tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-706551328658317312024-03-14T03:02:00.934+00:00PAUL MURPHY & THE BISHOPSFrequently unwieldy missives from a chap wandering around London. Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.comBlogger75125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-45741313774158611412016-06-22T11:30:00.000+01:002016-06-22T11:37:32.130+01:00Vote: REMAIN<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I rarely get political on social media. I don't think it's a good place
to do so, especially when I've worked so hard to make my corner of it
into a silly, joyous, ranting and musical place. Besides, you lot are my
friends — not people I feel the need to hector with my half-hearted
party opinions most of the time: the converted — or at least, the
accepting. Consequently I'm not going to get unnecessarily bogged down
in political details but with one more day of decision left to go,
something needs to be said.<br />
<br />
I’m voting REMAIN. There has never been any doubt in my mind otherwise. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, I'll give you my reasons. Monetary ones? Nope, I hate
counting and maths is grown-up and dull. Negotiating trade agreements?
Boring. They did too much of that in <i>The Phantom Menace </i>and we all
remember how <i>exciting</i> that was. Immigration? I was born in England and
by blood I’m 50% Irish, 50% Italian — that's a whole 100% Can't Be
Arsed. Politics? Cah. No matter who you vote for, as Viv Stanshall once
said, the Government always gets in.<br />
<br />
However since this
referendum gained momentum it hasn't, to my eyes, ever been about the
nuts and bolts of international politics and commerce so much as it's
been a platform for people to air their discontent with the world around
them — and more to the point, how they think the referendum result, in
their favour, is going to make the country, its place in the world — and
by logical extension the world itself — a better place to be. <br />
<br />
Well, with that in mind, call me a loony, but somehow I don’t think
Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Bobby Moore, Winston Churchill, John Bull,
Princess Diana, fish’n’chips, The Beatles, misquoting William
Shakespeare, ‘saying it like it is’ (whatever that actually means),
‘putting the Great back into Britain’ (whatever <i>that </i>means), ‘taking our
country back’ (whatever etc etc), the Dunkirk Spirit, Spirit of the
Blitz or even the bloody Spirit of Ecstasy are realistically going to
get this country out of recession quite as effectively as hard work,
courage, civic duty, openness to ideas, willingness to share,
intelligent discussion, cultural respect, tolerance, generosity,
compassion and inclusivity will. <br />
<br />This is the 'magic', such as
may be, of the referendum. You don’t really have to understand the
paperwork, much as you don’t have to understand it on a daily basis
already. The values that come with remaining in the EU are the kind that
encourage people to roll their sleeves up, muck in, work a problem, be
kind to mistakes and remain undaunted should they happen. <br />
<br />
I have
heard several lucid, intelligent arguments for Brexit, but frankly not
many, and certainly not enough of them. They confine themselves to
either the cold, inhuman facts of finance or the profoundly speculative
nature of future trade agreements — and the rest of the Brexiters reside
in infantile whimsy, misguided anarchy, a simple, bitter, resentful and
cowardly defeatism — and at worst, the bleakly sinister pall of
outright ignorance, low self-esteem, fear, racism, hostility and
belligerence.<br />
<br />
<br />
These are not qualities I see in the act of remaining within the EU. <br />
<br />
Therefore, I will choose to Remain.<br />
<br />
PM</div>
Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-36443609310417840192016-01-03T19:51:00.001+00:002016-01-03T19:51:49.145+00:00PAUL MURPHY & THE BISHOPS: God Bless Tiny Tim<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5uNE5qC9bug" width="480"></iframe>Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-75367230023957633602015-12-08T14:56:00.000+00:002016-10-06T10:30:03.614+01:00A poem: The Visit.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>The Visit.</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Again! The question made and answered same<br /> tho' answer, prov<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">è</span>d true, was heard in vain. <br /> And more! O words unvary'd, yet shot anew with pain. <br /> Should dotage be, shall I not wish myself remain.<b> </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">PM<b><br /></b></span></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-23556935385516830812015-12-05T18:47:00.001+00:002015-12-05T21:15:20.987+00:00Future Boy: an open letter from Paul A Murphy (aged 44) to Paul A Murphy (aged 19).<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Some of you may remember that I recently found a letter I wrote to myself in 1991, the content of which was to be read on the evidently monumental day in 2011 that I turned forty. <a href="http://paulmurphyandthebishops.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/life-fragments-letter-from-paul-murphy.html" target="_blank">You can see it if you click HERE</a>. I reread recently it with a small degree of rue and chagrin (lovely, flowery French terms for turbulent emotions that come in anything but pastel shades) and wondered what it would be like were I able to pop a note back through the temporal post box and address this well-meaning, but callow youth. Not that he'd listen to a guy my age. So, with that up-front appreciation of the manifest futility and obvious vain self-regard of this exercise (feel free to leave now), here we are: <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Saturday, December 5th 2015</span><br />
<br />
Hello Paulie, <br />
<br />
From the distant future, I salute you, dear boy. Nice letter, you’re a good chap — you get a certain sense of your personality across. Yes, I call people ‘dear boy’ and use words like ‘chap’ these days. I don’t mean to sound patronising — it started off as affectation and became habit. Isn’t that how it all starts? You’ll be pleased to know no-one uses ‘wicked’ as a superlative anymore in 2015. Although everyone overuses ‘legend’ to tedious effect — you’ll find out.<br />
<br />
I’d love to tell you all sorts of things about what has happened in the intervening near-quarter-century, but to be perfectly honest, the surprise is part of finding stuff out, isn’t it? Furthermore, you’ve seen <i>Back To The Future</i> enough times recently to understand what it is to know too much (although the celebrations we had when we actually got to October 21st 2015 will warm the cockles of your heart, I assure you). However, I can’t resist throwing a few bones your way, though. So, remember these words, as you’re gonna hear them a lot over the next twenty-five years: <br />
