― DG, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
obviously i'm not as smart as the people on this here board but i'm doing as gosh darnit good of a job as i can do.
― doomie, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Eh to move away from the warzone a little.....
― Ronan, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
plus you can read some stuff that i've got coming out in some magazines and a short film that is being done at the moment with somebody coming out sometime soon.
ha! heh! ha!
going to bed.
i was blocked and came on here for a bit of a relief. i'm busy busy busy.
― suzy, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Ally C, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
i'm doing an article for a well known american magazine at the moment commissioned just three days ago ummmm........what else? just little bits and bobs of writing as i am the ghetto balzac.
― Nicole, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
ps. i didnt steal anyone's dialogue but i think i just came up with the line that i was looking for bespoketh by me! hooray!
― mark s, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Momus, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
"Momus - Do You Like Hitler?" would win the booker prize, going by the title alone.
No, you're not alone -- it's thanks to the Peel Sessions discs and comps, though, that he really became known at all in the States, and then to a large degree among college DJs like myself who envied his ability to control an entire nation's airwaves rather than a campus that wasn't tuning in much anyway.
― electric sound of jim, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Here's an Ivor Cutler website with sound samples of his Glaswegian-Beckettian (not to mention Oblomovidian) art: www.ivorcutler.org.
So that's why he sings the way he does.
poor ethan really nailed this one with the first answer though. yet here we are 180-odd later...
― jess, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I'll have to try harder next time.
That said, I went through and read the whole thread so I could get a better sense of what exactly was going on.
I think it needs to be said first and foremost that I came from a perfect example of a stereotypical family dominant-American style as such. Dad = breadwinner; Mom = college-educated teacher who became full-time housewife; two kids, me the older and my sister the younger; Caucasian, Protestant (if only just, thanks to Anglicanism), partially Anglo-Saxon, lived in suburbs or 'small towns,' family dog (several in a row).
The Momus vision of things is that I should thank my parents for the upbringing and then go out and find ways in the big wide world all my very own. Terribly seductive. But not in and of itself an automatic answer. I live in the suburbs now and aside from a stint at UCLA have done so since leaving home. I ended up at UCI here in Orange County by the luck of the grad application and am still here even with school long behind me. I have ye olde stable job thanks to the college library, with those all-important Good Benefits (at least in America). Every workday I get up at 6:30 am, arguing with myself the entire time about maybe calling in sick until I hit the shower, leave the house by 7:00 am and take an hour to get to work via three buses (in itself an anomaly in such a car-centered country, state, and county -- public transport being supposedly there for the 'hired help,' to use the ridiculously euphemistic term for the many Mexican American and Central American riders going to their own jobs). At work I follow certain set patterns throughout the day, including firing up both boards and obsessively reading and posting on them -- not what I am paid for, but which I am fortunate enough to do given my work and its lack of micromanaging. I have my lunch, whatever it is, work through the afternoon, including my regular stint at the library front desk, then make my way home. If I'm not going out -- and I usually don't -- I fire up the computer here, then maybe listen to music, read a book, watch a movie, whatever. I eventually go to sleep and the pattern continues.
From the sound of it, I'm little more than a timekilling automaton. Even more so, I have consciously excluded myself from an employment arena revolving around profit and therefore may well have sentenced myself (for the time being if not eternally) to less pay than I deserve, as Suzy mentioned elsewhere. I have an attachment to a slew of materials -- books, CDs, DVDs, other videos and more -- that would make them a burden to carry around if I moved often. I value a good night's rest, a comfortable bed, a roof over my head -- and I'm well aware that compared to a huge swathe of the world's population that I'm astoundingly well off in comparison to them, as it seems to me even a brief visit through, say, India might well demonstrate. I envy someone like Nicole her boyfriend-now-fiancee-soon-to-be-husband, not so much for some sort of conservative vision of 'the right way of things' but because she found someone and someone found her -- because I believe in such a thing as romantic love that stands the test of time, regardless of ceremony given over it. I have only to look at my parents to see that and know that while it's not *always* the case for everyone, it still exists, in many different forms.
Now, that said -- I don't watch TV these days outside of snippets and haven't for some years. I search out non-mainstream news perspectives. I am fascinated by artists few know about, whether in word or paint or on-line or whatever. I read and try to learn more about this world, in large part because I feel that when I die I die and that's that, and therefore I will use this one chance as I can, even if at my own pace. I have a sometimes flamboyant public/on-line persona I try and consciously pump up from time to time. And when I can, I create, in my own way, sometimes surprising even myself, possibly impressing or entertaining others.
