Ageless

Interesting to see that the commentary surrounding the new Bowie album has been overwhelmingly positive, as with the first single from it. Can rock music be viable as a form for old men? There's no problem for jazz and folk, of course, but it's hard to think of a single rock musician off-hand whose work post-sixty years can reasonably be claimed to match the earlier stuff - unless you count Dylan. Mind you I have no doubt that if Zappa had made it to old age we would have seen no dimming of the light. But, then, the term 'rock' is too narrow a label for either Bowie or Frank.

And there's also the simple fascination surrounding why it is that some artists seem to thrive in their golden years in a seemingly inevitable way, whilst others burn out. The paradigm, I suppose, is Yeats. Who would have thought reading the Celtic twilight stuff, good as it is, that we would one day be sent Sailing To Byzantium?

A Guilty Pleasure

Given my views on the importance of active listening and doing justice to the artist it's dreadfully hypocritical that I frequently use music as a tool for making myself doze off. But I do. And I like it.

The other night I managed half of the first track on Fripp and Eno's Equatorial Stars. Gorgeous stuff. Better than any narcotic you can possibly think of.

Back to Basics

Noi and I were watching a programme this evening about various rather fancy houses that people with a fair amount of cash were intending to buy, or already owned. It says much for our shared perspectives on these matters that when she asked, with regard to one particularly opulent Georgian pile being shown off by its owner, Do you mean people actually live there? and How do they keep it clean? she was, with uncanny accuracy, echoing my very thoughts.

Spinning Plates

I went to the circus quite a few times as a kid. Can't say I enjoyed all the acts though, and one which always left me cold was the plate spinner. Usually male and looking a bit past it compared to the other limber circus folk, the spinner would set in motion lots of said plates at the ends of an unlikely number of unusually flexible poles and try and keep them all going. The rather unpleasant tension underlying the performance came from your awareness that some of the plates would eventually end up teetering in ungainly fashion on the very edge of crashing down, only to be set in motion again at the excruciating last moment. But the tension always struck me as fundamentally pointless. There was something trivial in the invocation of some sort of danger, compared to the genuine sense of accomplishment in, say, walking the high wire. There was nothing terribly impressive about each individual spinning plate. It seemed fairly easy to set them going round, so the skill, if any, lay in a sort of manic monitoring.

It never occurred to me then that one day that's what I would find myself doing.

Not Exactly Appropriate

It should be a routine for me to watch Mio tv's Goals on Sunday, basically their highlights show featuring a run-down of the Saturday games in the Premier League. In fact, whilst I do watch it fairly regularly, I find doing so close to torture. Not because of the anguish the Mighty Reds are capable of inflicting on their ardent supporters, even in a season when they've gone 15 points clear. Such suffering is very much part of the live experience, of course. No, the torture comes about as a result of being subjected to two of the most painfully inept introducers of a television programme I've seen for years. Stick them on MTV and there might be just be some kind of logic behind putting them on screen. But this is about football, for goodness sake! You don't need eye-candy to talk about Harry Redknapp. You don't need bad jokes and continual smirking and too much of the girl's legs when all you want to see is just how good Rafael's strike actually was.

Besides, there's way too much stultifyingly cliched gabbing and not enough of the game.

I assume the producers have some kind of odd justification of all this in mind, like trying to attract a wider audience. But surely the crucial thing about about putting footie on the box is to have people talking about it who have some basic knowledge of and insight into the game?

Hard Study

One of my favourite chapters in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is the one with his wonderful rant against Overmuch Study. This should be required reading for all teachers everywhere: ...hard students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives, and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies.

How much poorer we are these days in terms of physical complaints. Now it's just flu, headaches, and irritable bowel syndrome. And how much poorer our world is in having no Burton to anatomise our own deeply, deeply melancholy times.

Living In The Past

I've just been listening to a couple of things available on youtube - a bit of Roy Harper and CSNY - and it was quite extraordinary how they invoked memories of two particular years, 1970 and 1978. I can well understand the temptation to take off and re-locate to an earlier, safer time - safer because the outcomes are, well, out. But the present is breathing down my neck, a bit uncomfortably so at this time. And I, like many another, have promises to keep. And the present is always, thankfully, redolent with promise, even the sort sadly not kept.

Lingering

Have recently realised that whatever the last album I've listened to, I'll be left with an ear worm of a specific section of a specific track that will last until I listen to something else. Earlier this week I managed to play Genesis's Selling England By The Pound at a pretty reasonable volume whilst the Missus was out and ever since I've been replaying Dancing Out With The Moonlit Knight - the bit where Peter Gabriel sings, knight of the Green Shield stamp and shout! and the band go into the instrumental section - at least twenty times a day at work.

I rate this a very satisfactory state of affairs.

I wonder whether anyone remembers Green Shield stamps? As a kid I felt vaguely envious of folks who collected them. For some reason we never did.

Healthy Attitudes

Spoke to John and Maureen over the weekend. It was great, and I don't use that word lightly, to hear my sister sounding so well, especially considering what a mess she was just one year ago. Unfortunately John isn't faring quite so well. He's just had an operation on his neck which has gone well, relieving the sense of weakness he was feelings in his arms. But the operation he really yearns for is the one that will solve the problem of the trapped nerve in his lower back, and the doc is reluctant to go in there, from what I can gather.

Now I know a bit about this kind of pain, and I'm glad it's only a bit. At the time I had a problem with chronic pain, whenever I sat or lay down flat the result was almost instant relief. John's condition isn't quite the same and the difference means everything. When he lies down to sleep he wakes two hours later in intense discomfort and has to get up to seek some relief. This is not good at all. Of course, there's still hope. I still have no real explanation as to why my own problem simply and suddenly disappeared. I assume the nerve became untrapped, as it were, by sheer good fortune. And John is clearly hoping for a similar result.

In the meantime I'm trying to bear two things in mind. The first is that my reprieve is most likely only temporary and it makes good sense to be grateful while it lasts. The second is the tired old, true old cliche that basically it's your health that matters, with all else a very distant second.

Also in the meantime, John and Maureen are popping over to Blackpool next week to get away from it all for a few days of just good old-fashioned fun. A wise move.

Great British Trash

As they say, you live and learn. Case in point: earlier this evening I realised something about my attitude to a certain kind of programme on the telly that I don't think I've ever quite consciously understood before.

The revelation came to me after watching a couple of wonderfully trashy British programmes back to back on the Granada channel we get on cable. In order of viewing these were the embarrassingly hilarious Come Dine With Me, and the even more hilarious and painfully embarrassing Coach Trip. It's difficult to think of much if anything to say in their defence. This is reality tv at its most frivolous. There aren't even worthwhile prizes involved. The participants just get to air their flaws for all the world to gape at for no real reason I can see other than to have their ten minutes of fame.

And it all works wonderfully well. A great way to pass an hour. But the puzzle is this: I just can't stand the equivalent trash from other nations - and I'm thinking primarily of the US here. Five minutes of something like Jerseylicious just makes me gag. So therein lies my great insight. We Brits do rubbish better than anyone else in the world. Fact.