Miscellany: drawing carts, year zero and the vinyl Hoover

  • Toby Amies has put his radio documentaries online. All of them are worth a listen, but I particularly recommend 'Beatmining with the Vinyl Hoover' and 'The Man Whose Mind Exploded', the latter of which is a fantastic Brighton story.
  • Last weekend followed some advice from zenbullets and archived off my music collection, all 17 1/2 days of it. I currently have a more manageable 6 hours. It's proving an interesting experiment and I'm enjoying the music more.
  • Interesting rant by Stewart Lee about 'content', which contains some provocative points about the importance of medium. "The Tewa clowns would not be cross-platformed. Their content was developed for the pueblo square format and it would stay that way."
  • Lovely slideshow from Jake Spicer, showing an outdoor launch event for the Artists Open Houses that he was involved with.
  • Today's XKCD has some haunting alt text: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

Psychogeographical Experiment: Blindfolded walking

Guy Debord defined psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals". The discipline is a mish-mash of ideas and experiments, many of them contradictory or in violent opposition. One common aspect is the idea of exploring one's enviroment by the means of experiments and play.

For some time I've been meaning to try a number of experiments in Brighton. It's a place I know well and one that I love exploring. It is also a very playful city, sometimes seeming almost alive. Tonight, with my accomplice Dr Evil, I tried a first experiment, blindfolded walking.

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The idea was quite simple, taking turns to walk blindfolded along the seafront, with the guide suggesting course corrections and helping to avoid obstacles.

The experience was intense. Time and distance were hard to estimate while blindfolded. Above the constant noise of traffic, one could pick out passers-by, the scampering of dogs, but very few details. The sea was so quiet it could not be heard above the traffic. Dr Evil wondered about "all the silent things that you are missing." 

Walking blind produced a strange relation to space. At first it felt as if one was just about to walk into something. It was very hard to judge how far away things were by sound alone. Time too changed, with the doctor estimating time passing twice as fast as it was. The subway was particularly interesting, as it distorted and focussed the sounds of the road above. 

Finally, in homage to the film Intacto (video here) we took turns running blind.

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Afterwards we felt tired and also more alert. We found ourselves more aware of potential trip hazards and had to stop ourselves from warning the (now sighted) other. It was an interesting way to experience a quiet sea-front. We're hoping to try this again in the town one evening.

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Anonymous stories near the Level

One of the things I love most about Brighton is the strange pieces of anonymous art you find about the place. Maybe such things happen elsewhere, but I don't remember much of it in Hastings, Norwich or Coventry.

I saw the first story below on Wednesday night when I was escorting Ellen to the Skiff. I saw the one below on a run earlier that day, but thought it was a strange notice rather than a story. I was pleased to find they were both still there when I went to work on Thursday morning.

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Why music needs to be hard to find

I'm fascinated by the Internet's effect on counter-culture. For example, at the end of London Calling, his history of London's underground scenes, Barry Miles argues:

"With the coming of the Internet, underground publication has effectively disappeared. There can be no avant-garde unless there is a time delay before the general public knows what you are doing… Whereas artists in the Sixties could work for years with no media coverage, the hardest thing now is to not have thousands of hits on Google or an entry on Wikipedia."

The Internet has also produced subtle changes in the way artists innovate. A recent article in Slate by Bill Wyman, Lester Bangs' Basement, remembers the days before we could take the Internet cultural treasure-house for granted:

"The music you wanted to hear wasn't played on the radio and you couldn't find the records you wanted to buy. You couldn't even find the magazines that told you what records you should want to buy. It was almost impossible to see filmed footage of the artists you wanted to see. And movie fans? We scurried like rats after what could be, for all we knew, once-in-a-lifetime viewing opportunities to see this or that film at movie theaters or in unexpected showings on television.

