Friday, August 30, 2013
Seamus Heaney RIP
What a nice chap. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry while I was there for the last couple of years, and hence at Magdalen, where I was. We had this poetry society that I used to run, to which he showed up when he was there. It was heavy duty. Anonymously submitted poems, read by volunteers, mercilessly critiqued. It had the predictable effect of putting a lot of people off writing poems, which was sad!
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7 comments:
I am very sorry for your loos of a friend. The people we meet in life give meaning and purpose to our journey. These relationships transcend meaning in simple moments that we carry with us as we struggle to make sense of a sometimes chaotic existence....
I am very sorry for your loos of a friend. The people we meet in life give meaning and purpose to our journey. These relationships transcend meaning in simple moments that we carry with us as we struggle to make sense of a sometimes chaotic existence....
I am very sorry for your loos of a friend. The people we meet in life give meaning and purpose to our journey. These relationships transcend meaning in simple moments that we carry with us as we struggle to make sense of a sometimes chaotic existence....
I am very sorry for your loos of a friend. The people we meet in life give meaning and purpose to our journey. These relationships transcend meaning in simple moments that we carry with us as we struggle to make sense of a sometimes chaotic existence....
I am very sorry for your loos of a friend. The people we meet in life give meaning and purpose to our journey. These relationships transcend meaning in simple moments that we carry with us as we struggle to make sense of a sometimes chaotic existence....
Tim, if you like MBV you simply must listen to the album Hairdryer Peace by The Hospitals. They were a weird california noise punk band that disbanded after releasing that album.
It's an amazing elucidation of many of your theories. They were a hyper energetic rock n roll band that seemed to collapse into psychosis and exhaustion from the intensity of that lifestyle, having marginal popularity in the most underground recesses of the indie scene. But then they created Hairdryer Peace, which is a kind of noise psychedelic masterpiece. It's very weird, its an album all about the exhausted subject subsumed by objects.
I had the most fucking insane experience when I bought it. The songs caused me to be kind of hypnotized out of my stupor and I gave up smoking. The night after buying it I laid in bed and had the most intense barrage of sleep paralysis hallucinations.
I really like what you are saying in your books and talks because it seems to point the way forward. Instead of this culture of crass hedonism, intensity, noise and speed where we all burn ourselves out trying to escape/assert the nothingness within, we need a weird, gentler, more uncanny culture we're we try and coexist with the nothingness all around us.
I think Hairdryer Peace points towards this future. Most of the lyrics are garbled but I noticed that the song titles and whatever lyrics I could hear seem to describe a man almost immobile and gone half insane trying to overcome the sheer presence of inanimate objects around him. There's moments where they regain the rock n roll outlook but when they do the lyrics are all absurdisms.
What you are saying really resonates with me and I hope more artists move in this direction and abandon the rock n roll deadlock that I think is responsible for all the BAD indie music we get today. It's almost aggressively passive, infantilized, happy nihilism. The otherside to this is the sneering self consciousness you see in Vice magazine, which seems desperate for us all to be hypomanic drug addicts and hyper sexualizd caricatures of a bundle of references that can be quickly listed off and sneered at.
Another California group I suspect you will really like are the Skaters. Today James Ferraro does solo stuff, but the original Skaters albums he did are amazing. New new age drone jams. Some of their releases were divinely weird. I think there is a proto OOO element to a lot of lo fi music that tries to use noise, fuzz, tape hiss and feedback to imply or cover over the presence of a base object that all the music fits around.
The flaw with a lot of this music is that it doesn't yet know how to introduce anything but the atmosphere of fuzzy objects subsuming voices. A lot of its very basely lyrical, or just sub vocal howlings. I wonder if there's some way to reintroduce high lyricism to a future OOO type music.
Anyway, keep up the great talks and books mate!
Tim, if you like MBV you simply must listen to the album Hairdryer Peace by The Hospitals. They were a weird california noise punk band that disbanded after releasing that album.
It's an amazing elucidation of many of your theories. They were a hyper energetic rock n roll band that seemed to collapse into psychosis and exhaustion from the intensity of that lifestyle, having marginal popularity in the most underground recesses of the indie scene. But then they created Hairdryer Peace, which is a kind of noise psychedelic masterpiece. It's very weird, its an album all about the exhausted subject subsumed by objects.
I had the most fucking insane experience when I bought it. The songs caused me to be kind of hypnotized out of my stupor and I gave up smoking. The night after buying it I laid in bed and had the most intense barrage of sleep paralysis hallucinations.
I really like what you are saying in your books and talks because it seems to point the way forward. Instead of this culture of crass hedonism, intensity, noise and speed where we all burn ourselves out trying to escape/assert the nothingness within, we need a weird, gentler, more uncanny culture we're we try and coexist with the nothingness all around us.
I think Hairdryer Peace points towards this future. Most of the lyrics are garbled but I noticed that the song titles and whatever lyrics I could hear seem to describe a man almost immobile and gone half insane trying to overcome the sheer presence of inanimate objects around him. There's moments where they regain the rock n roll outlook but when they do the lyrics are all absurdisms.
What you are saying really resonates with me and I hope more artists move in this direction and abandon the rock n roll deadlock that I think is responsible for all the BAD indie music we get today. It's almost aggressively passive, infantilized, happy nihilism. The otherside to this is the sneering self consciousness you see in Vice magazine, which seems desperate for us all to be hypomanic drug addicts and hyper sexualizd caricatures of a bundle of references that can be quickly listed off and sneered at.
Another California group I suspect you will really like are the Skaters. Today James Ferraro does solo stuff, but the original Skaters albums he did are amazing. New new age drone jams. Some of their releases were divinely weird. I think there is a proto OOO element to a lot of lo fi music that tries to use noise, fuzz, tape hiss and feedback to imply or cover over the presence of a base object that all the music fits around.
The flaw with a lot of this music is that it doesn't yet know how to introduce anything but the atmosphere of fuzzy objects subsuming voices. A lot of its very basely lyrical, or just sub vocal howlings. I wonder if there's some way to reintroduce high lyricism to a future OOO type music.
Anyway, keep up the great talks and books mate!
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