New Toy

New Toy on the way Doodle. It's not the cone of silence but it will be worth the viewing pleasure,
Cheers.

Aphex Twin Pt 2 - Come to Daddy

O.K, so here's the second part to Aphex Twin - 'Come to Daddy' -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Az_7U0-cK0

I'm sure there'll be a few who will have seen this on Rage (on the ABC). It has to be one of the warped clips I've seen on Rage in a long time. This surpasses 'Gay Bikers on Acid' and The Cycle Sluts From Hell's - 'Wish You Were a Beer'. Chris Cunningham is the guy responsible for this clip and he's worth checking out as a separate entity, perhaps try You Tube on this one. He's done clips for Bjork, Squarepusher and Autechre also. See Aphex Twin's Profile in the previous post if you haven't already looked.

Commenting tips

Hey, I just wanted to mention a few tips about making comments.
Firstly, you dont have to be a member to make a comment on any of my posts.
Secondly, if you choose the anonymous setting after making your comment it should be posted (let me know if this hasn't been working, I guess through my email), all you have to do is copy the code that appears. This code is there to stop unnecessary spamming.
Thirdly, feel free to comment. This whole blog is about connection, and hopefully quite a different connection than facebook. I'm looking for a creative and open connection that delves a little deeper (at times I guess). Sometimes I just want to share the joy that is this existence!
Lastly, I have been loaned a really cool toy and hope to have something really cool posted soon.
Cheers, and here's hoping the cone of silence hasn't fallen on all those who've chosen to take a peek at my blog.

Aphex Twin Pt 1 - Nannou

I love this track. I have to tell you what it does for me. Firstly you need to listen to this through headphones or earphones if possible. This song reminds me of when I was little and being fascinated with Mum's musical wind up jewellery box. When I close my eyes and let my child-like fascination return it is like returning there all over again. With no adult preconceptions, just pure fascination, untethered and flowing with the movement of the song. It also reminds me of a high school class where my English teacher asked us to close our eyes and listen to some music and to write down what our imagination did with the music when we heard it. I'm sure we weren't listening to Aphex Twin but I like to use the experience to reinterpret, reimagine and reinvigorate my enjoyment and pleasure of my vast music collection time and time again. This is the quieter side of Richard D James. His ambient work is some of the best and reminds me of the love I had for Jean Michel Jarre (one of the fathers of ambient/experimental music I think) when I was much younger. If you haven't yet explored the eclectic electric mindfield of Richard D James just be aware that there are amazing highs and incredibly shocking jolts of creation as well as minimalist works that soothe the worn down souls at the end of the week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaXqU7hVVhI

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&searchlink=APHEXTWIN&sql=11:kxfoxqw5ldje~T1


Cheers.

Laurie Anderson's - O Superman

Laurie Anderson's clip and song fascinates me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7XnOnSkkA

I'm still learning about the creative spirit behind this fascinating performance art. I certainly love (as a sociologist) the social, cultural and political commentary interwoven in the lyrics as well. There isn't a lot that I know about the woman, all I know is that her work certainly should bear recognition and contemplation (or perhaps from some contempt). I think her work certainly reflects important creation/art worth more than a second look. Given her credentials I thought Doodle Ace McDonkey might find her work interesting but then again he's probably already been here with his ears and eyes also. A small biography is found at all-music below.

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:jifrxqw5ldae~T1

Musical introductions - The Legendary Stardust Cowboy

Given I haven't started the radio program yet, this is a first in the series of music I just can't help sharing with people. I hope most of you have the internet coverage to listen/watch this stuff. All episodes will (hopefully) have links to clips/soundtracks on YouTube. The first episode is the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and his famous hit 'Paralysed', enjoy and feel free to comment (here, not on YouTube!) as to your impressions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cq-9BSiHdY

The following biography (in the link below) on 'The Ledge' is taken from the Allmusic website (which is a veritable library for anything on anyone that you like listening to) and was written by Steve Huey. I have tried to link the biography numerous times and I hope this one works. Let me know if it doesn't.

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:hzfoxq85ldte~T1

I was first introduced to the 'Ledge' through watching 'Hey Hey It's Saturday' (a once popular Australian TV show) religiously as a child. They used to sample 'Paralysed' fairly consistently with the sound dept. interrupting Daryl and Ozzie each week. Recently I was introduced to the Ledge's first album 'Rock-it to Stardom' and found it to be quite a wild and inventive sound, one that certainly didn't take itself too seriously whilst also invoking a wildness in my own spirit (Dionysian perhaps?). I just wanted to yell, howl and yahoo all round the house while playing it for the first time. It astounds me that this artist held on to his sound whilst many around him were either criticising him or trying to capitalise on the 'next new sound'. Yes the MC5 were making that new sound in the late 1960s but so was the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

I hope this first (and continously edited!) episode in musical exploration has been enlightening and enjoyable. I aim to impress, challenge and bombard your senses, musically of course.

