Kthaahthikha

If you have an artistic ability that you would like to showcase, Night Gig are opening-up two slots in September. Go submit some stuff and them may give you a free site.

They gave me one, so I'm not sure how high their standards are.

I've been listening back through Air's back catalogue quite a bit lately, and it's only served to reaffirm my high opinion of them.

I am quite the fan of Air. Their tongue-in-cheek take on the cliche' of the ice-cold European artiste is a delight, especially as we have only their own assurances that it isn't true. Their music, at least their post-Safari stuff, is the perfect blend of repetition, mtion and careful, gentle pacing, giving tracks where very little is going-on a rapid, exhilirating feeling, and working perfectly when a song like The Word Hurricane decides it's time to turn-on the sexy. And sexy it is indeed.

That said, I've been interested in the critical response to most of the material post-Moon Safari. Every review seeming to run to the tune of 'It's quite good, but no Moon Safari', this began to puzzle me somewhat. I think Air have managed to tighten, sharpen their music, giving it more focus than the Wordsworthian rambles that filled most of Moon Safari and were swarming under the skin of Premiers Symptomes like a host of South Paraguayan swarming-ants. It seems that most of the reviewers who came to Air came through their early stuff, and immediately formed a mental mold into which Air fit rather neatly - something which it became apparent was not meant to last when Virgin Suicides came out, and was well-and-truly refuted by 10,000 hz legend.

My favourite album would probably have to be Talkie Walkie. It has more going-on than Moon Safari, but doesn't fall into the occasional trap that Legend sprung of placing quality tracks of one very sqpecific kind in amongst many other quality tracks of a very different form - much like putting diamonds in ice-cream (a surprisingly-accurate simile, I feel), the combination didn't really work. This was the real flaw of Legend, in that it sacrificed the group's sense of pacing and over-all structure for a parade of singles - an understandable tactic but one they didn't quite manage to pull-off.

Talkie Walkie, however, is sharp, clear, elegant, simple and dark. It is probably closest to Suicides in tone, even if it has very little in common thematically. The sharpness manages to cut through the soft, vague slickness that was such a trademark of Moon Safari (which I really do like, but I'm afraid everyone needs a point of comparison), revelling in catchy tunes and swaying, deeply-layered excercises in pop that play like the fairytale electric Sigur Ros at their more shadowy moments.

I think the albumdoes begin to suffer towards the end, however. The tracks retain a certain quality, but after the lush density of Alone in Kyoto (which appeared in Sophia Coppola's marvelous Lost in Translation - I always love it when kids show their parents how it's done) the tracks seem to merge into one long fade-out. Obviously, this plays great if one is lounging about at twelve am, reading something vaguely-intellectual and contemplating wine, but are sometimes harder to get into at more active hours of the day. I'd really love to hear Air's Late Night Tales compilation.

I realise the review is hopelessly out-of-date, but meh.

Also, they have made an Australian Western. It is set in Australia in the Bushranger era, in the desert. it has Guy Pierce in it and was written by Nick Cave. This can only be a good thing.

It is called The Proposition.

And I have made bad music. Go download it from my website. I listened to yours, Bean.

I may review Look Both Ways some time. It's wondrous.

I made a song! It's not very good! It samples Hendrix shamelessly!

I'd like to send a big shout-out to my estranged brother Robert, who should come along and read this some time in the next few days (I hope). I love you, Robbie, and I hope you find some of the ridiculous thing available via this site entertaining. Yours is pretty neat, too. To see my other site just click here

I have also composed a discriptive vignette.

Imagine a man, as broad as he is tall, seated in a high-backed leather anachronism behind a mahogany bureau. He is dressed in a grey suit that fits him like a second skin, with a brown felt vest, the brass buttons of which gleam from careful polishing. The man’s face is broad and bloated, the eyes hidden amidst Byzantine folds of flesh. The body squirms from time to time, as though something were pushing at the fabric which constitutes this grotesquely-expansive form.

The man reaches to the buttons of his vest and begins to undo them. The head tilts-up, the chin lifted from the creature’s chest as the face on the back of its neck crumples into folds reminiscent of a foreskin. Thin, bluish-grey arms reach out from beneath the vest, clutching at the fabric and drawing it tight as though a dressing-gown. Through the cracks, one catches glimpses of ribs that fray and jut outwards from a body like that of a skinless whippet.

The eyes are yellowish-white with lavender irises, smallish globes set in broad oval fields of exposed red flesh. The mouth is broad, rubbery, too wide for the face it serves, the lips thick, the nose a plunging column of bone with splaying nostrils. The cheeks are hollow and striated, the bones like stubby wings. Creases run about the too-small eyes and the too-large mouth, a complex maze of wrinkling as folds overlap folds of loose, foundationless skin. Spittle and mucus course sluggishly through the runnels.

‘Mr Blasko,’ says Sisterre, ‘lovely to meet you.’


I have also been listening to a lot of late-sixties Psychadelia lately, and was ecstatic when I finally found the song from The Game's soundtrack that I've had in my head for six years (it was White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane).

To finish this off, I must say that Sgt Pepper's is arguably the most overrated album in the history of time. It's a good album, yes. Even a brilliant album. It is not the best album that I have ever heard.

On an unrelated note, Human After All was very underrated, but the Peaches remix of Technologic leaves the original for dead. I'm also both delighted and distressed that Sigur Ros' new single is onyl available via paid download. I must engage in felony, it seems, due to my lack of cards.

So, yes, little but a few musical notes, a vignette, and me telling my brother I love him. Sorry.

I finally did it. After long months of struggling against his Siren call, I went out and borrowed GRR Martin's A Game of Thrones. And what's more, I don't hate it. It's not quite as I'd expected (although very close to my mental image), but quite entertaining nonetheless. Also, numerous people had complained about a lack of magic in the series. This has failed to impress itself upon me, no doubt due to my being readily-distracted by the attack by revenants, the giant, mystically-linked wolf, and the wall of ice.

That said, I have been reduced to listening to the audio book version, and at nineteen large cassettes, it is a daunting sight to this traveller still weary from the road.

This painting is the subject of three short poems that I must write for my Literature assignment. It is called The Sleeping Venus, by Paul Delvaux. And on the subject of Literature, Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the vaguest, most poorly-grounded and down-right hypocritical films I have ever seen, although it helped to pass the time. I can't believe I used to enjoy it thoroughly (although the visuals are still pretty nice ten years on). There is an excellent disection of the piece as compared to the novel and to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein here

There are many excitements afoot in this most thrilling of worlds. After untold aeons of scrabbling through the murky corridors of templated single-purpose sites, I have been excepted into the fold at Night Gig, in my new studio, Assorted Miscellanea. The cupboards are at present a little bare, but I'm working on it. I'm a busy man.

I also have far too much homework, and one of the vaguest assignment topics that I have ever read (and that's saying quite a lot). Tomorrow, being a free day, will be wholly given-over to painting two bad still-lifes. Then I still have to go out and photograph well-composed landscape shots for an annoying tutor who can't seem to work-out if he wants us to be technically-proficient or artistically-daring, and write that damned Dracula parody, too.

University irks me.