Sunday, 6 April 2014
WOW!
'Blue Yodel No 6' Singer "EmiSunshine" is only 9-years-old, but already she can sing, play the ukulele, banjolele, mandolin, kazoo, and a little piano. In this video she is captured playing Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel No. 6" by an impressed bystander. At The Sweetwater, Tennessee Flea Market
Saturday, 5 April 2014
Michael Faber on J.G. Ballard's 'Kindness of Women'
It wasn't until the 1980s that he commanded his fiction to shine a documentary torch into his own life, to illuminate, and perhaps to exorcise his Shanghai ghosts. He confronted them first in Empire of the Sun, tackled them again from another angle in The Kindness of Women, and finally – just before he died – offered a conventionally "truthful" account in his autobiography, Miracles of Life. The Kindness of Women, marketed as a "sequel" to Empire of the Sun, steered back towards the provocative style of Ballard's earlier work, exploring the psychic fallout of horror and violence. The scene where young Jim watches four somnolent Japanese soldiers slowly murder a Chinese prisoner with telephone wire is a masterpiece of understatement and baleful resonance: even as Jim negotiates his own escape, we know that, on a deeper level, there is no escaping from such a sight.
Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard's life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. "To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme." Those last 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's novels.
If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's medical studies in postwar England tell us a lot about Ballard's values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: "You'll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia." It's an appropriate metaphor for Ballard's clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was "an old-fashioned storyteller at heart", he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism's emphasis on the inexplicable and SF's tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating.
It is in the area of physicality – especially sex – that Ballard's style jars most with the conventions of British fiction. It's hard to imagine another English author who could come up with a sentence like: "Her small, detergent-chafed hands, with their smell of lipstick, semen and rectal mucus, ran across my forehead." Frequent references to penises, labia, pelvises and prostates underscore Jim's contention that "Gray's Anatomy is a far greater novel than Ulysses." Ballard is unashamedly fascinated by the flesh – every pore, blemish and scar of it. The scenes in The Kindness of Women where Jim dissects the woman's carcass inspire some of Ballard's most tender, most respectful, most reverent writing.
For all his modernity, however, Ballard was formed by the fashions of a previous age; he could never quite shake the values instilled in him by Biggles and Boy's Own. His ambivalent fascination with soldiers, his disdain for the defeatism of the British in Singapore, and his lifelong love affair with fighter planes, set him apart from the long-haired peaceniks of later generations. His relationship with the times was atypical. Indifferent to music, immune to the charms of psychedelia and bemused by the idealism of hippies, he felt less enamoured of the 1960s than many of his fellow experimenters. He approved of the shake-up of the class system, and celebrated the rise of the literary counterculture that promoted his work, but in The Kindness of Women he chooses to present the 60s as an era driven to psychosis by a steady diet of drugs, assassinations, war trauma and TV. "The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade."
J.G. Ballard: five years on
Richard Heslop and Mark French: Shooting The Hunter (Tribute to Derek Jarman)
Richard was one of the cameramen on Derek's film The Garden and this video contains original Super 8 shot by him on the set, together with contemporary footage shot around Prospect Cottage which features in the film. Original music by Fritz Catlin (Skintologists/23 Skidoo). Edited by Ben Cole
Friday, 4 April 2014
TONIGHT IN LONDON: 23 Skidoo and Richard Heslop - Seven Songs @BFI Southbank
Followed by a DJ set from Don Letts in the benugo Bar.
Tickets £15, concs £11.50 (Members pay £1.50 less)
Wish I was there for this. Original guitarist Sam Mills will be playing alongside Jim Whelan tonight too
Thursday, 3 April 2014
June Tabor & Oysterband - Love Will Tear Us Apart
Filmed at the Union Chapel London on April 19th 2012, directed by Judith Burrows.
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
CAN - Live @Soest 1970 (Rockpalast Archive) *Uncut Version
0. Intro
1. Sense All of Mine
2. Oh Yeah
3. I Feel Alright
4. Mother Sky
5. Deadlock
6. Bring Me Coffee or Tea
7. Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone
8. Paperhouse
Holger Czukay – bass
Irmin Schmidt – keyboards
Michael Karoli – guitar
Jaki Liebezeit – drums
Damo Suzuki – vocals
High quality download @DIME
Irmin Schmidt on the CAN Biography
The British novelist, good friend and since Can-times collaborator Duncan Fallowell (who also wrote all the lyrics for my solo albums and the wonderful libretto for my opera Gormenghast) had the next great idea: why not make it two books in one? A biography and – what he called – a symposium. He made the first contact with Faber & Faber and they were excited by the project. No, they ARE excited! Lee Brackstone suggested Rob Young as the writer for the biography. We have known Rob for a long time and regard him highly. He knows Can, the music and all the band members very well, so we were straight away extremely happy about this choice and are delighted to have him on board.
The idea of the symposium fascinated me so much that I decided to make it myself (meaning to curate it, edit it...). To use Can as a starting-point for a wild selection of stories, statements and interviews seemed like a really exciting project. A collage of talks not only with musicians (like Bobby Gillespie, Julian Cope, Geoff Barrow) and
people from the music-business side of things (Daniel Miller, Jazz Summers, Hartwig Masuch) but also people in other arts, like writers, philosophers, film-makers, painters and other nerds and neuroscientists...
And pictures. In 2011 there was a great exhibition in Berlin called HALLELUHWAH! Hommage à CAN, with paintings, photos, installations, sculptures, etc., by over forty artists (including Malcolm Mooney) all based around the theme of Can. Some of these will also be included in the symposium.
I am also very happy that Max Dax, editor-in-chief of Electronic Beats, will join me in working on this project.
Looking forward to being surprised!
Irmin Schmidt
Bandol, France – 16 March 2014
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