Cheers,
Ian.

Nananananananana Batman!

Finally a pic. Just relaxing after almost drowning in a pile of 100 sociology essays. If only they could mark themsleves. The above mentined pic originates around my 5th or 6th birthday I think (late 70s). Given the old black and white you miss the wonderful black and red contrast of the costume. Mum made that cool eye mask as well. Oh and I'm also carrying my kid's imitation 2 wood. You should have seen how far I could hit those plastic golf balls. The only thing I found, when I actually went to the golf course with Dad, was that plastic balls do not wash well in the windy ball washer thingy. They broke. Could you imagine what my driving looked liked compared to the adults!

Oh and another thing. If you feel up to it and you haven't given up on this blog altogether it would be great to see your comments. I often wonder how many 'visitors' I get when there are so few comments. If you do I'll gladly repay you with more recent and consistent postings. Otherwise keep on facebooking and just forget about it.

Cheers.

Untag my heart.

I was tagged by Lillieve. I am still quite the technological luddite so I do not yet know how to provide links. Thanks LE! This is kinda fun. So I guess with all other bloggers that I know already tagged I'll just tag myself! MMMMM start an infinite tagging/chain mail loop with myself, could it be possible to have an infinitely multiple personality disorder?

The rules:
1. Link to the person who “tagged” you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know your entry is up.

1. See above
2. Done.
3. - I'm currently anxiously awaiting the news of my pending PhD proposal (and scholarship). Tom Petty was right, waiting is the hardest part.
- I'm still quite new to this blogging thing but I have to say that I like it much better than bookface. I miss the times when we all used to interact without all the intermediary technology.
- I'm currently trying to listen to something new each day (as my music collection will still be playing long after my death!). I have to say that I have just recently listened to the Cramps 'Bad music for bad people' (Wee oo Aaah Aaah!) and the Pixies 'Surfer Rosa' (No I'm not into field hockey players, that was just a rumour).
- I love books, art, movies and music and the mind altering possibilities each medium can offer. I guess that's why I sometimes try to write myself.
- I have an amazing partner and stepson that I love and adore and am very proud of. When I'm not being a tired grumpy old fart I realise that the sentiment is very reciprocal.
- I have aspirations (well I've had them for a few years now) to have my own radio show on community radio. This way I can play music to people and share all the cool (and bad taste) music with people who may eventually decide to switch back to the commercial crap they used to listen to!
4. No can do - see above.
5. Hmm, I'll see what I can do!
6. Yep Uh huh Uh Huh.

Jon Spencer Shopping Explosion

I just have to retell how amazing it was going shopping the other night. Not because I'm a rabid consumer but because I took the ol'MP3 player with me and listened to JSBX (ACME album) whilst shopping at OLDI, the Kemist and Slow-way. I have to say it made an amazing difference to the banality of walking around the predictable produce shelves, I just needed some bellbottoms to make it all the more surreal! Onya Jon, Jude and the other guy (um Russell Simmons I think?). I think JSBX should replace all muzak, it would certainly make shopping and dancing simultaneously a culturally and socially worthwhile experience. HeeeeeeH!

Enough words for now...

Just informing the enormous following that until mountains of marking has been completed I will finish with a poem. I remember that I wanted to share with Thistler an experience of seeing CW Stoneking at the Port Fairy folkie, so with even further self indulgence here goes...

Stone King

Black man in a white body,
is it my eyes or my ears
that deceive me? Is it
the way you look or
the way you sound?

From this great white exterior
comes the sound of midnight black.
Howls from the Deep South
have found a new continent.
My ears believe but my eyes don’t.

Eyes closed, I listen
and beyond the present,
in swaying fields of the past
I find remembrance not my own,
voices leaving the burden of experience
behind them, drowning
in the nostalgic liquor of song,
escaping circumstance, transcending pain.

This presence contradicting sense
allows me to escape the culture
engraved upon my skin,
causing the touch of history unknown
to resonate in my bones.

Voice transcends appearance
and thought escapes time.




P.S. Next posts may even include pics!

On Language

The following writing comes from John Hughes,author of The Idea of Home and Someone Else: Fictional Essays. It is titled On Language and really blew my socks off after reading it, started to get the creative juices flowing again and drew me away from the repetitive drudgery of marking and teaching through casual employment. I hope it compels me to write more often (like this blog) and reminds me that language has a mind and experience of its own...

