digress, as these bands are merely the tip of the iceberg (and, of course, the most commercially successful). This compilation brings together some of the more underground sounds of NY in this period. Proto-electronica, jazz, dub, cavernous hiphop, very unusual lo-fi production techniques, mergers of music with performance art, and just about everything in between appear here. Arthur Russell, a classically-trained cellist, created expansive, almost ambient dance-inflected soundscapes, Sonic Youth went on to become one of the defining bands of the late 1980’s, and Glenn Branca wrote symphonies for the electric guitar. Of course, alongside these more avant garde musicians, there are of course some delightful 3 minute punk-pop tracks – The Ramones, were, of course CBGBs stalwarts.

This is the third in the series (part one is excellent, part two still has to be delivered), and has once again deepened my knowledge of this period in NY’s musical development, the repercussions of which can still be heard not only in the recent slew of pop-punk bands, but also in the electroclash fashion of a couple of years ago, and in some of the more expansive dance music and hiphop. And it has the second best version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Ever.

The back streets of Ealing

yielded the following on my walk home tonight:

1 drunken man kicking his way through the newly fallen leaves – I would imagine it was his first day at a new job. The hangover will hurt tomorrow.

2 engineers from Clancy Docwra trying to find the source of the large water-filled hole caused by a burst pipe (this would explain the water being cut off across Ealing yesterday).

A mist reminiscent of Gogol’’s descriptions of Nevskii Prospekt.

Unseasonably warm weather – no coat yet and it’s almost November!

No traffic at all.

A smell of cider vinegar beneath the apple tree just up the road from my flat as the windfall slowly decay.

Re-energised

Seems that 17 hours of sleep has done wonders for me. I have managed to come home from work and don’t feel the urge to pass out. Now, if I can just get 17 hours a night, I should be able to get some research done… Watching ‘Kubanskie kazaki’ tonight (again)…

The Excluded Ones

10/11/2006
Disagreements

Already as soon as it hurt. It arrived almost always behind schedule, yes, but never one dared to ask to him from where. Not to find out something that it wanted to hide itself to itself but by gentleness, not to abruptly alter the so fine balance in which their lives were sustained. Who knows with whom it would walk now. Before they had been happy. It does not do so much. How to draw up with a piece of chalk the exact line that indicates the point of flexion of the things: everything slipped little by little towards the worse thing, without haste. A day, perhaps, began to find its less graceful jokes of the habitual thing, another one realized that was less intelligent of which always it had thought, another one discovered it balder. They wanted to be a modern pair and always they decided tacitly that to leave separately from time to time with its respective friends it would not be a problem. What friends, he asked himself, who had been acquiring to the force the habit to speak with the objects that populated their house. Before it read, but to read is bad because sometimes it makes think, so it finished always in front of waiting for it the television set, if it were possible submerged in some program aid of high tension: that managed to maintain it in a state of well-being near the idiotez, that is, to innocence, out of danger temporarily of the martyrdom of the doubts.

Translated by Mozilla from Los Excluidos