Home Truths

Could it be that I'm the only one to feel betrayed by John Peel because I'm the only one to care about John Peel?

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.

Here's me meeting another of my elders and betters.

http://www.demon.co.uk/momus/cutlery.jpeg

This reminds me of a photo I have of me standing next to Stephin Merritt. He looks about as happy as Mr Cutler does there.

Oh, I could give you my Merrit photo too. He never looks happy. He looked even less happy the day I last saw him, cos his gums had just been ripped out and stitched back in.

Here's an Ivor Cutler website with sound samples of his Glaswegian-Beckettian (not to mention Oblomovidian) art: www.ivorcutler.org.

his gums had just been ripped out and stitched back in

So that's why he sings the way he does.

i stand by my moleman-ism above.

poor ethan really nailed this one with the first answer though. yet here we are 180-odd later...

Listen to the Cutler sound files on this page, this will totally explain what I'm talking about. For instance, 'Bounce Bounce Bounce', from a John Peel session of 1969.

Cutler to Peel: (His voice is slow, mannered Glaswegian, rather prim and correct yet also countercultural, like R.D. Laing doing an old vaudeville number) 'This song was inspired by Princess Berenice, a princess with a six inch gold chain between her ankles, who's to be found in Gustave Flaubert's 'Salammbo'.

John Peel: (Hushed, tripped out, posh, respectful, sexy, very public school, very arts lab: 'Mmmm, okay, fine, Ivor Cutler and 'Bounce Bounce Bounce'.

(Cutler proceeds to sing in a fake Jamaican accent about watching women walking down the street with a bounce, accompanied by his creaky harmonium. Really very Robert Crumb, square yet pervy, kinky in that innocently sexist 60s way.)

Now, would you ever hear anything like that on 'Home Truths'? I think not. Those normal people were just too busy being normal to read Flaubert, let alone to attempt a fake Jamaican accent and parade their surreal sexual fantasies in front of the listener. The song is not a good one, but it leads me into... another world. And through that looking glass Peel is a patron of the arts rather than a Liverpool supporter. And Samuel Beckett and Marty Feldman and Ivor Cutler and R.D. Laing and Robert Crumb are all singing a George Formby number. And there are no 'normals' within earshot. They're somewhere else, being mocked as Chartered Accountants in a Monty Python sketch.

(Then again, the following clip, 'Beatrice', greeted warmly by Peel, sounds like a dry run for Home Truths. Except it's about a teenager dating a six year old boy. A bit too close to home to be a palatable truth, perhaps.)

Listening to Cutler again makes me think of two similar artists:

David Shrigley

and

Brian Dewan .

The first web page I hit researching Dewan begins 'Already a favourite with British tastemaker John Peel, Dewan...'

In the spirit of Jim Haynes, whose book about the 60s 'Thanks For Coming' is described as 'A book with John Lennon, Yoko Ono... (the list continues onto the back flap)' I would just like to say 'This has been a thread with
John Peel
Viv Stanshall
Ivor Cutler
Syd Barrett
Marc Bolan
Oscar Wilde
Nietszche
PiL
Palais Schaumburg
Jarvis Cocker
Goncharov
G.K. Chesterton
Henry Darger
Joe Orton
Ivo Watts-Russell
Mike Alway
Alan McGee
Guillaume Apollinaire
Holger Hiller
Paul Hindemith
R.D. Laing
George Formby
Robert Crumb
Incredible String Band
David Shrigley
Brian Dewan

I see them all on a bill at The Roundhouse, or spread out like the Peter Blake collage on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.

I'd love to turn you on. Thanks for coming.

the thread soars on the Neilsen 'New Answers' ratings: 175 beats all comers. Nearest rival, Would You Have A Deaf Baby? at 112.

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?

By the way, I may be despised and get my free mp3s trashed, but the thread soars on the Neilsen 'New Answers' ratings: 175 beats all comers. Nearest rival, Would You Have A Deaf Baby? at 112.

It'd be more impressive if half the answers weren't you and doomie.

Well, without wishing to put you in a box, Ned, I'd say you're becoming -- which is by far the best state. Personally, I'm already somewhat boringly defined and painted into my corner. But you're tremulous with possibility. 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.

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?

not unless Bonehead or Guigsy are a lot more interesting than we give them credit for.

Why Jim, you 'orrible man. ;-)

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.

"I am RObert Burns, I have just disturbed a mouses' home. He made plans but now where are his little plans!? Gang awry!" Update of old poetry #23

Isn't there an Elvis COstello song called Home Truth? Finally, why do the most babies come from the dumbest vaginas?

Brian Dewan is cool! I love his cover version of "R2 D2 We Wish You A Merry Christmas"...

