Iggy

Later With Jools Holland interview 2010.

Eddie

Edward James Olmos interviewed here:

If your possible careers included only baseball and acting, you really rolled those dice.

[Laughs.] Amen. I did not create any sort of backup plan. But one thing I learned at a very young age is not to try and live outside my means. I don't let possessions own me. I think the only payment I have is my house. I don't have car payments or credit cards. I'm not a rich guy — I could have been very rich or much more famous had I done all the work I was offered. I just couldn't do it. I'm not that gifted to be able to do stuff I don't have passion for.

Now playing

Drunken Wednesday (already?) night Recently Played.

1. 'Baby You're a Rich Man' – The Beatles They were huge, apparently, and criticising them is against the law in Britain. But can we just point out that far from being the big fat Rutles failure that it's claimed to be, Magical Mystery Tour has all the best songs on it, and this track recorded without George Martin (as opposed to in spite of him) is a cracker. Featured on The Social Network, so the kids are down with it. Like!
   
2. 'White Love' - One Dove Speaking of tuned to a natural E: standout obscure track from the pre-millennium before MDMA escapades went corporate. Vocalist / songwriter Dot Allison (Dot!) went on to her own solo spooky stuff including a breathy collaboration on 'Girls', the only Death in Vegas song that anyone cares about.
3. 'I've Seen That Face Before' – Grace Jones She's an old lady now. So are you. But she's still ice cold in Alex, and you're not. Grace Jones did everything right when we were all still working shit out.
   
4. 'Design for Living' – Nona Hendryx Revived by Bill Laswell, we thought, but no – she was the life force. Scraping metallic bad things presage uplifting gospel discordance at the song's conclusion. Ms Hendryx has issues; few have presented them with such classic grace. From the near-mythically prescient album Nona. Good luck finding a legal copy of that one. The woman's a genius. Bill helped.
   
5. 'Live With Me' – The Rolling Stones Clever'n'that. They made lots of money and outlived everyone except for some of The Rolling Stones. Their longevity has validated a ragged output and Mick singing with the saddest American accent in the world but there's a reason why they're loved and this is it.
6. 'Bonnie & Clyde' – Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot Foolish, whooping mélange until you play it alongside its modern electro / rap counterparts and realise what a classic foolish, whooping mélange it is. As important to modern music as Brian Eno and Snatch's 'RAF'. Vive la something or other!
7. 'Magic Spells' – Crystal Castles The best band in the world ATM IMHO. Don't know what those kids do but it's brilliant: recessive, near-anonymous vocals over a pissed-off curtain of electronic sound. Said it before: if Cayce Pollard had a band, Crystal Castles would be it.
   
8. 'Liebe auf den Ersten Blick' – D.A.F. Sexy pared-back electro; opening track for an album Gold und Liebe which never quite lived up to its Suicide-al aspirations but did trick you into buying the gayest album in your LP collection outside of [insert band name here].
9. 'Psychic Chasms' – Neon Indian Summery metronomic love song (Or Is It?) from the digital swimming hole. Everything is good when you listen to this: it's so damn up, you know their parents have already set up their retirement plan and all they're really doing is kicking back. Not a bad thing.
10. 'Sweetest Pie' - Curve An oldie for me. Curve were like Oasis, but with songs. Singer / songwriter / not just a knockout Toni Halliday was quintessentially electro in the way that PJ Harvey was quintessentially indie, but dismissed as being too convenient for 90s grunge trends. Longing constellations of pretty-edged regret don't come along that often: we were ungrateful then, but so much older now.
    

One by one

School of Seven Bells' 'Bye Bye Bye' was my most played song in 2010. Bells ' Alejandra Deheza interviewed by author Rick Florino:

What records shaped you? What do you always come back to?

A huge album from when I was little was Fleetwood Mac's Rumors. I was totally blown away by the harmonies they sang. I'm a really huge Echo and the Bunnymen fan. I love his lyrics, and I love the music. Will Sergeant's like my favorite guitar player ever. His guitar lines are almost Middle Eastern. I feel like what he was doing, no one was doing at the time. Ian McCulloch's such a great singer. I love what they do because they're very abstract, but they know how to make a melody everyone can relate to. That's really important to me when I hear music. You don't want to make music to alienate people or to make someone feel like they don't get it. There's a place for things like that. For me, I love making music that can communicate something real.

Full interview at ArtistDirect.com.

Stable door? Check

Above, the graphic from Sarah Palin's 'Take Back the 20' campaign. U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords is in the left column, fourth from the top. Since the shooting Palin – or the person who runs her Twitter account – has been deleting tweets such as this one.

When Palin was Mayor of Wasilla she enquired about censoring library books:

Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.

In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose.

Emmons told the Frontiersman she flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship [...]

"Sarah said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?" Kilkenny said.

"I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.'"

Palin didn't mention specific books at that meeting, Kilkenny said [...] A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired.

Earlier this week, Montgomery English professor Alan Gribben announced he was publishing a censored version of Huckleberry Finn:

"I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either 'Huckleberry Finn' or 'Tom Sawyer,' " he said. "And I don't think I'm alone.... I'm by no means sanitizing Mark Twain," Mr. Gribben said. "The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone."