<br />
Cobain. Corbyn. Father Ted. Alan Partridge. Internet. iPod. Yewtree. YouTube. Koresh. Daesh. Ebola. Nigella. Nine-Eleven. Seven-Seven. Twenty-Twelve. Phantom, Attack, Revenge. McGann, Hurt, Eccleston, Tennant, Smith and Capaldi. <br />
<br />
That should be enough to be getting on with. Oh, and everyone will remember what they were doing the day they heard Cliff Richard was shot, right!? <br />
<br />
Take some advice from an old man: you’re a more tactful chap than you give yourself credit for. Yes, you have a reputation — you know this already — for having a motormouth. It’s quite all right. In fact, never let anyone persuade you to change in this regard. You talk a lot, but are at your best when you are talking things out, because if the alternative is shouting, you will find that you have a dark talent for that too. Be reasonable. Pride yourself on that. You’re already quite good at knowing when to talk and when to shut the fuck up. Keep it up.<br />
<br />
The Nineteen-Nineties. Oh, you’re gonna love them. You’ll see. Dance at every opportunity. Drink like a fish. Try not to smoke, it's pointless. Be sociable. Check out new music and new bands. Be bold and courageous. Actually, take that advice to heart beyond the next decade. <br />
<br />
Don’t live with secrets. You think that keeping certain, possibly hurtful things from people is kind and compassionate, but you underestimate their resilience and the resultant repression will eat away at you and leave you bitter and regretful. So be straight-dealing and expect others to be the same — and make sure you take no nonsense should anyone fail you in this fashion. <br />
<br />
Be kinder to your father. Life was unkind to him in ways you know, but will fully appreciate only as you get older, so trust me on this: you know he has his moments of being blustering and unsubtle. You also know he’s unlikely to change. Remember he loves you and it’s all done from concern, however clumsily displayed, so please show patience and forgiveness. Don’t be angry, be compassionate, willing to talk and try to understand — and do not let the sun set on an unresolved argument. This is <i>really</i> important. <br />
<br />
You were absolutely right — there is still time to change. In fact, changing happens every day — but don’t underestimate yourself. Self-deprecation is a cool pose, but recognise that you will be loved, and that’s because you are worth loving. There will be times when this doesn’t feel like it’s the case, but that’s only because you do not choose to see it. Doesn’t matter; the love is still there. <br />
<br />
Oh and married? Yeah, like I’d tell you that. You don’t need a letter from the future to tell you that the path of love is not always straightforward. Just make sure you tell the one you really love that you love her, regardless of your situation — and hers — and don’t tell anyone else that if you don’t mean it and only want to keep them happy. This is also very important. Remember what I said about secrets? <br />
<br />
You’re doing all right. So get a life, kiddo, as we used to say in 1991. But thankfully no longer in 2015. <br />
<i><br />Paul Aloysius Cainnech Murphy</i> <br />
<br />
(don’t use the confirmation name all that often anymore though, it doesn’t fly.) <br />
<br />
PS: Oh, and don’t leave it until you’re 27 before you watch <i>The Godfather</i>. It’s a genuine classic, so stop dicking about and step to it. <br />
<br />
PPS: you don’t even know what a National Lottery is, yet, so let’s not go there. <br />
<br />
PPPS: yes, people say “let’s not go there” a lot in the nineties. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
PM</div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-66687476908386228272015-06-30T16:38:00.001+01:002015-07-11T22:43:04.506+01:00A poem: Three Early Memories, 1974. Also, a dream.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Three Early Memories, 1974.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sat fast, high-chaired </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">as shattered shell </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">scattered, fell, then lay beyond grasp. Scared;</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">they couldn't hear me yell. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">The screaming, unreasoning.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Faceted yet unreadable, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">gliding and sliding without hurry, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">in single-file, silvery </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">(both hunter and quarry).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">One last show, then it's time to sleep. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Tired boy, tries his best to keep </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">awake, can barely raise his head.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">No matter; carried easily off to bed. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Lights out on the Christmas tree.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Oh, what happened to you? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Whatever happened to me?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="EN-US">A dream.</span></b></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">The date on the discarded local newspaper
was Thursday, October 17<sup>th</sup> 1974, but the paper was damp and had been
trodden on several times. Furthermore, the lack of traffic at what I guessed
from the twilight to be about 6pm suggested a day of closed shops and no work.
Sunday, the 20<sup>th</sup> October, 1974, then. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">I walked down the hill,
marvelling at the old buildings that were standing, soon to be
demolished — and the newness of the ones that I grew up only to know as old
seventies constructions. The fields in the gaps between the houses looked
identical to how they would appear to me when I’d smoke on the benches there as
a lad in my twenties. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">Finally, as the dark enclosed me, I stood outside my
home. I looked admiringly at my father’s cherry red Daimler in the garage, its
length rendering the garage doors uncloseable. Through the leaded glass in the
front door, I saw the kindly light on in the hall, heard my father’s voice,
clear and confident from somewhere within. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: small;">I was afraid to knock on the door.