(I've got the right Brian Dewan haven't I?)

One thing though - I asked someone who knows you quite well and the thing is...

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.

Jel: YES, I've been waiting this whole thread for someone to say 'X is great!' And Brian Dewan is indeed great. There are sound files on that page I linked to. He painted the sleeve for David Byrne's 'Uh Oh' album, he makes his own extraordinary musical instruments, he makes funny b movie / Daniel Johnson-type songs, he played zither on the track I sang on the last 6ths album, he makes really intriguing and funny public information-style slide shows of the Book of Deuteronomy and how Native Americans should look out for the white man... He lives in Brooklyn, but he's a man carrying a portable universe around in his head. (Which must get heavy.)

Doomie: thanks. The same could be said about you!

but i thank god that you are not in the mainstream, it would be an ayn rand nightmare where people are forced to listen to the unlistenable and read unreadable french authors and probably wear scarfs all day long.

but I respect it cause you never waiver.

cause recently I had a run in with one of the london media minions (who are, far worse, than any small town strangeness) and to actually have an opinion, or an unpopular opinion, is a struggle. I was emailed and told "if I wanted to make any friends in London I had to shut my mouth"...fuck that, the next thing, I'll be walking around with a Hoxton fin, mobile phone and talking loudly through an edie sedgwick film saying: Oh god, this is boring *MY* production company can do better. So RESPECT.

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.

Momus - give us a map, then. Put a page on yr website (or post it here - not unlike the list given above) of the marginals, the RD Laings, the Henry Dargers... I can't find it 'cos the stuff I read doesn't drop names like yr good self. There are no Kierkegaard- quoting Morley's in the music press, no Bataille-loving madmen... Those little ladders to the stratosphere: gimme some rungs.

The only reason that I mentioned Richard Yates is that his mesterwerk "Revolutionary Road" is because "the people and events he writes about are so average and identifiable, so much like the world we know" but the point of the novel [there are several] is that the central relationship create a tension between this ordinary world. They create this flux state of becoming. [The main point of the novel is how we mortgage our spirituality and ambition for 9 to 5]. But I guess [and it only occurred to me reading this] Yates is saying what you're saying but not in such a crass [i.e. blatant] way.

Now, this wouldn't go down well with Styron & Vonnegut. But it seems he paints this dichotomy. This cultured man waiting to be -- as I said the main point of the novel is about honesty & truth and how we lie to ourselves in order to accept these compromises -- to dash off to the culture of Europe, reading the biographies of Great Men in Books Shelved But Never Read and seeing that they started late in life and taking solace in this, lying to himself that so will he.

This dichotomy of beings: the normal and the exceptional.

Kierrgard quoting Morley, sorry, I have to quote David Crosby...

Don't intellectualize my rock'n'roll. Though I have tried to sneak Kenneth Halliwell references in to no effect!

This dichotomy of beings: the normal and the exceptional.

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.

I believe their 'flux state of becoming' is called Hope.

This are tagentiall , for example i know Peter BLake from his life paintings, i google and find out. There is something very uncomfortable in listening to gurus and following their cult ...

I believe their 'flux state of becoming' is called Hope.

Break that down into English for the eejits in the crowd.

I'm not getting back into the argument again. I'm going with Ned's stance which is probably the kind of cop out that Momus is trying to battle against. Class: yeh of course that marks out the normal and exceptional. Yeah right, if I thought that I would be talking out of my ass. The gap between the normal and the exceptional is (in my view): X2-X1. Where X1 = yrself + hope + ambition. X2 = the fruition of this process. Therefore, X1= amoeba + hope + reads Kierkegaard => becomes X2 = exceptional.

Momus got onto shaky ground 'cos it seemed like he was advocating a mass pogrom of the working class. The way I read it was that he was just hoping that people would try and better themselves. Look at Alice Through the Looking Glass not just look into The Looking Glass.

They are marked out from the 'normals', the stagnants by their Hope. It's this Hope that creates a between their normal lives and their aspirations. Thus creating pressure => movement. [Ultimately, though it breaks down 'cos their hope is all lies].

"creates a [insert "tension" here] between".

I agree with that but that is shakey ground when England is concerned especially when a 102 matriach who was insane from brain cancer and rotten teeth is given a funeral of a god with no one querying why, I would have to query that the normal and the exceptional.

But if Momus is defining this as bettering oneself, I agree absolutely, but you are talking to someone who dropped out of university in the second year to work in a factory. So, maybe I am not the best example.

Do we live in a system of mediocrity? Yes. YES. YES.

Are the normal people (who I count myself as part of) responsible for the mediocrity? No.

