Some Songs In Green And Purple

Listening to Beauty and Crime by Suzanne Vega

I’m still buying these albums and still go and see her. Not sure how to describe that her music goes beyond the normal waify singer-songwriter stuff – maybe just because she was the first I knew but there is some definite depth to the words even if there is no punch line as it were. She tells these strange stories in between songs when she is on stage – none of which have any point other than to provide background to the songs or even just interest while somebody fixes a string or changes a sample disk. Something surreal in there as well. This album is about New York but then again I suppose that is like saying that War and Peace is about Russia. Not sure it will keep everyone happy.

Apropos of something, this week I have been mostly thinking about architecture. There is a lot of it in Alice in Sunderland which you may have gathered was my Fathers’ Day present yesterday. It sometimes reads like a straight local-history book and yet the interest it generates is multiplied ten-fold through the jump-cut, post-modern story-telling and fantastic mixing of media throughout. It changes from ssurreal Bash-Street-Kids style version of Henry V, through Boys-own adventure to a dreamy walk through Sunderland’s Riverside sculpture trail with the real-life creators. All the sly references make this one to start again once you have been through it the first time.

We don’t look up enough. I was in Liverpool for years before I noticed some of the special things that were visible above eye-level. There are small staircases in some of the streets that must be a hundred years old and yet look like they were created as part of some modern building. Buildings jump around in time, creating a consistent whole in space but making a strange, disjointed things if you try and undo them like trying to work out the order of scenes in Pulp-fiction. (Damn! I’ll get in Pseuds’ Corner one day.) I have nearly always been very unfortunate with the locations of the offices I work in. I started out well with my first job on the second floor of the Bristol and West Building right in the centre of that fair city (My bit was the shorter bit on the right of this picture) but since then I have had brick walls or anonymous industrial parks as the view that I get during my working day. I hope one day to get an office with a view that matches my desires. However, with the non-stop rush to complete buildings for the Capital of Culture in Liverpool, any view that might once have been is rapidly being destroyed in order to put up sheds which look like vertical Nissen huts. We used to have one of the most distinctive skylines in the country and it is now just a grey version of every other city in this country. We do not take our planning regulations seriously. How permission is granted for these things is beyond me save for the simple understanding that it involves money and lots of it. They do love their numbers.

Real and Imaginary

Listening to Mouth Music by Mouth Music

You will never hear anything quite like this album – forget Afro-Celt Sound system and every other techno/trad cross-over – this is as original as original gets. There is nothing that sounds forced in this matching of Scottish Gaelic, African beats and technologically based instrumentation. You will want to sit amongst the islanders and join in with this, marvelling at the deftness of their craft and their stoicism in the face of everything from the clearances, through the excise men of the time of Polly to the seeming loss of the traditional links to the country. And to include a song that was played at JFK’s funeral seems like bravado on such a thing but it is right in the extreme.

I think Gaelic is the most beautiful language, the strange combinations and mixtures of letters seem just perfect even without knowing their meanings and when mixed with music they become something almost excessively spiritual, something that does not seem to match with the normal everyday things which the language itself must have been used to describe. Mix this with pipes or fiddles and you have the sound of ecstasy born of hardship, nourished by clean winds and fixed in memory forever.

Well it rained some more. The garden is flooded and half of Liverpool lost power when a sub-station exploded. Not sure if that was to do with the rain but it did seem a bit like a larger disaster than it actually was because of the dark skies and squally wind. In the back of a Black raincoat jungle we are – slowing to nothing in our appreciation of the rightness of this music and bowing to the superior knowledge of the blues fans who dye their hair green and are so superior in almost everything. Sing and sing ‘til the ground vibrates and the long-sleeping faeries come back to brush the ears of the torpid king and court that hide in the hill awaiting disaster and nothing less to bring them back to our aid. And grammar is nothing heard today, lost in this music like meaning and thought, squashed out of us until we can think no more. Alice will save us – save us from the rain and tears that may be hers anyway. She will make us race and make us safe. Victoria falls to Earth unreasoned, shadowing me from all those years back and laughing at my poetry that took all my courage to hand over in those concrete corridors of light that made adolescence flee in all the hardship of just surviving on your own wits. I wonder where all those blues records have gone – whether she still plays them, reverently lifting them from their sleeves and placing them on some dust-free player in a clean room somewhere. They were her father’s records and I am not sure whether she stole them or inherited them for she was a mystery, not revealing anything other than her green hair and inscrutable face to us. Maybe she has a shop now, left her art degree and started a laid-back retail empire where she keeps everything for herself, all the rare marks lifted from the incoming boxes to the lined walls of some cheap flat somewhere. And the funeral march in blues for dead presidents had defined her life. Great rats, rats in the skies, flying like bombers to take us all away from here, a strange life of unreason in the absurd and drafty alley-ways of a northern city, faded with the clean-up, into the backdrop of the green, northern fields that takes us from industrial hell to bucolic heaven in just a few miles. We are in full control and yet the revolution does not interest us any more. Kings and Queens for ever we are – dead to the real world but still watching for any kink and crack that might take us back through all those extra dimensions, into the breeze and rain that tells us how life should be.

Afternoon Toppo! How Terrific are The Weasels?

Listening to Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin

I was nearly allowed my Fathers’ Day present yesterday but I have asked for it to be hidden until the day itself to make for the traditional lie-in/Breakfast/Card/Present sequence. However, I do know what it is.

My obsession with rain has been fed muchly over the last few days and allowed me to sit in the porch just out of reach of the showers and to get to sleep listening to the white noise of heavy rain for a couple of nights. I’m thinking of getting a CD of rain if there is such a thing as help for my insomnia though maybe some fast speech would be better at keeping my mind from thinking too much about things which worry me. Distraction is what I need. I like thunder as well by the way – it always seems familiarly calming rather than containing any threat of danger.

I want to right that I am feeling a bit ‘undefined’ at the moment but I’m not sure I can expand on what that means. I have been reading nineteen-eighty-four half-heartedly for the last few days as recent changes in my own perception of the world seem to have rendered Mr Orwell’s views on the world as a bit blunt but then every so often the complexity re-asserts itself and I see the point. The idea that the removal of undesired aspects of language could in itself remove the possibility for thoughtcrime is a breathtaking one and yet I keep feeling that humans must be able to think things without having to have language to back it up. I suppose it all links in with the development of language and how meaning is attached to words. “Nice” for example has changed its meaning through an evolution undefined by us which leads me to think that meaning is deeper than the words behind it. Do you dream in dialogue or images? How much of your day is actually defined by words?

Anyway nineteen-eighty-four has been jettisoned in favour of Polly – The True Story Behind Whisky Galore which was ordered from the library on Tuesday and collected yesterday – who needs Amazon? Well I do actually I suppose. Don’t believe the first review – it is wrong.