The game isn't over until Karen O pours bottled water on her head

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Brixton Academy, Tuesday December 1, 2009

It tickles me that the Brixton touts reduced their calls for tickets to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to simply "the Yeah Yeahs." Three Yeahs is quintessentially American in its cheerleading ("Yeah Yeah Yeah!") whereas two is British and downbeat ("Yeah, yeah -- get over it"). The different readings were a sign. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are more New York and older than their new fans expect. As the grumpy young thing standing in front of me tapped out on her Blackberry: it's all twenties and thirties here I thought it would be the Skins generation. OMG. Whatevs.

Instead of texting my BFFs before the sparkly curtain went up I was listening to the pre-gig DJ set: Suicide's 'Cheree', Eno and Byrne's 'Very, Very Hungry' and after the gig The Normal's 'Warm Leatherette', a track that everybody respects but nobody really loves. (Grace Jones' version: whole different story.) Way to make it hard for yourself, guys.

'Warm Leatherette' sums up the band but not in the way they might think. In their early days the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were cool in the sense that anything that might not have been cool about them had been eliminated, like a pre-vandalised industrial bus stop. Even the band's name seemed calculated: an instruction as to the position the audience should take. I was never a fan before 'Maps' (which the Brits love like Coldplay's 'Yellow' - it's all very singalong) and the album It's Blitz, which is terrific. I haven't interrogated the CD notes but something changed with the new one. They wrote songs, basically, and whatever stopped Karen O smiling kept going. The melancholy was a welcome break and also got Nick Zinner off the hook. He's as cool as fuck but may I be the first to quietly suggest that his guitar playing is not as incredible as the pose. For how could it be? The guy may look like a cross between The Cramps and Liaisons Dangereuses but if he sounded even half that good the universe would have collapsed and exploded years before now.

Karen O was much as I expected: cheerleader and stylestress, a One Note But The Right Note singer, and you can't hang a girl for that. She smiles an awful lot, mainly for the cameras recording a live DVD that will look more spontaneous than it really was, and she holds up the mike all the time (the cheerleading thing again -- third time I've used the word but I'm working dude, I have no time to type this really). There were also Costumes. She swung the microphone like a club (she's not very co-ordinated) but never broke the pose until the last Pretend Ending where she tipped bottled water over her head, the deconstruction of the bowl cut signifying that it was our bedtime.

The big live surprise was Brian Chase who turned out to be as loud and sharp and modern a drummer as Battles' John Stanier. But whereas Stanier looks like he's headed for cardiac arrest Chase flicked off 75 minutes of punchy rock drumming sweatlessly, just like that: he was unbelievably good. For most of the concert what we were really listening to was Brian's kick drum and Karen squawking like a duck while Nick chugged away not unacceptably. I thought they were nice kids except they are pretty old now, and most of the set consisted of It's Blitz. 'Maps' still tears me up. 'Zero's' a ten.

Bedtime stories: Paranormal Activity

It says a lot about my age that I spent much of Paranormal Activity admiring the haunted couple's house and thinking that if I had their two-storey three bedroom in San Diego* I'd make peace with the entity and maybe plant more things in the garden. At the very least, Katie and Micah could change sides on the bed or sleep with the door shut so the nameless thing would have to walk around the bed to get to whichever one of them it's after.

That the pair do not is the fly-on-the-wall POV equivalent of a Halloween teenager going outside at night to see what's making the noise in the pines. Lack of common sense is the basis for good horror movies. Katie and Micah have none but are proficient in the ways of video editing and digital sound enhancement.

In the old days of The Entity or The Exorcist scientific detection of a ghost required calling in experts from a university: even the kids in the first Nightmare On Elm Street had to check into a monitored sleep clinic. Now all victims need to do is go down to Radio Shack, assuming the software didn't come bundled on their PC. The nagging problem with Cloverfield was that no modern camera operator would be using a device without shake correction, let alone cut away from the monster. Paranormal Activity's unblinking hi-def monitoring of the supernatural is not only credible for modern audiences but mandatory.

When Micah does capture the entity's sounds and Katie and her sister regard the technology he is using without comment, I became enjoyably distracted by their technological sophistication. If both characters and audience understand how digital sampling can catch a ghost, will spooks become rationalised to the point when they are never scary again? This in a way is the movie's theme: tech is the protagonist and evil -- as represented by Micah flicking through the pages of a book of woodblocks and engravings of devils -- is the antagonist.

A truly creepy moment in Paranormal Activity is Katie's never-discussed hobby of threading beads to make dream catchers: a buried hint that she may be in communication with the spirit world, or that her family has some connection to playing with such entities and thus "opening the door" to them. Katie's sister has also witnessed to the scary phenomenom, and when the two women sit to have "girl time" they weave dream catchers together - another red light.

These scenes reminded me of The Blair Witch Project when the documentary makers interview a barely coherent local who reports seeing a strangely hirsute stranger, and the folklore of a woman who crossed a running stream with her feet not touching the ground. The images were clues to witch folklore and resonated in our unconscious at a deep level. That the audience had to create them in their own imagination, making up for the fictional and real filmmakers' lack of budget only added to their effectiveness.