It is the artists responsiblity for this, the artists and cultural critics, who, as there job, should be responsible for this.

But then it's a tricky question, is there nothing more subversive than normality, nothing more violent and interesting than the psychosis of the american dream?

Ie. Artists and culturalists are responsible for the quality control. Not the normal people.

ie.

if the artist or culturalists places himself in the exceptional rather than normal mind set, which is fine, he will have to expect a cult sized audience of people who, as he does, think that they are successful but that way of thinking is hardly successful with the mainstream. You can still educate to some extent but it has to be subtle....

ie. Momus' market audience is basically people who know all of his references, etc, etc, Momus would be successful if he were to be much more subtle, write a pop hit, whilst still referencing his usual topics but in a less obvious way. Then I would place Momus in the exceptional catergory of entertaining folk. But until then, he knows who he is singing to, knowns his market audience and he knows what to do and what they expect (speaking from a western viewpoint of course as I have never been to Japan) but if he were to cross over and maintain the naivity and idealism, he would then inform 'the mass public' and entertain at the same time. Until then I think he is just talking out of his ass to his already select market audience.

ie.

if he were to write a subversive and educating pizza hut jingle I would honestly think that he was exceptional.

and if the pizza hut jingle was a pop hit, he would move out of his artist ghetto of overeducated affluent white males and into the mainstream, he would be extremely useful as a cultural agent.

or even if he wrote songs for Christina Aguilera.

but the thing is that he's stuck in the artist ghetto, by his market audience, the only way he can escape if he has some message of intent before entering the mainstream. If he had a pop hit, he would lose his bread'n'butter (his fanbase....who want him to be exclusive/elusive) but me thinks he wants to have the big pop hit and that is the interest aspect of Momus. One foot in cultdom and the other in mainstream superstardom, back and forth. Until he goes fuck it and goes for it, then he really can't complain. His cultdom has provided him probably the income of a city investment wanker or a member of Westlife, he has a couple of pads and meets interesting people...

ie. if Momus had a sexy pop girl singer on his label with all songs written by him or a boyband with all songs written by him, then he would subvert normality and probably be very successful at it. It's a risk though.

It strikes me that Momus's definition of valuable strangeness is rooted too heavily in performance: I find myself much more interested in quieter understated strangeness or abnormality.

It's possible to overrate the importance of how people earn their living: some (many) people lead outwardly 'normal' lives while being gloriously strange.

Similarly, Suzy's 'cannon fodder' statements overrate the importance to having a full / rich / strange life of consuming the stuff she considers good.

Both of you seem to be saying "if you're going to be strange you'd better do it like us".

He'd only 'subvert normality' if normality was the homogeneous bloc of mediocrity that has to be invoked for the kinds of argument Momus is making to make any kind of sense. There's something creepy and context-free in the way that domesticity, normality, consumerism and lo culture are conflated here into a monolith of mediocrity*, with artistic extraordinariness standing outside of it, and as if the 'content' of both stances was perfectly clear to all of us, and as if the two poles at issue don't co-construct each other. What Suzy said about the dull mores of the capitalist fodder (and I know this was said in exasperation rather than criticism) - that's what allows for an artistic/avant garde/extraordinary mode of life to operate and discourse, both materially and culturally. The dichotomy in no small way fuels itself. The contradictions and paradoxes of most peoples' lives are perhaps a better route to thinking this through, and I feel like there's no room in Momus' manifesto for contradictions. Ivor Cutler leads you 'into another world', but takes me on a quirked path through the one I know, ditto David Shrigley,

*Something ineffably male too; the kind of lofty contempt tossed around for 'breeders' and hyperbole re artistic 'difference' neglects that the feminist (if not female) take on Momus' account might bring to light whole sets of social and artistic/cultural relationships, contradictions and possibilities otherwise steamrollered over here. Of course the 'life of the mind' (good god) is possible in conjunction with the domestic and the parenting; a history of women artists have (had to) make this pretty clear in ways that a fleeting reference to Patti Smith's retreat into the suburbs to raise a family doesn't address.

I can't help wondering if what irks you about H Truths (and like other people have intimated, picking on it is a straw man for cheap potshots; the issue w/ Home Truths is style of discourse rather than content) is Peel's occupation of what might conventionally be thought of as a woman's role, picking through the detritus of the ordinary/extraordinary in family life (a version of the lady novelist, perhaps), his move from sibilant seducer of sixteen year olds to domestic partner, rather than what it might have to say about the state of culture more generally.

yeah, Home Truths is a world away from both the Starbucks globalisation culture and the 'Brutish' Loaded magazine culture that Momus hates. he's attacking something which is part of intellectual culture (R4), and maybe ought to remember that Home Truths is on at 9 on Saturday mornings when people are eating their breakfast and is correspondingly pitched at a level appropriate for the time-slot

There've been some excellent late points made here, and I want to get round to them. But first, this notion of infiltrating the mainstream as an 'agent':

if he were to write a subversive and educating pizza hut jingle I would honestly think that he was exceptional.