Somehow I felt he would know who I was and be frightened by it. <br /><br /><br />PM</span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-57588997310123576592015-02-01T13:02:00.004+00:002015-02-01T22:45:28.825+00:00Sound & Vision<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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They say a picture paints a thousand words. Here's my War & Peace. Enjoy. </div>
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First up, a title sequence for this 'ere blog. </div>
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Next, the song I wrote for last Christmas: </div>
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And finally, the one I wrote for benighted times, to bring comfort and solace whenever it's needed.<br />
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-3206227443193216792015-01-06T01:31:00.000+00:002015-01-06T19:24:28.750+00:00Music: the miraculous instances. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Those of you who know me and have ever discussed music with me will know that — as one friend delightfully put it — I ‘sleep around’. That is, I’m the kind of person who discovers a musician, band or composer and subsequently pursues their creative output with a dogged ardour: days spent out in the world collecting albums in some of the few remaining record shops; the nights spent at home absorbing every drop of sound though headphones; evenings researching clips on YouTube or ordering things online — and all the time reading, reading, reading up on them. Everything in an attempt to grok the subject in fullness, as they no doubt said in the Seventies. I let the music and musicians bewitch me. And then, weeks or even months later — a considerable while at least — then, well, I move on and find something else to fascinate me. The objects of my melodic obsessions are not callously discarded in my ongoing quest to seek new distractions; rather, they are assimilated warmly into my preexisting musical cognitive framework, elevated to my imagined Pantheon of sonic greatness to join those other ecstatic heartbeats of harmony and invention that have been judged worthy before them.<br />
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Pomposity aside, there’s a danger of making this process sound like a fickle, casual process but I assure you if there’s anything I do in my life with devoted dedication, assiduous application and ever-loving loyalty, it is to appreciate music. As Frank Zappa once said, with a laudable lack of needless overstatement: it’s the best. Lovers (and I can barely use the term in plural, let’s face it) have come and gone in my life. My observations on visual arts are plain, unremarkable and hold no revelations for the world at large. I have a weirdly moody, on-off affair with films, television and books with few, highly noteworthy exceptions. However, my relationship with music has and ever holds fast, runs deep, improves with age and is all-consuming.<br />
<br />
Truly with music, one can create a kingdom, a realm of sound that reflects, refracts, justifies, challenges and crystallises oneself. To enjoy a piece of music, to <i>really </i>enjoy it, not merely hear or perceive it, but to <i>listen</i>, engage with it, let it take you somewhere until you feel your understanding of it is so close, so deeply personal and heartfelt, that an exchange occurs and <i>it</i> becomes part of <i>you</i> — well, that’s the closest we get to godliness in this mortal existence. It’s love. Conversely, there are few purer, more excoriating sensations of condemnation and abhorrence in normal life than the ones felt when experiencing a piece of music that one despises for whatever reasons; be they down to an ear sensitised to irritable cacophony, compositional laziness or a prosaic triteness of structure — or worse still, powerful and emotive negative memory associations. <br />
<br />
I’ve needed music more than ever before lately, not only for its delicious contradiction of calmative yet stimulating effects, but also for either the escape it has afforded, or for its joyous affirmation of the here and now, as circumstances have dictated. Those exponents of the music that has transported me thus this past year have been clasped very firmly to my bosom indeed. Here are three examples: <br />
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Nikolai Kapustin’s music for solo piano. A classicist who spent much time in jazz bands, Kapustin’s genius lies in his ability to write music that sounds like pure improvisation, but his questing mind sought to express it as solid, on-paper composition — and so it proves: a deliriously rhythmic, yet almost mathematical jazz-classical fusion, with wit and soul allied to intellect. Pleasingly, Kapustin’s still alive at time of writing, a querulous, bespectacled septagenarian, whose suave, vandyked facial features congregate around the lower portion of his head, the better to accentuate his cranium. More often than not, he’s photographed with a ciggie on the go. Well, of <i>course</i>. </div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hnZBRvCGX5Y/VKs5l8IgSsI/AAAAAAAAAKk/_04xE15vEIA/s1600/Kapustin.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hnZBRvCGX5Y/VKs5l8IgSsI/AAAAAAAAAKk/_04xE15vEIA/s1600/Kapustin.png" height="320" width="184" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkWA_Bom79A%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8" target="_blank">Nikolai Kapustin plays Kapustin (click here)</a></div>
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Speaking of pianistic wit and soul, I was reacquainted last spring with the artistry of Martha Argerich. As an overconfident and ultimately callow young man in my twenties, working in the classical department of the then all-powerful Virgin empire, I was peripherally appreciative of the popularity of Ms Argerich, her face on a dozen Deutsche Grammophon CD albums, either smiling with warm, glamorous, middle-aged serenity in full colour, or in sultry black and white shots from the Sixties, pouting in moody communion with her Muse; a deeply sexy young woman. Clearly her musical qualities were lost on me at my age then. Now in her early seventies, Martha Argerich is the finest pianist alive on this planet, no question in my mind. She remains a bewitching presence in the concert hall, not least for a devastating technique that combines speed and precision with panache and a profoundly tasteful understanding of the requirements of the music that flows from her ageless fingertips. In a parallel universe without music, Argerich would have been a highly successful brain surgeon — or a prolific sniper. </div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RubX9PM3L4g%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8" target="_blank">Martha Argerich performs Prokofiev's 3rd Piano Concerto (1st movement) (click here)</a></div>