So am I fish or fowl? Am I entrapped among the 'normals' of the world and therefore compromised? Am I freeing my personality to fulfill itself by making sure the bills are paid? Am I the social tourist getting off on things heard about second-hand and pretending to be above it all while cocooned away in 'safe' areas? Am I destined to 'repeat the cycle' with another generation?
I don't know. I don't think I will ever know. But it seems the answers depend on who asks the questions. Do I read weird cult novels or obvious constructions of a dominant artistic stamp? Is that obscure music I'm hearing or patently obvious drivel? Do I not do what 'everyone else' does or am I just a 9 to 5er in the end? Do I fulminate on the left with my thoughts and convictions or do I merely exhibit a hidebound smug conservatism without even trying? And so forth.
I don't use this to claim any sort of new, strange or useful identity. If I am coming across as trying to arrogantly claim some sort of middle ground -- if it *is* a middle ground, and maybe it isn't -- and mold it in my name, then no, no and no again. The only point to have is that I am here -- and that if *I* am here, if I can exhibit what appear to be a raft of potential contradictions in approach -- then why can't that be the case for so many, many others?
I don't see the vast sweep of people in early 21st century America as either dead drones or hypercreative avatars. I don't see either side as victorious or right either by sheer force of numbers or sheer amount of examples. I see more infinite worlds shaped by more infinite obsessions, desires, approaches, results, productions than can be imagined. And if I only see this as a reflection of what I see in myself as what *could* happen, then how are any of us any different in the ways we measure the world, when we do so entrapped in the expectations of our own experiences, pasts, bodies, minds?
― bnw, Sunday, 14 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I do think things are more boring and conformist now, though. I think all the people on this thread who revealed their stock of cultural references to be mapped almost exactly to Reupert Murdoch Fox TV schedules show that, and the fact that only one poster (Howie D) pointed me towards interesting culture stuff I didn't know about.
Ivor Cutler first came to fame as a voice in the Beatles' 'Yellow Submarine' movie. Do you think such a genuinely quirky and interesting figure could emerge from any Oasis project?
Well, without wishing to put you in a box, Ned, I'd say you're becoming -- which is by far the best state.
All very nice, perhaps, but something about the term makes me think I'm pupating.
If your novel flies, you may one day know the artist ghetto I live in. I hope you do, and I hope you don't.
Sorta hope I don't, really. An example that just leapt to mind: Tim Powers lived one city over in Santa Ana for many years and wrote a series of inventive, strange and wonderful novels all while working a city job, if I remember right, along with raising a family at that. Clearly the life of the mind doesn't determine one's living quarters.
I think all the people on this thread who revealed their stock of cultural references to be mapped almost exactly to Reupert Murdoch Fox TV schedules show that
*arched eyebrow* Anthony, to name one example, probably wasn't echoing ol' Laughing Boy Murdoch when he talked of Benton and Pollock, for instance. If the argument is you're looking always for something new, does that mean anything already common currency is automatically invalid?
Do you think such a genuinely quirky and interesting figure could emerge from any Oasis project?
Does it matter? Seems like a battle/comparison not worth drawing out when other possibilities exist.
― Ned Raggett, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Isn't there an Elvis COstello song called Home Truth? Finally, why do the most babies come from the dumbest vaginas?
― mike hanle y, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― jel --, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
He said, I respect Nick cause he will stick by his opinion no matter what...and kudos, you did that man, thick and thin, you are a man with an opinion, popular or unpopular. And I respect that.
― doomie, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Doomie: thanks. The same could be said about you!
― Momus, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Even though I think you are wrong 'cept for the Ivor Cutler bit. Friends of mine followed him home once and finally asked him for his autograph. He looked scared and replied "I thought you were ghosts"...
He is obviously a genius.
― david h, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Don't intellectualize my rock'n'roll. Though I have tried to sneak Kenneth Halliwell references in to no effect!
Are you not talking about ego. Who defines who is normal and exceptional. I mean, shit, I'm in England, where the class system defines the arts. Is it class that defines the normal and the exceptional? If that is the case then you are talking out of your ass.
― david h`, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― anthony, Monday, 15 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Break that down into English for the eejits in the crowd.