10 August 2004
Salad for Men
Home yesterday evening, bored of reading about subterranean London excursions and playing Snake 2, I decided to have some supper. It was hot and sticky despite soft rain finally clearing the atmosphere, and lukewarm food like Italian-style cous cous (with black olives, tomatoes, pesto, what have you et c.) goes down a treat in such conditions.
Reader, I made a salad:
a smallish aubergine, thinly sliced, brushed with olive oil and grilled to smoky brownness;
slivers of a cheeky boar sausage (purchased recently in Greenwich at the travelling Bruno’s French Market: there was perry available and indeed drunk on this occasion, for the information of all you Glasto boozehounds) fried off gently while the aubergine was cooking;
a few halved cherry tomatoes and a finely sliced spring onion, added to the sausage and joggled about a bit for a couple of minutes once it had released some fat;
a generous splash of lemon juice sloshed into the frying pan to form a dressing with the sausage juices;
all the above tumbled in a large bowl with a big old load of ripped up iceberg lettuce leaves and seasoned with some freshly milled black pepper.
The result was interestingly savoury, the sausage and aubergine slices in particular combining well, and the lettuce and tomatoes providing a salient reminder of health and efficiency. It was a proper no-effort manly salad, and yet I had no man to share it with, because he lives in Portsmouth. So I scoffed it all myself, oh yes.
Liz x in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
“Mac Nerdery etc” at daringfireball.net
John Gruber – my sort of nerd. Some substantial essays often extolling more sober lines of thought as an antidote to popular badly-thought-through-isms. A prime example being the recent “If only Apple had licensed the Macintosh…” counterfactual that plagues many apple/pc “debates”. I also prefer his take on the recent dashboard vs konfabulator kerfuffle (scratching your head at that = you won’t be interested in this site).
His “I feel strongly that web sites should be producible in a hand-editable format”* is the sort of hardcore sentiment I agree with in theory, certainly GUI web editors (Dreamweaver et al) are an abomination above even Flash-powered home pages, but in practice I can take a bit of automation in my blogging. Which is a relief to FT’s other contributors no doubt.
*from his rant against Trackback!
Alan in Proven By Science • No Comments
HOW TO DO A COVER VERSION
Distilled from several years of pop experience, here from the WORST to the BEST are ways to approach a cover version.
The Acoustic Guitar: i.e. “Any good song will sound great on an acoustic guitar”, runs the prized nugget of MOJO wisdom which results in Travis mauling “…Baby One More Time”. Culprits throw up their hands in innocence – “It’s not ironic, it’s a great tune”, not any more it isn’t mate.
The ‘Gary Jules’: When in doubt SLOW IT DOWN. Close relation of above, guaranteed to leech all life, rhythm and joy from a song. Critical banker, though (“Nick Cave’s sensitive reading of Bombalurina’s hit reveals the deep psychic wounds beneath the original’s flimsy pop etc etc.”)
The Atomic Kitten: After a karaoke night you maybe remember a quarter or a third of the performances more »
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • 7 Comments
The Silence of Flooded Houses
I discovered this little introduction to a book of Beatles lyrics, by Richard Brautigan.
Mike in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
Against The Corporate We
My mouth tells me that Innocent Smoothies are very nice. My brain suggests they are a great deal better for me than that next can of coke. So why am I so suspicious of them? This provides a clue:
“We promise a lot of things. For instance, we promise we’ll never cheat at cards. We promise we’ll always cover our mouths when we yawn. But most importantly, we promise we will never, ever adulterate our drinks…We promise that anything innocent will always taste good and do you good. And if it doesn’t, you can tell our mums.”
This kind of whimsy – see also Ben And Jerry’s adverts passim – brings out the cynic in me like a rash. The folksy ‘we’, products with a ‘human face’, blah blah. The impression is that the premium prices we’re paying for Innocent products are going paying for this ‘personal touch’ as well as for high-quality ingredients. But I’d be quite happy if they slapped on an extra 5p to fund not treating us like children.
Tom in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Sexy History
I’m reading Rubicon by Tom Holland, a pacy account of the corruption and collapse of the Roman republic in the first century BC. It’s a period I’m interested in because my own Roman studies started with Augustus, with the post-collapse settlement being put in place and bloodily enforced. My grasp of what happened before was sketchy.
Actually Rubicon is more than pacy: in the context of ancient history writing it’s delirious, its narrative mapped out with the snap and vigour of a true crime pulp(aptly, since the story is steeped in murder). Holland is shown on the back, a lean and good-looking young man with a fin haircut, the very un-model of an ancient historian. Rubicon reads like a major breakthrough in classical studies. The paradox of ancient history is that from Thucydides on so many of the sources are narratives but that the discipline in the last fifty years has been so afraid of them – in fact there pretty much hasn’t been a populist ancient history book since Gibbon. Classical studies have been much more about the tortuous and guess-laden work of reconstructing everyday ancient life, economics, psychology, social structure: groundwork Holland has absorbed and mastered and knows how to deploy to make his story richer and more complete.
