As long planned, here‘s the page dedicated to our late friend and colleague, gathering together his work on the internet and the many fond tributes to him. This is a work in progress: please point us to anything you think also belongs here.
(*in the English language since I read no others)
The disgraced children’s author William Mayne died in 2010, some 57 years after the publication of Follow the Footprints, the first of his more than a hundred books, none of them for adults. A final book came out the year of his death, Every Dog (puissant title in the circumstances), and I haven’t read it yet, though I will. I’ll talk a little about his downfall at the close of this post, and doubtless more later, but what I actually propose to undertake is a gradual reading of these books, such as I can track down, starting with a rereading of the 20-odd that I own and know. more »
Some time in the mid-70s, I went on a school trip to the Ludlow Festival, to see (I think) Cymbeline: six kids crammed in the back of a teacher’s little van, five in their late teens actually studying it for A-level, and me, experimenting and showing off. So naturally they were all having fun amiably teasing me, and hit on POP as a topic to trip me up. As a gamble — early version of a dodge I make to this day — I declared my Young Person’s admiration for my dad’s favourite singer: Eartha Kitt. Which paid off — they’d none of them never heard of her, and with no comfy take, to needle or muddle me with, preferred to chuckle a bit at my weird obscure tastes and went back to earnest Sabbath-chat.
Funny thing is, I grew up and through a life writing about and categorising music, exploring and improving histories, and still Eartha feels more like a handy prevarication move than a name to conjure with: someone people kind of know about, for sure, and maybe like (maybe a LOT), but without a set place, or role, or handy symbolic meaning. more »
‘Dr De Bie, senior lecturer in artificial intelligence, said: “Musical tastes evolve, which means our ‘hit potential equation’ needs to evolve as well. Indeed, we have found the hit potential of a song depends on the era. This may be due to the varying dominant music style, culture and environment.”‘
(Note link also includes MATHEMATICAL FORMULA FOR POP SUCCESS, and other reliable christmas cracker filling material…)
“Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.” As [Uncle Andrew] said this he sighed and looked so grave and noble and mysterious that for a second Digory really thought he was saying something rather fine.
As I gave Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” an easy ten on Tom’s Popular thread I’d probably better expand — as usual, other people’s comments help me think this through, especially when they’re subtly wrong in ways that nevertheless seem self-evidently right. I think Lex is right about the bludgeoning, for example, but not the bludgeonee: and I think wichita lineman is right about the unconvincingness, but entirely wrong about any insincerity. punctum is absolutely correct about the performance as an evasion; the deep question — impossible to answer, essential to explore — being how much of this effect is conscious, how much an unconscious matter of singer’s identification with role.
I’ve alread tied this into the aria in the film Diva: I haven’t the slightest idea whether that film was in Whitney’s head, still less anyone else on the production team, but I think it has useful explanatory value all the same. To prove this I’m going to triangulate it with (i) John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band LP (though haha the two Unfinished Music LPs also totally fit, just go look up their titles when you’ve finished reading this), and (ii) Queen Elizabeth the First of England and Scotland. more »
(crossposted at my tumblr)
Saw the John Martin: Apocalypse show at Tate Britain yesterday. Oddly mixed feelings: not disappointment exactly — I think I childishly wanted the big end-of-the-world canvasses to be three times bigger — but a mild sense of deflation alongside the enormous enjoyment. I don’t mind AMAZING SPECTACLE and I don’t mind ACTUALLY QUITE SILLY, and of course (like lovely progrock) JM is very often both, and the astonished ooh! of phantasmagoria is very often followed by a slightly shamefaced giggle (I expect someone can work this up into a critical “symptom of modernity (in a bad way)”, but I think both responses are good critical practice, to be honest… ). But this is the Tate more »
… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.
Right, 1989′s near-eve of cancellation, in which Eeevil McRe-Incarnate Fenric plays games with the bloodlines of all (local amateur) history until a rematch with the Doctor goes AWRY, but at WHAT COST to TRUST? A hyper-timely-wimely ketchup this, given actual current Nu-Who (apparently: I’m writing this up before I watch last week’s) (and after I watched this week’s). And also anyway an epochal, prescient, witty and fascinatingly and unexpectedly complex and emotionally provocative ep, say some (others: “it’s incomprehensible c0ck”). On hand PLOOS it has Vikings, vampires, vicars (well, Nicholas Parsons as a vicar), cosmic chess, companionly fambly biz, WW2-era computers, code-busting Bletchley Park rehoused near legendary Gothavore bathing spot Whitby, un CURSE LOCALE and AMAZING SOVIET LOVE INTEREST < ---- :o :o :o :o On side (so-called) MEEEN00S = Ms Dorothy Gale "Ace" McShane; SIR SYLVESTRE McGURNSALOT; fx budget of 15 and one quarter pee. And so, since the plot claims to untangle itself by working backwards, backwardsly let us trip and troll through these claims more »
Being a more or less unedited ilx liveblog of the BOOK in anticipation of the new screen version of John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: published in 1974, on the BBC in seven parts in 1979. Includes a couple of ilxor thread-responses, for clarity — but go read the whole thread when you have a moment, it’s full of ilx-y goodness (and badness hurrah). In the thread, I was being careful about revealing stuff: the only real change I’ve made here is to remove the veil of anti-spoilerdom. THIS THREAD NOW CONTAINS TOTAL END-AWAY-GIVING SPOILERS, SO STOP RIGHT NOW IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN OUT OF THE KNOW!!! Also do not read if you hate raw text-splurge, I have not re-edited for grammar, punctuation, coherence, grown-upness… more »
By Marcello Carlin, pub.Zer0 Books, £9.99, pb, 142pp.
Two threads run though my friend Marcello’s The Blue in the Air: one’s a fear, rarely directly stated; and the other’s a trust, a implicit confidence, a gamble. Between them, these oblique stances, very different but very connected, lure or impel us through an astonishing maze of music, much of it very likely unfamiliar, from radical free improv to one-off novelty pop, via every imaginable sheeptrack or rat-run or scenic bus ride… more »