He quotes a review of the recent Keith Richard's autobiography that discusses what it was like to make music when other music was scarce:

"Mick had seen Buddy Holly play, and played the Buddy Holly songs he heard—if he didn’t play them, he wouldn’t hear them—in bars around Dartford. Anyone reading this review can go to YouTube now and experience Muddy Waters, or Chuck Berry, or Buddy Holly… the experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity… The Rolling Stones do not happen in any other context: they were a band based on craving, impersonation, tribute: white guys from England who worshiped black blues… The early Stones were in a constant huddle, dissecting blues songs in front of the speakers and playing them back for each other and then for their few fans. They thought of themselves, not even as a band, really, but as a way of distributing music the radio never played.

This idea of making music inspired by music you love but have little access to has turned up a few times in my reading. Most recently in Days in the Life by Jonathan Green, during an interview with Peter Jenner:

 "At [Pink Floyd's] finest, it was very extra-ordinary free improvisation, in the purest psychedelic sense… We thought we were doing what was happening on the West Coast, which we'd never heard. And it was totally different. Attempting to imitate when you don't know what you're imitating leads to genuine creativity, and I think that's what happened with the Floyd."

Earlier in the book there is another interview with Peter Jenner, talking about rhythm and blues:

"Eric Clapton would never have seen Muddy Waters playing live; the Stones would never have heard Bo Diddley live. You'd have heard a couple of records and just tried to get the spirit. In fact they'd have been rather brought down if they'd seen them. I saw Muddy Waters live in America in 1960 and he played sitting down. That would have really upset the Stones."

Another example: Kurt Cobain spoke of his discovery of punk rock in Aberdeen, Washington, through reading about the Sex Pistols:

"My first exposure to punk rock came when Creem started covering the Sex Pistols' U.S. tour. I would read about them and just fantasize about how amazing it would be to hear their music and to be a part of it… After that, I was always trying to find punk rock, but of course they didn't have it in our record shop in Aberdeen. The first punk rock I was able to buy was probably Devo and Oingo Boingo and stuff like that; that stuff finally leaked into Aberdeen many years after the fact. Then, finally, in 1984 a friend of mine named Buzz Osborne [Melvins singer/guitarist] made me a couple of compilation tapes with Black Flag and Flipper everything… I'd already been playing guitar by then for a couple of years, and I was trying to play my own style of punk rock, or what I imagined that it was, I knew it was fast and had a lot of distortion. Punk expressed the way I felt socially and politically."

Sometimes glimpses of a culture are more inspiring than access to the full resources of that culture. There are many obvious advantages of the Internet's cultural treasure horde, but some things are lost too. Is there any way to regain the benefits of cultural scarcity?

The Blue Boar

One of the books about the 60's that I'm currently reading is Days in the Life by Jonathon Green. It's a fascinating series of interviews with people involved in the counterculture.

From an interview with June Bolan:

"You always went home after a gig because you couldn't afford to stay anywhere! You'd do Newcastle and back in a night. There were no motorways to speak of. They loved the Floyd out in the sticks… The highlight of the evening if you'd been to Newcastle and were coming back was  to go to the Blue Boar, the service station. You'd see people like the Small Faces, Spencer Davies, the Soft Machine."

The Blue Boar is one of those things that turns up incidentally in a lot of books about the sixties. Now Watford Gap Services, it's well remembered for the people who passed through. From a post on a motorway services blog: "Jimi Hendrix is reputed to have been under the false impression that the “Blue Boar Cafe” was some trendy nightclub, because his British contemporaries mentioned it so often"

A four legged goat

In February, I visited Southern India with my Dad. We went to Kanyakumari, a town at the country's southern tip. We paid £1.30 each to visit a museum that the Lonely Planet described as "overpriced and underwhelming":

"There's a blah display of archeological finds and temple artefacts and some freakshow paraphenalia, like the foetus of a four-legged goat and (gasp!) a three-chambered coconut

I can never resist freakshow paraphenalia. It turned out that the four-legged goat's foetus was one of the Lonely Planet's rare errors. It was, in fact, an eight-legged foetus: 

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Here is a photograph of a three-chambered coconut:

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Miscellany: small publishers, red squares, hitch-hiking