Dadblog

It’s my copyleft duty to blog as much of this wonderful piece of prose as possible, because judging by the URL it’ll disappear one day (have these guys never heard of permanence?): Ron Rosenbaum talking about an interview with Emmylou Harris:

NYO - Ron Rosenbaum: Emmylou was in town from Nashville for a concert with Elvis Costello at SummerStage and an appearance on Letterman. In addition to that, she’s got a remarkable career-retrospective CD just out - The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways - that brings together the most exquisite and scarring of her black-hole ballads.

If you can get past the first killer song on that album - a duet with her legendary soulmate Gram Parsons on Love Hurts - then you have to face the all-time lethal lost-love song, the one she co-wrote about Gram Parsons’s death, Boulder to Birmingham. Then you’ve got to deal with the insidiously plaintive Making Believe and Townes Van Zandt’s mysterioso melancholy classic Pancho and Lefty, about the treachery that destroys friendship.

That’s just the first four songs, and if you get through them without being a total emotional wreck, I envy you. I congratulate you on your cold-bloodedness. You are immune to emotion. Welcome to the Sociopaths’ Hall of Fame.

As a summation of Emmylou, that’s pretty good. But then Rosenbaum goes on to this:

I’d asked her something that I’d once asked Bob Dylan, about whether she thought certain keys or chords corresponded to certain emotions. Dylan had told me he thought D minor was “the chord of regret” (and yes, Dylan’s reply to me was the one mocked in Spinal Tap, and though I’m deeply proud it found a place in that great work, even in mockery - despite that, I think it’s still a legitimate question). And so I asked Emmylou if she had any similar intuitions about the correspondence of chords and emotions.

She didn’t personally, she said, but she told me the story of a guy in one of her bands, Roy Huskey Jr., a bass player who told her that he had synesthesia: He saw musical notes as colors. And she remembered that he’d always say that, alone of all the notes, B flat was “very, very, very black, really, really dark.”

“The funny thing is,” she then told me, “I was reading the paper a while ago, and I came upon a report that black holes are now reported to emit sounds. And that the sound emitted is B flat!“

As it happens, one black hole, somewhere in Perseus, is emitting something like a B flat sound, albeit one 57 octaves below middle C. Rosenbaum then goes on with this conceit:

It puts a new spin on the poetic vision of the universe. Lucretius (in De Rerum Natura, circa 50 B.C.) envisioned all the separateness of the cosmos bound together by Love, whom he personified as Venus. Love was the universal gravitational field. Emmylou’s B-flat black-hole revelation—I’m not saying she discovered it, but it was a revelation to me when she told me—suggests metaphorically a different kind of universe. One that’s not bound by love, but by sorrow. With black holes “singing to each other like whales,” as Errol Morris put it when I told him about it.

Who can resist the image of the vast reaches of interstellar space filled with lonely, heartbroken black holes humming their mournful B flats to each other across the endless vistas of the cosmos?

Who indeed? But Rosenbaum’s absolute clincher is this, where he ties in Emmylou Harris and black holes with Gram Parsons, Harris’ doomed lover:

“Americana”! It sounds less like music than some Antiques Roadshow category. It’s for country singers ashamed of being country, folkies ashamed of being folkies, bluegrass heads ashamed of sounding too “rural.” It should be called “Ashamed-icana.” Out with it! Let’s abolish “Americana” from the American musical vocabulary now!

Emmylou Harris has never had that problem. It’s like she has too much integrity to care what people call her music, even if she knows it can make a difference in radio and airplay. She just wants to sing it and shatter your heart.

But there is one term she does kind of like. It’s the one I found in the old clip, the one Gram Parsons coined: “Cosmic American music.” I like it, too! There’s always been something spiritual about it. All the more suggestive now that we know about the sorrowful songs of the black holes, that there’s something cosmic about sorrow, something built into the structure of creation.

Now that’s writing, ladies and gentlemen. If it’s still there, go and read the whole thing, because I haven’t done it justice. And Mr Rosenbaum, wherever you are, I promise to read you all the time from now on…

There’s a very odd Karen Armstrong comment from the Guardian last week which I missed completely, and which the inestimable normblog has pointed out to me. The piece has much that I agree with fervently, for instance:

I have plenty of opinions now. But I have become increasingly wary of the assurance with which people express their views. We live in a highly opinionated society. The media bombards us with information, much of it superficial, and the internet makes available a plethora of facts, which are difficult to assess adequately. But we are encouraged to air our views, and are probably exposed to more opinions than at any time in history. Some sound plausible - unless you know a little about the subject.