The history of this jingle has been a textbook example of how difficult it is to infitrate the mainstream (and I'd say it's also a refutation of that old chestnut about how we live in a time when you can't be avant garde because advertising and marketing leap on fresh, subversive ideas as soon as they're hatched -- nonsense, say I, they leap only at some things, others they wouldn't dare touch, and not only because they're too outré, but because they're too gentle and strange).

I was contacted last week by an ad agency to make the jingle. 'We don't want to tell you too much about the scenario,' they said, 'because we don't want to cramp your style. Just approach it as a song on your own album. Do whatever you want.' Well, my own style just now is Cantonese / Kabuki, but I couldn't see that selling pizza. So I gave them a first demo in a style I thought might be a compromise: a kind of Goldoni farce theme, a light Italian operetta full of doors opening, heads being popped out of windows, and people singing 'Where's the cheese?' (The pizza is called The Insider, because the cheese is inside. The concept of the commercial is a town without cheese.)

This was rejected, and little by little I was told what the agency and client really had in mind. They wanted to emulate the Swedish wonder agency Traktor (who are winning all the creative awards currently for stuff like their MTV campaign 'Jukka Bros', about some kooky Swedes who live in a cabin and copy the antics they see on MTV, saying 'That's soooo LA!'). And the music they wanted was 'Where's Your Head At?' by Basement Jaxx. Except they wanted it to say 'Where's the cheese at?' So for take 2, that's exactly what I gave them.

No more pretense that they want my unique take, no more genuine creative input from me, no chance of infiltration or subversion of the mainstream. You do it on their terms, or not at all.

That's the price you pay for reaching the mainstream. You basically have to copy pre- existing templates, reach pre-defined audiences, give them more of what they already know and recognize. To break through with stuff that's totally new and strange is, I believe, virtually impossible. You can only do that at the margins. On little labels, on college radio, in art galleries. So that's where I feel comfortable. The mainstream is just where I go to get subsidies when the cash runs out. Anyone coming up through the suburbs who really wants challenge, imagination, adventure, knows where to come looking. 'Outside, it's happening outside.'

I dont agree at all, what about the bluegrass being hip all of a sudden or N Sync deconstructing pop tropes or a poet making a fortune on sears or burroughs asked to shill for nike ( nike in general are fucking beutiful and reach for a sublime abstractness)

Well, I also did work for Nike earlier this year. Music for a Nike/NBC Winter Olympics special. In that case our needs meshed better, because I could do folktronic curling music with bagpipes and stuff. Also, in Italy there's a radio commercial using my song 'Giapponese A Roma', which is fine, because I basically wrote the song the way I wanted to, then they used it as they found it. But am I subverting anything in these cases? I doubt it. The music is usually mixed way down behind the voice over, all subtlety and strangeness is lost.

A couple of years a whole ad campaign for an online knowledge service called Questia was based on my cabaret show 'Electronics in the 18th Century'. But by the time it was stripped down to 30 second clips with the URL and the selling line, it was just some guy in a wig with a silly french accent. It had none of the gestalt shock that I put into my original cabaret, the 'what if' proposition about a parallel world where they had Pong games in the 18th century. Was I surprised to have all the interesting bits smoothed off my original concept? Was I fuck. It's the story of the majority of creative people working in capitalism.

It's the story of the majority of creative people working in capitalism.

Yeah, but my original point stands, you are still attempting as well as drawing money out, to enter the mainstream through the advertisements. It's clever and it's often done. Stereolab/Spiritualized/Lilys/Clash/New Order/etc. Do it. And do it alot. Just not as blatant as you are.

let's ask this question, if we agree that nike makes pretty ads- how do we reconcile that with its colonial view of labour ? Are we all in Austens drawing room, talking about wonderus marvels while refusing to acknolwedge where that money comes from ? How does this blindness relate to the obsession with "real lives" in the BBC or on CBS ?

the name of the realm that peel placed on offer w.the perfumed garden = PROG!!

Prog — which was an anti-canonic cross-class space in the late 60s and early 70s — was aggressively de-working classed by punk, a younger-sibling-rival strand of anti-canonic cross-class bohemianism.

(very early prophet of where peel was always headed = julie burchill) (both now shill for difftly shrill versions of normalcy, of course)