Surely feeling uncomfortable about 'that word' is one of the things the book has to teach us? If Quentin Tarantino and Chuck D. can use the n- word, so can Mark Twain. Conversely, feeling uncomfortable about something you or your campaign operatives have tweeted, or posted, or the metaphors you've employed to whip up people's feelings can demonstrate that you're having second thoughts about it – or even, possibly, that you're thinking about it for the very first time.

In the wake of John Lennon's murder in 1980 there were calls to ban the book that shooter Mark Chapman was carrying in his pocket – predictably, Catcher in the Rye, but it could have just as easily been Naked Lunch or On The Road. In that instance I thought it was mad to blame the book and not the gun, so it would be hypocritical to blame Palin for the incident in Arizona. However, words have an effect, which is precisely why we use them – or choose not to. Speech should be free: it will never be free from meaning.

Postscript: The FBI is investigating the links:

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, who travelled to Tucson, Arizona, to take charge of the investigation, said that one focus of the inquiry is whether far-right organisations and websites played a role.

"The ubiquitous nature of the internet means that not only threats, but hate speech and other inciteful speech is much more readily available to individuals than quite clearly it was eight or 10 or 15 years ago," he said.

Investigators are exploring suspected links between Loughner and an online publication known for its strongly anti-immigrant stance, American Renaissance. It has denied any links to the accused killer.

Full story here.

PPS: Sarah Palin's Facebook page operators have been censoring – and not censoring – posts in disturbing ways.

Light in your head and dead on your feet

So the world is ending because some birds and fish died in smaller quantities than you would find in a supermarket freezer. Quoth The Examiner:

While no one person, not even self-proclaimed prophets, know if God of the Christian Bible is now ushering mankind into the End Times, many believe this week's dead birds and fish are a sign the Great Tribulation talked about in the book of Revelation and Daniel is fast approaching.

Other signs: Gerry Rafferty is dead, and Agnetha wants ABBA to reform. Birds and fish flock, so they're more likely to go down in scores, surely? I'm impressed that there are any fish left to wash up, given the quantities in which we net them. More seriously, how will the fragile-minded react to official news outlets contemplating the end of everything? The Northern Line was delayed with a person in front of the train today: death is always a single stride away. The Gaia theory is to 2010 what nuclear war was to the Reagan / Thatcher years: now is not the time to shout fire.

And China has a Stealth bomber. (This is of interest to me because I'm a guy.) The US spins arms tech at a slower rate than the Chinese but the key point is that China now has the money to invest in expensive and unreliable technology. The B2, famously, can't stand the rain:

Testing indicated that B-2s are also sensitive to extreme climates, water, and humidity-- exposure to water or moisture can damage some of the low-observable enhancing surfaces on the aircraft. Further, exposure to water or moisture that causes water to accumulate in aircraft compartments, ducts, and valves can cause systems to malfunction. If accumulated water freezes, it can take up to 24 hours to thaw and drain. Air Force officials said it is unlikely that the aircraft's sensitivity to moisture and climates or the need for controlled environments to fix low-observability problems will ever be fully resolved, even with improved materials and repair processes.

The Newton of arms tech, in other words. Relax! Global warming will have killed us by the time it's operational.

I love Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street.' When I came to London in 1978 it was all over the radio. I'll forever associate it with the first Kate Bush album, the smell of bacon and eggs on a gas stove, loneliness and bad weather.

Postscript: AP science report here. ("The irony is that mass die-offs - usually of animals with large populations - are getting the attention while a larger but slower mass extinction of thousands of species because of human activity is ignored.")

Miss January, and the future of publishing

When I killed Twitter a friend consoled me by saying, well, the only thing you ever posted about was writing. Marginalia is the opposite: my scrapbook of distractions: movies, TV, January Jones' black eyes like a doll's eyes. (Actually they're blue but the show is graded.) So if you follow this blog, 2011 will be more of the same. When I had a home my wall was pinned with all kinds of crap. Thanks to technology, anyone can share in my Many Wastes of Time.

But then last night I was nosing around the torrents, as you do, and wondered, hey, what .epub files are out there? And in less than ten seconds I had downloaded three commercial best sellers. The speed itself was unsurprising: the total works of Shakespeare are around 5 megabytes – less than a single pop song at 128kbps – and the books in question were around 500k. I've been told by programmers and developers that DRM protected ebooks are easily cracked, which makes sense: the format is XHTML, which is designed for sharing, and its contents are text only, with maybe a cover graphic.

The ease of access was enlightening. If you are faced with the choice of buying an ebook for the hardback cover price or downloading it for free faster than you can cough, is the "new" publishing business model sound? Computer users are more savvy than ever, networks are faster, storage devices are of greater capacity and cheaper – and the commercial object being illegally traded is, proportionally, smaller and easier to hack. We're talking the average size of an email here. Publishers may be trading on the basis of free distribution sooner than they think.

JJ pic c/ GQ, as per usual.