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Quite frequently, an understanding for certain music creeps up on you, don’t you find? Things you were already aware of — but indifferent to — often take time to come into focus and occupy one’s attention, but once there, they’re inside of you forever. Such was the case this time last year with the ‘cult’ rock band Family. I had owned their 1968 debut <i>Music In A Doll’s House</i>, their 1969 sophomore release <i>Family Entertainment </i>and a compilation album for a couple of years and found them curious, but somewhat chilly and offbeat. Picture me: late January weather, feeling miserable with my lot, my change of circumstances, tooling somewhat aimlessly around my local Tesco for want of anywhere better to shop (so it seemed) when ‘Burlesque’ popped onto the iPod Shuffle. Vocalist Roger Chapman’s voice varies from an acquired-taste tremelo in certain registers (described once and quoted for evermore as like an ‘electric goat’), through to an engaging, alleycat growl which sits fine and dandy on top of the band’s more blokey, meat-and-potatoes-style numbers. There was Chappo — both vocal iterations loud and proud on ‘Burlesque’, perhaps Family’s best-known song — and something snapped inside me in a good way. I ‘got’ Family. They were an amiable arm round my shoulder, a — dare-I-say — soundtrack to my perceived down-at-heel situation…and it worked. For the most part Family are quirky, steeped as much in folk tunings as they are the blues-rock stylings that mark them as a band from the late Sixties. They manage that clever trick of never sounding quite the same from one song to another, while forging an overall identity that is distinctive as their own. It’s an experimental, communal outlook that allies them closely in my mind to British groups such as Traffic and Jethro Tull, and American ones like Spirit and The Band. Not long after my Finchley Road To Damascus moment in Tesco (great sentence, never writing that one ever again) I acquired a second-hand copy of their final studio album, 1973’s <i>It’s Only A Movie</i>, with its striking cover image of a sullen, silent-movie-era actor dressed as a cowboy. The title song, its daft structure and knowing, fourth-wall-breaking lyric just maintained my hangdog mood, but now I had a reason to like it. </div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vT_fm5aJHE" target="_blank">Family — It's Only A Movie (click here)</a> </div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-67044389231509566552015-01-05T00:08:00.000+00:002015-01-05T00:24:36.836+00:00Welcome to 2015: K.B.O. — and thanks.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">David Coverdale, the leather-trous’d frontman of Whitesnake (and let’s be honest, how often does one get to start an article like that?) is a gentleman who enjoys Twitter and the opportunities it affords a veteran rocker to vouchsafe his whimsical worldview unto the tweeting faithful. The other day, amidst his usual engaging blend of daft photos, jokes, and cheerful innuendo, he sent out this piece of motivation: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">No matter how you feel, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">get up, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">dress up,</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> show up, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">never give up. </span></i></b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Not his words of course — it’s been attributed to various people, but dang, I’m taking it as wisdom imparted direct from the man who sang Fool For Your Lovin’ and once made an album with Deep Purple called <i>Come Taste The Band</i>. Thanks, Dave. <br /><br />Even more succinctly, Winston Churchill, always pretty good value for a quip and a quote (especially when lifted out of context), famously signed off letters and phonecalls during the Second World War with the initials <i>K.B.O.</i> — <b>Keep Buggering On</b>. Churchill had a name for depression, specifically his own: the ‘black dog</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">’</span></span> — but as a confessed depressive, he appreciated the value of engaging with the world, to seize opportunities to create that all-important sense of achievement that makes life worth getting out of bed for of a morning. Outside of — or perhaps slyly, gleefully acknowledging — the term’s sexual connotation, Churchill’s phrase has a certain dynamic, bullish swagger to it. Merely getting by is not enough. You have to get out there and get stuck in, cause trouble, build some bridges, burn some others, make some noise. Keep buggering on.<br /><br />“K.B.O…. K.B.O…” irrespective of how you may feel about Winston, I’ve found it a powerful mantra this past year. As I bid farewell to 2014, I can honestly say without overstatement that it has been, in many ways, about the worst single year of my life to date. I may sound melodramatic but trust me, there has been more heartbreak, anger, doubt, despair, loneliness, frustration and tiresome intimations of fleshly mortality packed into twelve neatly boxed sections as any I could recall, in relentless procession from January to December. <br /><br />However, I’m not here to complain, nor do I think it’s my natural disposition to wallow in abject misery. In fact, quite the opposite. Positive change has to take place from the inside first, of course. At the risk of spouting platitudes, here’s another quote, from <i>Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace</i>. Indulge me. Amidst the clunking dialogue of that much-maligned movie comes an unlikely, but undeniably neat precis of positive thinking: ‘your focus determines your reality’. I have spent a considerable amount of time this year, more than ever before in my life, alone — and this has afforded me time to sit and focus on said reality. But the journey has not always been about navel contemplation, reflection on regret and self-recrimination — the most exciting things can sometimes happen inside one’s head, and lately I have been more thankful than usual for the redemptive power of music and other entertainments. I’m certainly not saying anything new or profound here, I know, but one has to find this stuff out for oneself to really appreciate it. <br /><br />Most importantly, I can see that <span style="font-family: inherit;">t</span>here was a whole lot to enjoy in 2014, despite myself, between those episodes when I needed to remind myself to K.B.O. — and the vast majority of these things were experienced in the company of splendid, loving people. I shan’t name names as I will embarrass you almost as much as I will embarrass myself in my gushing, unvarnished praise of every one of you; you who have kept me occupied, engaged, amused, distracted and stimulated this past year. Let’s just say, you’ve collectively given me hope for the year to come. Please know that for that, I love you. <br /><br />Next time, soon, I’ll be back to pop culture chronicling duties and will present to you a list of cultural discoveries and re-acquaintances I made over the last twelve months. <br /><br />But first, a drink. If I permit myself. <br /><br />That’s a whole other story. <br /><br /><br />PM. </span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-48263445804019772992014-09-01T22:34:00.001+01:002014-09-02T14:16:38.600+01:00I’ve never lied to you. I’ve always been cool. I wanna be elected — a band manifesto. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">OK, I’ve been thinking about this for several months (several decades in some ways) and with an acute sense that I may have less time ahead of me than I’ve had behind me, I need to put it frankly…there’s no time to lose: it’s time to form a band. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’ve been in bands before, I’ve helped form bands and yes, I’ve been sacked from bands… but this time it’s going to be different. Because this time — it’s going to be MY band. And I’d like to invite anyone who’s interested to join me and help me make it work. I can’t promise you money (none coming my way either), but participation in the sheer act of musical creation and performance. The rest may hopefully come later for all of us.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Now, I want to make this clear. I have amassed MANY songs over the years and I wish to realise them to the best of their advantage with people who enjoy performing and recording. I will always welcome help with arrangements, lyrics, instrumental variety and virtuosity. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You will find I am not a difficult man to work with, but make no mistake: this isn’t a democracy. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’ve been in bands that claim to be democratic and one of two things happen: they are either mediocre, each person deferring to everyone else, making the whole only as strong as the weakest component. Alternatively, the veneer of egalitarian bonhomie falls away before too long and egos rise, egos clash, sides get taken, musical differences ensue, chaos reigns. I think it’s probably best that someone takes the responsibility from the off — the glory, sure, but also the rap when things don’t work — and if it’s my band, then that’s my job. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I want people to work with me to make my ideas work as best they can — and in return, I promise you will have plenty of challenge, a big batch of fun things to play on and demonstrate your brilliance. But that also means that I expect dedication, initiative, an attention to detail and a willingness on occasion to take my lead and directions and to give the music all the love you can. You will be treated entirely fairly. You’ll get credited accordingly. I am not an arsehole; I will love you. But this isn't going to feel like a hobby — it will take application and rigour to achieve great results. The rewards, I hope, are self-evident.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">To this end, I want a group of about six/seven individuals of instinctive musical brilliance and technique who are prepared to record music and perform live whenever and wherever it takes us. No politics, no arguments, no stage fright, no casuals, no time wasters please. But lots of fun with any luck. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Please let me know. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’ve never lied to you. I’ve always been cool. I wanna be elected. </span></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-37357925338651389372014-08-23T12:25:00.003+01:002014-08-23T19:26:53.194+01:00Ten From The Top Drawer: David Bowie.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino;">Recently, I had a <i>Rolling Stone</i> article brought to my attention by my good friend Brother JCC: a list of ‘<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/20-insanely-great-david-bowie-songs-only-hardcore-fans-know-20140811" target="_blank">20 Insanely Great David Bowie Songs Only Hardcore Fans Know</a>.’ </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ah well, it’s more like a list of ‘20 Insanely Great David Bowie Songs You Might Hear If You Owned A David Bowie Album That Wasn’t A Greatest Hits’, but you know how it is with lists. I hope it may serve a higher function than merely preaching to the converted; that hopefully a casual-but-intrigued Bowie neophyte may peruse the list and be tempted to go beyond the confines of a compilation — but who doesn’t love to disagree with a list, any list, purporting to precis some pop-cultural achievement in twenty easy-to-digest bullet points?</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So — with that in mind, but mindful of your time and tolerance, I present a mere ten songs by The Dame, in no particular order, that I rate most highly. There are many others of course, as my love of Bowie goes back to my first adolescent appreciations of music as an active consumer. His was the first corpus of work by any musician I consciously decided to investigate and collect, but I didn’t agonise over this list — I simply allowed myself a minute to think of musical moments in the Bowiesphere that I find are always welcome when they shuffle up to the surface on my iPod…and shuffle up they do, frequently. Feel free to disagree with my choices. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc1ePZDxIoY" target="_blank">Holy Holy</a>:</b> <i>Rolling Stone</i> and I concur — it’s an insane classic, with deliberately provocative occult-flirting lyrics that made quite an impression on me when I was 14 years old and heard it on the <i>Bowie Rare</i> album. The lyric sheet of this album (of European RCA provenance, I believe), should you ever read it, is a veritable velvet goldmine of badly translated mondegreens and typos (“bust just lest me be” instead of “but just let me be” being one of the milder examples in this song alone, if memory serves). Holy Holy also contains a sterling example of the quintessential 70s rock effect of a reversed gated reverb plastered on Bowie’s vocal, rendering the echo of the sung words audible before the words themselves. Legend has it that one James Patrick Page discovered this trick and this explains its earliest outings on certain Led Zeppelin guitar solos.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv-l2ZpTj58" target="_blank">She’s Got Medals</a>:</b> Again, can’t argue with<i> RS</i> on this. I am a vociferous defender of Bowie’s <i>soi-disant</i> ‘juvenilia’, if defence were even needed, and it riles me when his experimental, fertile and eclectic Sixties output is summarised by tin-eared journalists and wiki-rote pub bores invoking the <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SQdBxVjZx4" target="_blank">The Laughing Gnome</a> (which incidentally is a great song, doing a successful job as a comedy number with a Mod-stomping backbeat that bears repeated listening. Can’t fault it. Form a queue to smack me upside the head if you dare). She’s Got Medals, along with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIL5KDeLOJ0" target="_blank">The London Boys</a>, is possibly my favourite song from Bowie’s career before his 1969 breakout. An engaging, semi-spoken lyric (top line: “she went and joined the Army; passed the medical — don’t ask me how it’s done!”) and a weirdly creepy oboe arrangement stand out, along with a blatant steal of Love’s version of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JycjUsY9Ogo" target="_blank">Hey Joe </a>(the bass line, mostly, although there’s shades of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVFGwJ7S2EQ" target="_blank">Byrds version </a>in there too), but all wrapped up in a very English, between-the-wars parochialism that sets the lightness of the delivery against something dark and sinister in a way only the Sixties ever managed. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrfc8c6VkTA" target="_blank">Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)</a>/<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ZWY_NqozI" target="_blank">Rebel Rebel</a></b>: OK, I’m cheating by citing three (four?) songs, but they are so artfully linked that they are indivisible (and programmed to come up as such on my iPod). Bowie almost goes Prog! There’s definitely a concept-album feel to <i>Diamond Dogs</i> (betraying its gestation as a musical version of George Orwell’s <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>, nixed when Orwell’s widow refused Bowie the performing rights) and this three-song suite takes in a cracking range over a relatively short passage of time, with Sweet Thing alternately stately and darkly pretty, then (un)settling into the frankly creepy decadence of Candidate (a song that featured at the centre of a nightmare I once had concerning Bowie) before recapitulating Sweet Thing only to accelerate to the sleaze-out, stomp-riff finale of Rebel Rebel. This could well be the zenith of Bowie’s marriage of theatricality and rock — and the subsequent <i>Diamond Dogs</i> tour reflected that; possibly the high-water mark of Bowie’s live career — at least to begin with… </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EOlZyD26T4" target="_blank">Big Brother/Chant Of The Ever-Circling Skeletal Family</a>:</b> <i>Diamond Dogs</i> again, commanding a considerable amount of total minutes on this list. Scary Dave is back. There’s something almost cinematic about the placing of these songs and the atmosphere they convey (perhaps picked up subconsciously from the line in ‘Candidate’ where Bowie conspiratorially avers that “my set is amazing; it even smells like a street”) as we move in a distinct tracking shot (sonically speaking) down from the epic, crumbling tenement towers of Big Brother (with its brilliantly ‘failed’ attempt at a happy middle-eight) to focus on the Skeletal Family dancing round a burning oil drum in the precincts. Chant Of The Ever-Circling Skeletal Family completely obsessed me as a teen, with its theoretically endless, almost medieval <i>tötentanz</i>-ical whirl, while the mellotron/choir transition from Big Brother into the Chant is still up there as one of my favourite ever Bowie moments. The lyrics of Chant read on paper as the kind of interjections James Brown would bark out during one of his numbers (<i>Brother! Ooh-ooh! Shake it up! Move it up!</i>) but in Bowie’s delivery they become a ghostly, fleshless, minimalist mantra. Also noteworthy is the absolutely inspired, almost onomatopoeic use of guiro and claves to scratch-clatch out a hollow-boned percussive drive. Charles Schaar Murray once described <i>Diamond Dogs</i> and the subsequent tour LP <i>David Live</i> as ‘the final nightmare of glitter apocalypse…in which the corpse of Ziggy had been reanimated in hell to run through his act one more time’ — powerfully emotive, matchless metaphors indeed, realised no better than on these closing songs. To a certain post-Beatles generation, the repeated <i>bro-bro-bro-bro</i> fadeout must have been as resonant and final in the Seventies as the closing chord on the <i>Sgt. Pepper</i> album was in the Sixties — a slamming-down of the lid on the Glam Rock sarcophagus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYbwdWbl2z0" target="_blank">Life On Mars?: </a> As a very small child, my mother would sing me to sleep singing ‘Starman’, which she always thought had a nice melody even if <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muMcWMKPEWQ" target="_blank">that funny chap who sang it on telly </a>wore makeup and looked, as she would put it, ‘a bit poofy’. Consequently, I had the man we sometimes call ‘Bromley Dave’ instilled in me from before I can remember. My earliest inklings of Bowie, visually speaking, were derived from several pop promos that seemed to be on TV a lot when I was a toddler: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGQo6zpVzt8" target="_blank">the Jean Genie film </a>evinces a thrill of vivid childhood nostalgia for me, with the band filmed on The Streets Of San Francisco and the model Cyrinda Foxe vamping about trying to catch Bowie’s eye (which she did in real life, so I’m told). Ditto the Life On Mars? promo, filmed months, if not years, after the single release as it depicts a full-blown Ziggy on acoustic guitar (see link), rather than the Bacall-like, blond-locked and Oxford-bagged Bowie that was behind the mic on <i>Hunky Dory</i>. Throw in the photos of Ziggy in the red leather kecks, high boots and the eyepatch... and you had, er, Adolf Hitler. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Adolf Hitler, yesterday</i>.</td></tr>
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Or at least that’s who I thought it was at the age of four. I blame this misattribution on my older brother, who with four years on me had developed a childish fascination with war films and spoke about Churchill, Hitler, the Nazis etc a lot. Somehow in my head I conflated one person onto the image of another and subsequently maintained, in my childlike manner, a theory that a) Hitler was alive and out there, somewhere and b) he looked like Ziggy Stardust. This was clearly a man to be feared. Consequently my earliest memories of Bowie are imagining him to be some kind of human monster in Maybelline, the epitome of fear incarnate Factored to the Max... who also released pop singles. By the time Bowie got to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMThz7eQ6K0" target="_blank">Ashes To Ashes promo</a>, the deal was sealed; he terrified me like the Daleks. Even today I am aware that the eyepatched Ziggy pics create a frisson of recognition in me that is as potent as seeing a blue Police Box and acknowledging its time-travel capabilities first over any mere mundane functionality for the boys in blue. I probably didn’t shake this doublethink off until I turned thirteen or so. My sister owned several Bowie albums and, as is healthy for a curious adolescent, my fear gave way to fascination and eventually affection. Funny, I was fascinated by Bowie as a child despite the fact he scared me; as an adult I liked him precisely <i>because</i> I knew he scared me. In fact, I think I like Scary Dave the best of all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anyway, there’s nothing more I can add about the self-evident genius of Life On Mars? other than it’s an instant classic, pisses on My Way even if it’s derived thereof, and Mick Ronson’s stunning string arrangement can never be overpraised, although frequently overlooked, it seems. Oh, and Rick Wakeman’s on it. David Bowie: one — rest of the world: nil.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti29EFLkw7E" target="_blank">Hang On To Yourself: …</a> and then I’d say this song probably did more to (re)kindle an active interest in Dame Adolf as a teenager and initiate my ‘Bowie rehab’ (which ironically enough, meant I emerged a confirmed addict). This would be potent rock’n’roll by anyone, a crisp nugget of hard-hitting pop perfection and one of my favourite songs of all time. Amidst the Cochranesque riffing and the doo-wop hand-clapping, there is something so very Seventies about the half-heard “yeaaaaahhhh” that drifts across the speakers after the line “you’re the blessed; we’re the Spiders From Mars.” I love Woody Woodmansey’s machine-gun drum fills too. A song with a companionable arm round the shoulder for me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY77zDzNmYw" target="_blank">StationToStation: </a> I loved <i>StationToStation</i> as a teenager more than <i>Young Americans</i> as I despised anything too funky or soulish in those days, reacting against the preponderance of disco-funk in the charts as a child (I have since reconciled myself with this oft-rewarding, but frequently-abused genre). I found <i>Young Americans</i>, despite Bowie’s ‘plastic soul’ assessment, to be too much like The Real Thing (can you feel the force?). <i>StationToStation </i>somehow packages the funky inflections in with music that is glacial, lengthy and decidedly progressive (I think it’s no coincidence that Bowie, unable to secure Roy Bittan’s services on keyboards for the Thin White Duke tour, opted for ex-Yes man Tony Kaye) and nowhere more effectively than the title track, which builds from practically nothing into a sneaky, almost snidey but steady plod of a tune that then makes one magical movement into weirdly freaked-out, discofied apotheosis, leavened immeasurably by Bittan’s joyous, scintillating piano part. It’s actually amazing how little Bowie himself contributes to the structure of the music, but the Thin White Duke’s presence presides over the proceedings, all-pervading, like a vampiric cloud. Let us not forget that this album was recorded at Bowie’s lowest life-ebb to date, apparently leaving session boys Earl Slick, Bittan <i>et al </i>to get on with much of the arrangement while he descended into coke-induced, song-inspiring blackout. It is impressive that Bowie managed to parlay his demons into cohesive — and admittedly danceable — music to such successful effect. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU8HjP-aLKM" target="_blank">Look Back In Anger: </a> Online intelligence informs me that this song is considered by some critics to be the low point of <i>Lodger</i>. I don’t understand why, as it’s simply a kick-ass song, with the lyric that tells me <i>exactly </i>where the idea comes for the <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O95iX9WdOTw/TuJxNzm5aUI/AAAAAAAAHXg/LSj-uVfnRAQ/s1600/Bbm-Around-The-Next-Dream-Delantera.jpg" target="_blank">angelic Mr Baker on the cover of the BBM album.</a> The instrumental break that sort of comprises the second verse of Look Back In Anger (at least it comes before the second refrain of the structure) is a thrilling bit of tight ensemble playing, with Alomar’s simple but highly effective solo writhing over Dennis Davis’ astonishing drum part, one of the greatest takes of Davis’ illustrious Bowie career. I get the impression Bowie maybe had extra lyrics, but heard what his sidemen were doing on the backing track and elected to let some of the music breathe for several bars: it really is quite a piece of work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0wkJYXnNus" target="_blank">Come And Buy My Toys: </a>Another one from the arcane, recondite vaults of Bowie’s psinister, psychedelic psixties. John Renbourn on acoustic guitar. Fact. Artless (arf arf) mention of a ‘cambric shirt’ and some Baroque palm-muted bass counterpoint. It’s a slight arrangement, but something about this song opens a wormhole to somewhere that manages to be sunblest and fell simultaneously. A Wicker Manish Boy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGQo6zpVzt8" target="_blank">The Jean Genie: </a>A stone-cold classic. Time can flex like a whore and fall wanking to the floor all it wants, but it fails to diminish the sheer exuberant chug and swagger of this archetypal Spiders song. As a very small child, with the most minimal knowledge of pop music I initially believed it was by the Stones, and who can blame me? I remember this being played frequently when I was about five/six (a reissue, do we know?) on tv (in that aforementioned video) as well as on radio and the DJs talking so warmly of it that I liked it instantly and didn’t realise that ‘Adolf Hitler’ had recorded it until a while later. <i>Then</i> it scared me! </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That’s all from me for now. I’ll be doing more of these scrabblings around in my top drawers of pop culture soon. <br />
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But first, a drink. <br />
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-3641140704144538362014-08-02T11:24:00.002+01:002014-08-02T12:32:23.247+01:002014 — a half-time report. Part one: the bad times.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Palatino;">Many of my blog entries seem to start with “when I first started this blog...” and then go on to outline how what I wanted and what I actually do are two separate things. This one is no different. Clearly it’s a comfortable gambit. I’m a fool for laying out a stall without quite knowing what I plan to sell, I know, but as I have said before, there are subjects that I try to avoid posting online as much as I would in casual conversation. They are obvious. Politics: mainly because my grasp of it is childlike and overly simplistic — but let’s just say that no-one would be deported, prejudiced, unfairly taxed, unemployed or uneducated on <i>my</i> watch. Religion is also a wobbly one — essentially, all you need to know is this ex-Catholic veers between having a distant respect for it as a cultural inevitability or as a framework of faith that gives meaning, substance and order for many in life — but ultimately I think it’s completely crackers. Even that is possibly vouchsafing too much insight into my worldview. Maybe I should pull my head out of the sand on this one. But that’s a discussion for another time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’ve also tried hard not to make this blog too private, too personal, being as it is for the most part a collection of music essays, poetry scraps and pop culture silliness. But earlier this year I wrote something that was about as personal as I get. As such, I didn’t post it up at the time as it was more of an attempt at emotional catharsis and on a basic level, something to do; a time-consuming, energy-dissipating exercise. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">However, six months have passed and I am, as they say, in a better head-space than I was in those (literally and figuratively) dark, dank days. I attribute this improvement of my situation to several good, close friends, my family, and keeping busy with creative pursuits; the latter being something I intend to blog about very soon indeed. This article was also instrumental in the healing process, and in that spirit, I am happy to present it to you now. I cannot guarantee this is the last time I ever offer up something so close to home again, but I can promise that it would take a lot for me to do this any time soon. One hell of a lot. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Saturday, 1st February 2014, 8AM. </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My first night spent in the new flat. Woke on sofa with a dreadful hangover and still wearing my clothes from the night before (it was bit of a session). Since I was already fully clothed, with no-one around to impress, I decided it would be a good idea to head on out and attempt to finish off all business in the old flat before the afternoon, so by 8.30am I was on a Tube train from Finchley heading to London Bridge. I daresay I must have stank to high heaven of stale booze and sweat, but I didn’t give a damn as I felt absolutely rotten and completely lonely. Once more did I thank goodness for my badge-sized iPod Shuffle and the day’s worth of wonderful hand-picked tunes encoded within. <br />