(He’s also good on the characters involved – pen-portraits were something else classical writers knew to be a proper part of historical writing but which have been often neglected since.)
It’s a compliment to Holland’s book that reading it I’ve had to confront some of my prejudices about popular narrative history writing, something I think is great in theory but in practise often too sweeping or lacking in detail. With Rubicon I never feel that way – the one niggle I have is that Holland is clearly dying to make a parallel between Rome in the 1st century BC and America in the 21st AD. He’s never explicit but in some sections the whiff of ‘do you see!!’ is pretty pungent (OMG MITHRIDATES = SADDAM WTF). It’s not that he’s wrong, but while history does occasionally repeat it never does so exactly, and the specific differences tend to be as or more interesting than the similarities.
Tom in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
Practical Criticism
I wonder sometimes if music criticism shouldn’t be more practical. I suppose I’m thinking of the music criticism you pay for in magazines. The ‘music press’, with a handful of sterling exceptions (you know who you are!), has pretty much abandoned the idea that criticism should be beautiful or thought-provoking or take longer than a minute to read, but it hasn’t replaced this with anything more than pretensions to actual usefulness. I’m not talking about star ratings which are handy as a summary but lose their lustre when there’s little worthwhile opinion to summarise.
Practical information that might be useful would include: the approximate size of the record when converted to 192 kbps stereo MP3 files; a guesstimate of the marketing budget allocated to the record; BPM (Record Mirror used to do this, good for it). Softer, more subjective info would not be neglected, though. The reviewer could indicate which tracks were most effective on a first listen, and could provide examples of how the record might be used – in which situations and contexts (physical, social, emotional) it works best. A guess as to the listening lifespan of the record might also be useful, for readers who care about such things.
Seriously, focussing on how to use a record would be a refreshing alternative to the standard-issue half-background half-snark approach of the current monthlies. And useless records? Don’t review them.
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
Misery, complaints, self-pity, injustice — the utter joy of Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Exotic Video Show, just rereleased for the first time on DVD, lies in its naivete. Which is a trite thing to say on the one hand and something perfectly apt on the other. It’s a standard trope regarding early eighties videos from anywhere that they were throw-everything-in-plus-the-kitchen-sink affairs due to the medium’s theoretical newness, an assumption that actually can be challenged all the way down the line on a number of fronts.
But Tim Pope, who went on to become the Cure’s video director for something like a decade and a half, showed himself early on to have those same gifts that were evident later — not seeming chaos so much as an attempt to throw in storylines alternately relentlessly focused on the lyrics and taking them at an angle. It didn’t hurt that Soft Cell were all nervous energy and flamboyant hamminess — Marc Almond seems alternately surprised that there’s a camera filming his every move and relentlessly ready to own it, starpower consolidated after a year’s worth of surprise hits, while Dave Ball contentedly sits behind his keyboards with his tape reel, but more than happy to flash smiles or grins, or else actually become something like the chief actor in a scenario while Marc takes care of the singing part.
And so the whole thing is presented as a video revision of nearly the entire Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret album — minus “Sex Dwarf,” whose tabloid noteriety is constantly sent up throughout the whole thing thanks to the many skits and bumpers between the videos themselves. Marc reads one of the tabloid reports with the air of a gasping, shocked figure, Marc and Dave stop by a hardcore video booth locale and ask to see the production in question, etc. etc. Of course, what they finally do show is the brief alternate video featuring Marc and Dave and two shorter folks all dressed to the nines in formal wear and singing/playing along to the music books and stands in front of them — just another night at the Proms.
Sometimes things ARE all over the place — “Entertain Me,” which opens it all up, seems staffed by a slew of escapees from an Adam Ant production (no bad thing). “What?,” groovy cameo by Mari Wilson aside (she really did know how to work the beehive), is all Pop-Art and fourth wall nuttiness, works well enough but one can sense the band just wanting to get the cover over and done with. As for “Tainted Love,” combining Caligula with cricket at Lords must have been the result of the band going “We’re already SICK of the albatross, can we move on please?”
But then again there’s the perfectly appropriate super-8 editing collage of movies-on-tour that makes up “Memorabilia,” the nearly hyperliteral “Say Hello Wave Goodbye,” which is indeed shown from the start with Dave standing at the door of the Pink Flamingo. The two spot-on highpoints take completely different tacks — “Bedsitter” features Marc in a cramped studio set perfectly appropriate for the song’s setting, nicely capturing that sense of savage torpor which makes words and music fit so well together, nervous energy with no real outlet. “Youth,” in contrast, is just Marc’s face with childhood films — maybe of him, maybe of someone else entirely — chroma-key projected onto it, a one-take effort that stops the frenetic energy of the collection. The song is always the amazing joker in the pack on the album, the ghost of Marc’s two decades later self channeled backward into a shockingly great meditation on the ravages of time, just so.
So there was naivete on this collection, people trying something to see what could work. The nice thing is that, quite often, it did.
Ned Raggett in Do You See • No Comments
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