A colleague recently told me about an exam paper he marked on George Orwell's novel, Animal Farm. In what was otherwise a fairly mundane response, one of his pupils had written of Orwell's 'crittercism' of totalitarianism. Exam pressure, as it does from time to time, had thrown up a fortuitous error; an error in the sense that the pupil had almost certainly intended to write 'criticism'. But only in this sense. Few people could deliberately arrive at such a felicitous coinage, and yet once it has appeared, can anyone conceive of a more apt description of Orwell's methods in his classic political fable? In such moments it is impossible to resist the thought that language knows more than us.

'Blessed be all metrical rules,' W.H. Auden writes, 'that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self'. Auden, of course, is talking about poetry here, of the need for rules - despite what the bogeymen advocates of free verse might argue to the contrary - that rules and prescriptions, rather than being a limitation to creativity, free us from the fetters of automatic thought and help us to discover things we didn't know we knew. Language, that is, knows more than we do, and without formal limitations that force us to think again, that force us to 'play' with language, we cannot open ourselves up to this knowledge.
There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not said it. Here's Ludwig Wittgenstein in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, potential publisher for the recently completed Tractatus: 'My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I'm convinced that, strictly speaking, it can only be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. Therefore the book will, unless I'm quite wrong, have much to say which you want to say yourself, but perhaps you won't notice that it is said in it.'

Monty Python could not have written a better parody of philosophical absurdity: that the most profound things we can say about ethics are best said by remaining silent. This is mad, surely, and yet somehow, it also reveals a great truth: that some things can reveal or make themselves manifest but are not susceptible of explanation. There is a strong element of mysticism in much of Wittgenstein's thought, and yet for him, the distinction between showing and telling was as real as he was - there are simply some things about which we cannot talk and about such things we have a moral duty to remain silent. Talking about such things only creates problems; in fact, Wittgenstein came to believe that most of philosophy's problems were caused by language itself, or our clumsy use of it.

For example, 'I'll tell you about what I did yesterday' is not the same kind of statement as saying 'this piece of music is about a spring morning in a forest which suddenly erupts into storm'. One is sense, the other nonsense. Yet we behave, because language allows it, as if both 'abouts' are exactly the same. Wittgenstein believed he had found the solution to all the problems of philosophy in the Tractatus but considered that what was most valuable about this triumph was that it showed how little is achieved when these problems are solved.

In a similarly paradoxical (some might say absurd) way, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century could say: 'It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language'. For Samuel Beckett, language was a curse whose bitterest irony was that it could only be expiated through language. It was only through language that language could be railed against. Hence, a lifetime of writing in search of silence, or at the very least, for a language he did not know, could not learn, did not exist, might not be conceived, imagined, dreamed or forgotten, but a language all the same in which he might sing without a voice.

And yet, not all great writers are so damning of the medium in which they work. Surprisingly, where one might feel there were real grounds for remaining silent, or for the condemnation of his mother tongue, one comes across a writer whose project was the exact antithesis. Paul Celan was a poet, but like many poets he was also a translator, and he translated into German the work of many French, Russian and English poets. In the end, though, he came to believe that the real translation was not between languages but within them - he came to see all of his own writing as a translation of German into German.

This is not as paradoxical as it might at first appear, given that Celan was a Jew and a Holocaust survivor, and given what he saw as the German language's implication in the Holocaust. He did not agree with Theodor Adorno's infamous remark that 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', he did not agree with silence, that is, but he did more and more come to feel like a foreigner in his own tongue, alienated from his own language (an alienation so profound, it should be stated, that he committed suicide at the age of forty-nine, almost thirty years after his parents perished in the Holocaust).

His own poetry, by definition, then, had to be an act of translation: from the German language that existed before the Holocaust into the German language that came after, the language in which he had to work. This is how he put it: 'There remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this'.

He had wondered then if it wasn't just himself, if all poems were but ashes of the unutterable, and if not that, perhaps at times a reaching through, a bare-handed snatching from the flames. Because he'd never thought about it like this before, he understood what Wittgenstein and Beckett both feared, that language has a life of its own, that language too is like a man, and not only because it can think, was born thinking, in fact; but more than that: that it too has its own rites of passage, and hence its own nostalgia, that is of man yet also somehow not - his exile and his ghost.

Many modern writers have been worried about the totalising powers inherent in language, especially in the lead-up to the Second World War and the growth of totalitarianism in both its German and Russian forms. One such writer, Walter Benjamin, saw in the fragment some means of resistance, some way of restoring a sense of humility and wonder once again in our relationship to knowledge and the world.

