From time to time I’ve ranted, here and elsewhere, about the amazing writing of George Saunders (”one of the funniest and most insane writers ever published in the New Yorker”, according the the New Yorker. And the natural successor to Kafka and Gogol, according to me). Actually, I’d been meaning to rant about how bloody hard it is to get most of his books over here - The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp was out of print when I tried to get hold of it, so in the end I had to resort to EBay, and when I recently tried to track down copies of Civilwarland in Bad Decline and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, I tried four bookshops (including the huge London Waterstones at ULU, which used to be Dillons) before finally tracking them down at Foyles.
Anyway. Where was I? Oh yeah… Saunders’ new book In Persuasion Nation is out now in the states, and over here in a couple of months. And it has a pretty cool new Persuasion Nation website to go with it (with a great short story MP3 download).
Many years ago, I had a taped copy of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Unsichtbare Chöre (”Invisible Choirs”). For years, I’d forgotten about it, but something reminded me of it a couple of weeks ago, and twice since then it’s come up in conversation.
So I was really surprised to see the new Honda Civic ad (avaiable here with a “making of” film here) yesterday. The commercial features a choir mimicking exactly the various noises of the car driving and the environments it passes through. The vocal techniques used by Honda’s choir, and many of the sounds they make, seem exactly like those from Stockhausen’s work (at least, as I remember it from some ten years ago). These are, for the most part, techniques and sounds which I’ve never heard used in any other music.
The advert is incredible, of course, on a par with Wieden and Kennedy’s earlier Cog ad for the Honda Accord in terms of technical accomplishment and sheer bloody impressiveness. Plus it’s for the Civic, a car which I have a soft spot for as it was my first ever motor. Nice one again, W&K! (And Karlheinz).
As I’ve been getting in touch with lots of bands recently, through my gig photography and just the fact that I’m getting into a lot more new music, I finally took the plunge and signed up with Myspace. Actually I have two accounts: my own personal homepage and a music page for my old band, Cathy Ray.
Any readers of this blog who are also on Myspace, please add me.
Last night I was very, very drunk. And I have the photos to prove it.
Five years ago, I wrote a piece called Does Music Have a Future, which I’ve always been rather proud of.
Yesterday, a comment piece in the Guardian echoed much of what I said back then. The future has arrived!
By the way, most of the comments following that article seem to confuse the use of the term “boy band”, meaning mass-market manufactured all-encompasing pop, with “boy band” meaning either a band with boys in it, or a band making bland pop music. I don’t deny that both of the latter will continue, perhaps even thrive, but I don’t think we’ll again see a day when they dominate the music charts and push everything else to the periphery as they did for much of the 80s and 90s.
PS, another year gone and I still didn’t get around to playing my April Fool joke.
For my UK readers: I wouldn’t normally stoop this low but… how about you buy a copy of the Mail on Sunday tomorrow morning? Or for my Irish readers (are there any?) buy Ireland on Sunday.
The reason being they are almost certainly going to be publishing one of my photographs, of Peaches Geldof singing with her boyfriend’s band Trafalgar. Apparently part of a piece on how she is “following in her father’s footsteps”.
A pretty pleasing result - less than a month after the end of my photojournalism course, and I’ve almost covered the cost of the course with one photo which I took at the end of that week.
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