Paranormal Activity has a more professional structure than Blair Witch, which makes it less scary overall: because there's none of the wandering we trust the filmmakers to scare us at certain points, which they do. The attractive young couple's lack of friends and neighbours requires suspension of disbelief and as the story progresses and the manifestations become more literal they become less frightening but the movie is still a ripper, particularly when the couple's disharmony literally invites bad things to happen. Simple is scary, but making things scary is not simple. The best technology is always well-buried.

*Nobody knows what it really means.

I want your ugly, I want your disease

I love pop music because it inspires me to lesser things. To wit, the red dwarf of Lady GaGa, neither stellar nor a black hole, and the luxuriously boxed but boxed nevertheless 'Bad Romance' which opens a bit amyl and Gatecrasher but kicks into Wham Vogue and stays there, in French. The French and the catwalk talk will get it into fashion shows and the remarkable video (did anyone think videos would ever be interesting ever again, like, ever?) will sell it on iTunes. She's a worker, a songwriter who deduced that she needed her own brand to make money, and an introvert who disguises herself with the loudest clothes possible. It doesn't matter if it's GaGa under all that digital slap (it is) or if she can play (she can) and as long as her songs can be ProTooled into ringtones they don't need to be beautiful (but they are). GaGa lifted from Roisin Murphy and Miss Mosh, in the same way Roisin lifted from Portishead and Mosh lifted (licked?) Boop and Betty Page, but really Lady GaGa is the pop future Kraftwerk promised us: sexual, detached, romantic, efficient, modular, universal.

Faceless

My 200-plus friends want me to come back to Facebook. I know this because three have emailed me. The rest of my Facebook friends have not. They don't know how to get in touch with me, because I'm not on Facebook.

I joined the social network in 2007 for the same reason I first logged on to the internet in 1994: I like talking to people and discovering how new things work. I never want to be the guy who can't program -- well, I won't say "the VCR" because that technology has come and gone, but you get my drift. I'm a novelist who works from home and the web is indispensable. I have a site, a blog and accounts with Yahoo, Gmail and YouTube. I chat, video conference, bank, book flights and back up my work online. Memes, 4chan: it's all good. If I squint, I can almost see the point of Twitter.

But Facebook? You couldn't drag me back.

I liked it at first. I joined and was quickly "friended" by an ex-colleague, then a real-life friend I hadn't seen in years, and a fan of my novels. I connected with mutual friends, people in media, journalists and other writers. Over the next year I noticed the circle widen as less tech and more "everyday" friends came online. I viewed their holiday snaps and uploaded my own, including scans of the good old days when I would have killed to be this connected.

I didn't "friend" strangers or celebrities. My fan and I enjoyed a single exchange ("When's your new novel coming out?" is a question a writer can only answer every two years) but one of her friends was an editor whom I friended, and suddenly I had placed a short story in his collection. I was making money off this thing.

More old friends joined. Fellow clubbers. Drinkers. Exes. Persons from whom I had become estranged. Sometimes there was a frisson; other times a frank exchange. Working alone in my study I knew that even if my email fell silent there would always be a conversation waiting on Facebook. The more trivial the better. Five Albums That Changed Me! The Lesbian Test! If a conversation became boring, I could come back to it later. I was connected, I was in control.

There were professional issues. To wit, would the photograph of you at the BDSM party negatively affect your future employment prospects? It seemed like a no-brainer to me. Don't post what you don't want people to see. This issue was as old as the Internet itself.

I even remained sanguine during the infamous March 2009 redesign in which Facebook's interface was tweaked to act less like a group of social pages and more like Twitter, the short message network that has been described as "Facebook on crack".

Now, rather than a ruminative tangle of Top Fives, amusing profile images and cryptically funny bulletins, the newly emphasised news feed encouraged users to constantly update their status. Out went the philosophical non-sequiters, in came banal minute-by-minute updates. ("Having a coffee." Who cares?)

In fact, I was relying on Facebook even more. Having moved to the UK I was using it to stay in touch with friends back home and people I was meeting for the first time. Londoners introduce themselves via (in order) their mobile phone, Facebook and (quaintly) their business card. I was using the site to arrange business meetings, social events, email friends and family and publicise my work. Facebook had become indispensable.

At which point, Facebook became totally useless.

There's a difference between staying in touch with your friends, and telling all of them the same thing at once. With my closest friends, I'm totally open. If I'm miserable or angry, they know. But I don't want to communicate that to an ex. And I don't want to talk about them to my new friends, and I don't necessarily want to bore my new friends about my work.

My stepsons were friends, as were my nephews. But I'm meant to be setting some kind of an example to them, and knowing about their social lives was about as appealing as peeping into a stranger's window. As for my editors and readers: I write fiction. The point of novels is to filter out that stuff. Like the movie actress whose skirts fell down on set, I felt like I had lost my mystique.