Benjamin dreamed of a book comprised solely of quotations, but late in his life he began to find the idea of this collection unsatisfying. Its deliberateness disturbed him. Instead, he decided to fill a large notebook with pages torn from other books. He found this even more satisfying than collecting the books themselves. Once he had torn out the page he was able to throw the book away. It was a wonderful lightness. The single page remained, like the taste of the invisible.
Analogy is a much richer mode of apprehension than explanation, and truer, I think, to our own experience. It's not simply that the part can stand for the whole (that one thing can stand for another), but rather, as Benjamin discovered, that the part is more interesting than the whole, because like a trace it suggests what we have missed, something larger, something looming but elusive, which cannot be grasped; that what is important, what is real, is there, but just out of reach. The wonder of the whole. That the world has an agency separate from our own.
It might be the first sentence. Two prehistoric men watching an eagle circle, then stop, then drop as if through a trapdoor in air. They don't see the hare until the great bird, at the still point of its drop, snatches the small creature in. Terror-numb, heavy as a child, it doesn't kick or flinch, drawn upwards by the carriage of these wings, it is gone. The larger of the men pauses and seems to think - an absence in the way he holds his spear. Before him on the plain, bison graze, and taking the smaller man by the arm he points from him to the eagle and then at the bison with his spear. There is something here of the origin of words - not that they stand for things, if that is the order, but rather the other way around: that the thing might stand for the word.
Written language also begins in the trace, the magic of what remains. The words themselves are like the child's wonder of words when first he senses their connection to things and the way this connection is already a transformation, something magical: that the words in his mouth, and later, the words on the page, are connected somehow to the world beyond himself, the world beyond the page; but also that these words, when connected, become something else.
It is difficult to know exactly what is lost when we lose this wonder of words, but there is no doubt it is something special, something almost impossible to restore. What is at work, if not a kind of genetic ventriloquism, when my youngest son, in his mannerisms and his interests, in his very personality, comes more and more to resemble not me but my mother, because these very traits have bypassed me entirely? Influence, this chemical language of the body, is rarely direct.
The past wants only to colonise, and language is the greatest weapon the imperial past has at its disposal. 'The dead annex the living,' writes Marcel Proust towards the end of the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past. We forget the dead, even as our bodies become the repositories of their memories; annexed by history, our gestures repeat, perhaps eternally, what cannot be forgotten.

Language forgets nothing. The words that children now innocently sing in their game of 'Ring-a-ring o' roses' carry the plague still, a forgetting the language remembers. Language, that is, is more than us. So if we forget a language, if a language dies, as is the case with so many indigenous languages, something much greater dies with it, the extinction of a species of time.
Imagine a language that exists only in parts, and never in one place. One needs to conceive of it strung out in a line, a single sentence unrolled across the mountains and the plains, the deserts and the seas. Imagine a language with catches like barbs that caught as it grew all earthly marks: algae traces on mangrove trunks; marine worm engravings on bark hulls and temple columns; bird prints, rockpool whorls, tidal stains, tree weepings, dirt shadows, songlines of the restless spheres. To read one must walk and run and swim and fly, but following, always following this one line, now thin, now thick, now clean, now broken, tight, loose, heavy, light, feathered, dotted, smudged, bold and faded, curved and arabesqued, at once spearhead, smoke wisp, whipcrack, milky way, now worm line, now hook, now cuneiform, rune, hieroglyph, symbol, alphabet of the stars - Babel in one voice.

And so it could be thought that language, too, is a fence. But what it is keeping out, or in, only one returning might know.

Stream of conscious

These roads travelled upon, moved along by experience, driven by desire, unseen by apathy of ignorant moments, visions of now built upon by the mortared fragments of yesterday, here the rains fall on an upturned face, and each drop of rain falls on the realisation that each represents fallen moments, time passed, previous events that fall onto the surface of what we call everyday, until everyday becomes congealed into the clotted recognition of reflection, what does it mean to be here, now, after all that has passed, the well worn tracks of meaning only come from our walking along similar paths, sometimes our feet fall into the footprints of others and we wonder about the moment that step was taken, the experience, was it purposeful, a part of someones journey or just a diversion, an errand, these paths we cross sometimes conscious sometimes not, but we catch their meaning eventually in the periphery of our senses and meaning that once eluded us starts to take shape in our conscious and we draw close to perceptions that never entered our ways of thinking, the senses draw us to places unimagined and our mind steers us toward the blossoming of such feeling, as though our petals were never open to such light, such warmth, such presence, and we find new paths, new intersections where we meet or collide, sometimes spectacularly and others horrifically, we forget our spontaneity or perhaps it forgets us until such moments that our paths cross or we feel the familiarity of our paths, wherever in time, stepping into oneness, and touching the circumstances that bring us from undoing into being.

Disclaimer: Apologies to those who are grammatically pedantic.

Name Change

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, ie. me and a lawsuit from whoever represents that show on ABCkids. Maude's reflection was impetus enough. Anyhow, time to get this blog on the road with some creation and interesting finds.

Coming soon to a Blog near you

Hey, this first post means there will be more blogging post of substance to read in the near future. Keep eyes posted for more to come...