It would seem odd for anyone with a blog to agree with that - after all, aren’t we all just contributing to the hysterical airing of views by sending our ill-informed nonsense into the void? But I do agree with it.

But then the piece seems to do something odd. It seems to start criticising liberal westerners for “not understanding” other cultures, for being pushed into dogma by “fear and confusion.” In her well-earned role as explainer of Islam to westerners who care enough to find out about it, Armstrong seems to be saying that we need to work harder to understand the Islamist (or is it Islamic now?) state of mind. She concludes:

To acknowledge our partiality and confusion is therefore more realistic than rigid adherence to a particular point of view. We have seen too much certainty - religious and secular - recently. We went to war because of a misplaced opinion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. As we enter the uncharted political world of the 21st century, a humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge would seem to be the best policy.

Now, I find that statement of “misplaced opinion” really weird, and I think I know why. It’s all about timing. In the same month that people with “rigid adherence to a particular point of view” blew themselves up on underground tube trains, I find myself asking - why are you saying this now? Why are you bringing WMD intelligence into this now? Because isn’t the fact of the matter that evil people with very “rigid adherence” caused this to happen, and that the evil of the act is a reality independent of any indirect causes which may have led to it (something which normblog himself writes on with some powerful learned eloquence)?

As a left-winger myself, I find this knee-jerk response to Islamist terrorism depressing. Terrorism, like fascism, is something to be fought, not understood. Orwell understood this - he understood that whatever the historical roots of Nazism, be they Versailles Treaty or something else, Nazism itself was an evil that needed to be fought and beaten down. When you put a bomb on a train, you forego the right to have any civilised intercourse over the rights of your campaign. Your campaign is subsumed by the wrongness of your methods, and you must be hunted down and stopped. Let’s discuss the wrongness of Western armies in the Middle East and the wrongness of their motives, but let’s not confuse that conversation with one about the wrongness of terrorism. They are not the same thing.

Lord Pearson, described as a Tory peer and Eurosceptic, had this vision while having varicose veins removed:

Telegraph | News | ‘It’s possible that God will lose the fight against evil’: At this point I had an impression that there was a man with me, a ghost-like vision: I didn’t see his face, but he was wearing a greeny-brown tweed suit.

It became apparent that he was some kind of messenger. He reached out, took my arm and led me towards huge granite steps that descended into the earth.

Each step was like a wave of deeper pain but I took them, half dream-like, half-conscious, following my companion.

He then pointed to the huge doorway of a cave and beckoned me to go through, which I did. He did not follow as I found myself in the presence of God.

It was definitely a masculine presence that felt warm, strong and compassionate. However, I soon became aware of a pervading sadness. There were no words but I could feel this presence giving me a strong message.

The message was that God was sad because He was losing the fight of good against evil, and sad because people have lost faith.

I realised that this was the message I had to bring back and tell people: that it is possible God will indeed lose, and that people must fight harder for good against evil, for right against wrong, if He is to win.

Excellent. God is a “masculine presence” assisted by a bloke in a tweed suit, revealed to Eurosceptics with varicose veins. We’re all going to die, aren’t we?

If you haven’t used it before, the preview functionality on Nonesuch Records site is fantastic (but guys, get that flash off the homepage, it ain’t doing no good dere). It uses flash, but it creates a lovely little pop-up with info about the album concerned and two tracks in their entirety to listen to. I loved it so much that I’ve just bought three albums: You’ve Stolen My Heart - Songs from RD Burnman’s Bollywood by Kronos Quartet, Year of Meteors by Laura Veirs and something I’d never heard of but which sounds amazing: Dimanche a Bamako by Amadou & Miriam, a Mali duo. Normally I avoid world music like the plague, but this sounded so funky, fresh and summery that I dived straight in. Now that’s marketing.

Lots of worried faces about the place today. Although no-one died in yesterday’s attempted bombings in London, it felt like something worse had happened, like London was now a regular target, a surrogate Jerusalem where damaged and deranged young men could practise their obscene arts. It hit me hard this morning when, in the toilet at work no less, I said “how are you?” in a normal English middle-class way to someone and they replied “scared.” Jeezus.

