Tuesday 31 July 2018

Play it again

Tuesday 31 July:

Auspices all over the shop today, at least in terms of the semi-arbitrary yet frankly somehow spooky confluence of evidence that lessons are not easily learned which is summoned up by the fact that today happens to be the 101st anniversary of Passchendaele, it's 56 years since the vanguard of the vanguard of Australian forces set foot in Vietnam, (56 also being today's lucky number astrologically speaking) and it's also the tenth anniversary of Australia's withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. Right now is a good time for thinking about plans, goals and projects, such as tomorrow's pew cushion fabric repair bee which is to follow the 10:30am service at St Nicholas's Church. And thus it is that today brings a big shift in your thinking and it's almost certainly positive! However, this should subside as your body gets used to the extra pep from rising estrogen. Mood: Refreshed

The most important thing that happened today is I listened to this song 44 times between 6am and now



I say 'listened' but of course the active listening faded in and out across all those repetitions, most of which took place in the context of me travelling to and from work, walking around the building, working at my desk. Nevertheless I tuned in for extended periods to wonder, first of all, what is it about songs, certain songs and songs in general, that they induce in me this craving for repetition? There is nothing else that I enjoy doing that I want to do in this way, ie obsessive periodic binging on repetitions of a single brief experience. I don't remember now whether I wrote about this at the time, but earlier this year I read David Byrne's book How Music Works, expecting that he would address this and a couple of other questions I had about music. He didn't though. I enjoyed the book very much, once I understood it was really a kind of autobiography, but it left me none the wiser about how it is that music works.

I would listen with pleasure and interest to anything James Blake recorded and put out there, and part of what's got me about this cover of Vincent is simply the rich and intimate colours in his surpassingly beautiful and interesting voice (which is recorded much better in the version on Apple Music than it is in this Youtube clip) but the choice of this song - this terrible, maudlin, grotesque, bloated, overrated, tacky bit of the seventies that should have stayed buried - is fascinating in ways I can't quite get a handle on. Part of it revolves around the question of cool. And so the other thing I wondered is, Can this be this an example of a gesture that is so intensely dorky that it goes all the way to the distant end of dork and out the other side into an undiscovered realm of coolness? I don't know: I doubt it, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure that nothing is ever cooler than straight sincerity and not apologising for liking something obviously uncool. That said there isn't any song from the 1970s which is dorkier than Vincent. Not one. It is the limit case.







I'm done with dropped gloves. I know this because I've spotted some lovely ones and I just sailed on past them. It felt right. These three are the last gloves that I photographed: I've grandfathered them into my blog out of a faint feeling that I had made some kind of commitment to somebody, in paying these fallen ones a moment's attention on their great transitions from useful objects intimately applied to human bodies to unregarded pieces of flat sodden garbage.




1 comment:

ernmalleyscat said...

goodbye gloves