Facebook isn't socialising: it's broadcasting. Addressing these different groups was like being on a podium. My status updates had become as cautious as press statements. How could I say I'd seen Friend A when he was arguing with Friend B? How could I say I'd been out drinking with Friend C when I'd blown off a date with Friend D? As for professional complaints - forget about it. Add a journalist friend to that mix and you have a prairie fire.

I froze. I became frustrated. I tried using the site less but couldn't because it had become so central. It was all or nothing. I deleted all of my data and closed the account.

After a few weeks, three people wrote me emails saying they missed me. While 200-plus friends couldn't keep me on Facebook, those messages tugged at my conscience. And why wouldn't they? Real friends stay in touch.

-- The Age, September 2009 

Postscript: Parlance's blog on the evolution of language, Words All Around discussed the use of the word "friend" as a verb; Jesse Sommer discussed the article on Small Fried Chips of Thought; Brenda Chillingworth discussed it on her blog about journalism.

For Lowell and Kurt, too late

Long day. I don't like enjoy much about London at the moment but Saturday's pleasure is walking down to Camden to pick up the International Herald Tribune (IHT) and then walking back up to the Lord Palmerston for a big rioja and a slow read to burn off the demons. The IHT is the international (sic) edition of the New York Times and I buy it most days. Especially with the vino.

Today's edition included a review / feature on Kurt Vonnegut. Recommended. Kurt and Mark Twain are my two favourite authors in the whole wide world. Twain I don't read so much now but Vonnegut got me. He wrote short fiction and he was workmanlike, and constantly pissed off, and he loved people even after Dresden. Go figure. In George Plimpton's Truman Capote biography, Kurt talks about Capote coming round to swim in his pool at the height of the author's self-inflicted troubles. Kurt's account is flat as a board and as kind as casting an actress in a low light.

Soundtrack: Willing, by Lowell George. I don't know where I first heard Little Feat or Zappa. I still don't think either are very good, but they were there. Can't hang a man for that.

Lowell is Inara's dad. Inara's a peach. She's half of The Bird and The Bee, shown here covering 'I Can't Go For That' and later covering 'Psycho Killer' in white gloves.

Trip Checker interview (excerpt)

Leaning back in a patterned brown and orange booth of 246, the new space age arcade of Auckland City, New Zealand, Trip Checker enjoys a prawn cocktail and one of the latest drip percolator style coffees as the shoppers stroll beneath us on the ground floor. A week has passed since his discharge from Auckland Hospital: always bony and unshaven, the gentleman drummer is a little paler than usual. But he has kindly consented to keep the agreed appointment with Jazz Dispatch where we are keen to discuss his latest commercial forays plus rumours of a possible Muse Lounge reunion.

TRIP CHECKER: Is that thing on?

JANWILLEM DORIN: Yes I believe so. In 1969, you -

CHECKER: It's so damn small.

JD: It's one of the latest Japanese products.

CHECKER: And the mike picks up everything I'm saying?

JD: Yes. I was wondering if we could -

CHECKER: I'm hip.

JD: - if we could talk a little about Montreal.

CHECKER: That's a great town.

JD: Yeah?

CHECKER: It's a sweet gig. Yeah, I mean... we'd all meet up there, not in a planned way, you understand, but we'd meet up there see - I'd say to Clive [Janitor] and Elmore [Holdall] "see you at Montree." That was what we called it.

JD: Montree was your name for Montreal.

CHECKER: Swinging. [indistinct] So we'd be hanging around the tent. There were several tents, actually but the main tent you... [indistinct] ...the desk, right? And one of us would say - Elmore, usually, he'd say "let's do a gig." And we just would.

JD: With no rehearsal.

CHECKER: No, no. No rehearsal. Rehearsal's for squares, man! Rehearsal, I mean, hey, like we're not at school, you know? We're not like in class, this is not a class, man. You have to be there. You have to be there.

JD: But you had some sort of tonal framework, I understand -

CHECKER: No framework.

JD: Nothing? You had a scale worked out or something.

CHECKER: We had nothing, man. Nada.

JD: You just went in there?

CHECKER: You got it.

JD: And what if things didn't go as planned?

CHECKER: How could they? We didn't have any plans.

JD: I mean, what if things went wrong?

CHECKER: Then they went wrong. It's like life, you know? Why should Montree be any different?

JD: I think the danger is that the audience could think you were being indulgent.

CHECKER: We were always being indulgent. The only reason anyone ever heard us in the first place is because we decided to indulge ourselves by becoming a band. Everyone's indulging themselves. This interview's indulging you, I'm indulging myself by talking, you're indulging yourself by listening -

JD: Yes -

CHECKER: I mean, it's all indulgent, you know? We're all indulgent.

JD: OK. So, moving along -

CHECKER: I mean just moving along is indulgent. You dig?

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch, 1974
Translated from the original by Kirsty Widdell
(First reproduced | Dec 02, 2002)

I saw her today at the reception