Lots of good things are being written about this (the hard-left haven’t yet piled in with their stupid easily-held beliefs which are a religion in themselves), like Polly Toynbee on expunging religion from public life. But my colleague Bobbie Johnson wrote something which I think was wise and true in the aftermath of the initial attacks:

I wondered if, perhaps, we couldn’t look deeper at the problems that one particular group of people - young men - have with the normalities of our society. While money, religion and upbringing seems to differ among the spectrum of antisocial behaviour, it does seem that young men are overwhelmingly the footsoldiers of social extremism.

I’m drawing with broad brush strokes here, so I apologise, but for many young white men, the temptation to attack society manifests itself in drugs, crime and the far right. For many young black men, drugs and crime - particularly gang-related gun crime - offer a way out. For many young Asian men, the lure of extremism seems more appealing. Education doesn’t always solve the problem, and it seems far deeper than racial or social integration.

From PledgeBank:

ID Card Refusal pledge: “I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10000 other people will also make this same pledge.”

— Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator

Deadline to sign up by: 9th October 2005. 10145 people have signed up (145 over target)

My name’s down. Of course, the irony that I’ve now added some personal details about myself to a third-party database in order to make this pledge has not been lost on…

A Girl Called Eddy - lovely record, smokey and somnolent and poised and poignant. Like Dusty Springfield would have sounded like if she’d been privately educated in New York State. And on her website, Eddy lists her inspirations as including Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, Gilbert O’Sullivan and “the holy trinities” of Richard Harris, Michael Caine and Peter O’Toole, and Chrissie Hynde, Karen Carpenter and Dusty Springfield. Wanky, I know, but nice, comfortable, cup-of-tea wanky…

As is increasingly my way as the years roll by, I’ve followed a fallow patch of music buying with the mother of all Amazon splurges. Here’s the results:

Pernice Brothers - Yours, Mine and Ours. Lovely Teenage Fanclub-style strummy guitar pop-rock. The kind of thing that makes you smile and miss the Supernaturals. Their website’s here, and they’ve got some streaming audio here.

Johnny Cash - American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around. I’d been meaning to buy this for ages, on the strength of his version of Trent Reznor’s Hurt, which is a toweringly iconic performance. The album itself veers from stunning to stumbling. The title track, a Cash composition, is one of the best things I’ve heard him do, while his version of Bridge Over Troubled Water set my teeth on edge. Mainly brave and brilliant, though. Lots of clips from the album here.

John Martyn - One World. I cut my Martyn teeth on Solid Air, as most people do, I guess, but this is actually better. I got the remastered version, which is a bit up itself in terms of liner notes but does show how extraordinary Martyn’s working methods were, including stricking up a close relationship with Lee Scratch Perry and recording Small Hours across a lake with geese in the distance. Beautiful and ethereal.

Sufjan Stevens - Greetings From Michigan. I’m still not clear where I stand on fey American nu-folk types, and as Sufjan is almost the archetype for said types I’m not sure where I stand on him, either. Parts of this are really lovely, but parts are also too bloody restrained to hold my interest. I just want him to plug in his guitar and rawk or at least commit himself, just a bit. But he never does. Unlike…

Bright Eyes - I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning. OK, I’ve come ridiculously late to the Conor Oberst party, but I’m busy and ageing, you know? But it was worth the wait. Loved this, primarily because although Oberst is almost as nu-folk as Sufjan Stevens, he’s got cojones as well, and is quite happy to let it go occasionally and say something in more than a whisper. Christ, you could almost dance to some of this stuff!

More to add to this least - The Earlies, A Girl Called Eddy, The Go! Team, Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs (God, I’m a hopeless mainstream XFM dadrocking square, aren’t I?) - but I’ve got to find the time to listen to the flipping things first….

Fantastic. Lucy Pringle’s Crop Circle Photographs (Telegraph Hill,Hampshire,2005). Found at plasticbag, natch.

Sorry to be a bit bitchy, but this was funny:

What will Matt do next? (plasticbag.org): So I had this whole post written about Mr Biddulph leaving the BBC, but I threw it away because it was a bit too arch and tried to be a bit too clever.

If you don’t get why that’s funny, never mind. It’s probably just me being a bit too arch and clever.