Home Truths

time to rein in the barbs, people. the discourse has almost completely deteriorated

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaark!

Christ, did that seem to be a Overpriviledged Princess doth scream? Oh doth say it not so. We shall feed egoth and she shall be better by nightfall for her illumination helps us, the plebians, with her witteth and her banterth and her Joan Crawfordth personalityth.

this be the new new nas/hova thread beeyotches

Yes Ron. I was trying to think of a way to say that without sounding like a dick. But I couldn't. Yes he's right.

and who doth bredth Momus or was he created in Cherry Red hell, a cross fire hurricane of Pet Shop Boys West End Girls, Overdue Library Books, the personality x-factor of Oxford University and Marquis de Sade?

*splutters*

What kind of dork wastes valuable sex time quoting Henry Miller? Honestly, you'll have to do better than that.

"...I havent been fucked like that since grade school"."

Chortle. Somebody better give Garth here his ritalin, eh?

Mmmm, bacon. Canadian bacon...

Quoting Chuck Pahlinuk does it for me...

Momus, I'll need twenty jingles on my desk by tomorrow or else your FIRED!

Momus: Yes boss, right away boss.

(Momus works long into the night)

HOME TRUTH: We are all whores for cash.

'Nuff said.

You can talk about but we all fuck the big boss man for money. Momus, Suzy, everyone. Only twits and twats think otherwise.

(Momus laying in bed with a shattered Suzy. "He's wrong. I'll come onto this board tomorrow and show him how wrong he is". Suzy: Why of course, everyone is wrong, everyone, HEHhehHEHEHEHEHEH..)

But now you're a Manic Street Preachers ad campaign.

if anyone signed up for email alerts on this thread theyre fux0red

and with that I will leave you lot to discuss your own brilliance and importance in the world without necessarily doing brilliant or important things (unless you count Pizza Hut jingles).

Bye.

Makes sense that he's *years* out of date in more ways than one!

I'm sorry Suzy, living and fucking, so 1998, wasnt it?

Everyday I wake up glad not to be pondered down with the weight of nothing like you folks.

I did that for old times sake.

Funny boy.

*drops out again for months to come*

Everyday I wake up glad not to be pondered down with the weight of nothing like you folks.

That is so almost an Indigo Girls lyric.

I don't know why you bother to use a pseudonym Doompatrol, it's always so obvious it's you.

Yeah it was sort of clear.

How's the book coming along then Doomie?

almost too good, dg, the writing is almost going too well. grammatically i'm as fucked as ever but it's scary on how fast it's all coming now.

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.

it's going extremely well for the amount of interest i'm generating and me just networking myself all by my lonesome but isa comes here for the enlightenment cause i have troubles understanding things and me needs a good think up when i comes on y'all boards cause y'all so much better than me. i basked in y'all's intelligences and smarts and wits.

What's the book about?

Eh to move away from the warzone a little.....

I never give my ideas away, ronan and if you think I have, then I'm lying to you....but suffice to say it's about normalcy.

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.

Exactly, Ronan. I liked the discussion he had with me on the Poitier/ Cosby thread, that was cool. What on earth happened?

Thanks Doomie, you kept me entertained for a good 10 minutes there.

but considering what this thread is about i thought it pertinent to make my reappearance. re: novel: think/tennesse williams/flannery o'connor/denis johnson (he's an american god)/jackson pollack/primal scream and gorecki and the gap. never underestimate gap clothing as an influence.

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.

i was having a bit of fun suzy. matching it up with you is good fun as you can be as shitty/witty as virginia woolf on a good day. it's all writing in the end, nothing personal.

ie. I feel that I am in a wu-tang remake of a turn of a century drawing room comedy and it producees good dialogue.

This thread has bent my wookie.

sorry nicole, the thread will resume back to normal now (heh, normal). Also ronan think eugene o'neill.....the iceman cometh.

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!

I very much hope the first line of DP's novel = "Momus — do you like Hitler?"

Forget that, make it the title.

*drops out again for months to come*

Well, goodbye, then, Doomie, it's... it's been wonderful.

Excuse me, somebody needs to use this door. Another cup of tea?

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. This reality TV / all-celebrity family values thing is a winner. Now how can I make money from the poor misguided sods who came to watch it?

Doomie, I'm not complaining....this thread is just a bit weighty, if you read 100+ messages in one go.

"Momus - Do You Like Hitler?" would win the booker prize, going by the title alone.

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? Does anybody else know that he did a show in the 1960s called The Perfumed Garden, in which, a whispering hippie aesthete, he played nothing but The Incredible String Band and delivered saucy suggestions rather than his later football tips? And does nobody here actually know or value the work of Viv Stanshall and Ivor Cutler, who released rather baroque spoken word albums in the 70s only because of the exposure they got on the Peel show, an exposure impossible to imagine on any other Radio 1 programme? You can't feel let down unless you feel taken up in the first place. I probably like families more than most of you too. And perhaps even people. I attack them because they could be so much greater than they are. Flashback to the point about Terry Jones, publisher of i-D. The tragedy of his position post 9-11 is that he eradicated self-criticism, which is exactly what every institution most needs. Including the family, including the John Peel fan club (I'm a member, because he introduced me to Pierre Schaumburg and Ivor Cutler!), and including, of course, the Momus corporation itself. (For instance, I totally agree with the poster upstream who said my lawsuit with Wendy Carlos was over a crap novelty song.)

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.