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There was a delightful little boy on the Tube who clearly wasn’t enjoying being restrained in his pram and was trying to catch my attention, as I sat dejected and hungover on the opposite side of the car. I comically exaggerated my existing morning-after frown at him to show some solidarity for his plight. I soon got a smile and a wave. Parents smiled approvingly at me; the funny, grumpy, bearded man. Cheered me up a little too. The rail connections were straightforward and I soon found myself on a train that took me back to Chislehurst barely an hour after I’d started my journey — as swift as it gets really. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I cried briefly, but intensely at several moments throughout the day, each time over instances when it came crashing in on me — as if I didn’t know already — that despite our differences, Mrs M always was (and remains) a very lovely lady. The first tears were on entering the almost-vacated flat in Chislehurst and seeing a note that Mrs M had left for the landlord. It was sweet and kind, written in her distinctively friendly handwriting. At this point, I had an overwhelming need to hear her. I rang her. She was very patient and sympathetic and I soon resolved myself. I wrote a note for the landlord to accompany Mrs M’s and left it alongside. My handwriting, normally fractured and spidery at best, was more so this time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The final stages of moving out involved emptying the fridge of food, hiving off anything worthwhile into a cool bag and binning the rest. This simple task took a while longer than it ought to due to my hungover fatigue leaving me vexed, distracted and lacking in any methodic approach; consequently, I ended up making more trips back and forth to the bins than was necessary, as if subconsciously I knew that the best way to blow away the cobwebs was to keep on the move. Assembling the last couple of bags full of stuff to take back to the Finchley flat also took its time as my shape-sorting capacity seemed to have diminished overnight along with my linear logic. <br />
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The garden behind the flat in Chislehurst had given us great pleasure over the years. How often I’d stand with a cup of coffee in hand, at my window, in the back room and observe the wildlife; local cats, crows, blue tits, squirrels, magpies, robins and occasionally the odd woodpecker all passed through the greenery, occasionally tempted by the crumbs and food we’d leave out for them. It was nearly ten years since we moved in, in May 2004, a couple of weeks shy of our wedding day. Things seemed simpler then — a sense of a benevolently inexorable destiny pulled the pair of us happily along wherever we went. As the marriage deteriorated, so the flat became less of a joyful space to stand in as the boxes of <i>stuff</i> piled up. Home became more of a storage area than any place where the heart could be located. So as I stood in the empty flat for the final time late this particular morning, it was actually with an odd sense of satisfaction at seeing the rooms looking much as they did when we moved in, full of potential and promise — and no <i>stuff</i>. Full circle. I went to take a photograph of the garden from the window, but the light was against me — and besides, I have plenty of photos of the garden taken during every stage of our tenure. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Finally, not long after 11am, my brother-in-law drove round and took the last of my bulkier possessions away for storage, including my two cacti, House and Wilson, who continue, as I type, to make their presence felt on my hands and fingers as they didn’t pack themselves away without a fight and a suitably barbed parting shot or two. </span></div>
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Good morning, I’m Paul Murphy — you’re watching<i> Saturday Kitchen</i>, while I am not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Saturday afternoon. I was up against it returning to Finchley lugging my luggage, as I had arranged for Dick, my new landlord’s handyman, to arrive at 1pm and fix all the light fittings and sundry other niggles in the flat that had not presented themselves initially. I arrived on the dot of 1pm and awaited Dick. That a man could wear the handle ‘Dick’ comfortably in this day and age suggested to me that I was to expect a genial, white, middle-aged man on my doorstep — which was exactly what I got. Famished by this point, I left Dick to get on with it while I dashed across the road to get myself — finally — something from the Italian deli so providentially situated. I broke my fast with a cup of tea and a white anchovy, mayonnaise and lettuce ciabatta. It tasted pretty much like the greatest thing <i>ever</i> after five hours solid on the go. Meanwhile, Dick worked quickly and without fuss and soon the flat had a full complement of lights, rendering everywhere a little too bright, if anything — but I have the option now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An afternoon sojourn to Finchley Central provided me with some domestic essentials and most importantly, a duvet — my first double duvet. Back home, as I must now call it, opening the boxes containing tinned food and spice jars — which Mrs M had carefully and thoughtfully packed for me — elicited another brief torrent of tears, but hunger spurred me on to make a Thai-style noodle soup, out of a packet, which tasted surprisingly good. This also cheered me up considerably. As the afternoon wore on, a sense of despair had set in and I experienced brief but major pangs of regret and uncertainty about the future. A sort-out of the laundry served to dispel some of the blues still further and yielded a satisfyingly large quantity of clean clothes I can donate to one of the many charity shops in the area. I think the Cats Protection League will be the first beneficiaries. Having the dishwasher, the washing machine and the kettle on also served to provide some agreeable and familiar ambient noise in other rooms. Even setting the clock on the oven to the correct time added a tiny extra sense of being home. Silly really. I sat in the newly illuminated living room listening first to Radio 4, then over to my other ever-constant companion, Radio 3, for the evening concert programme. Pleased to note that I identified the music as being by Shostakovich before I read the information, solely from recognising the style rather than the specific piece. At least that part of my mind is still in decent order. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And that was my first whole day in the new flat.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Now listening/n</span></span>ow reading/n</b><b>ow watching:</b> that's a blog entry all to itself, and one I'm happy to do for you soon. </span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-66323621898526174412014-03-02T21:42:00.003+00:002014-03-02T22:06:30.148+00:00Life Fragments: a letter from Paul A Murphy (aged 19) to Paul A Murphy (aged 40)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">F.A.O. <u>Mr Paul A. Murphy</u></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">DO NOT OPEN BEFORE <u>SEPTEMBER 24th</u> <u>2011</u> A.D.</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Friday 20th September 1991</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">11.05pm</span></i></span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Dear Paul,</span></i></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">These are the words of someone 20 years your junior — don’t worry, they say life begins at 40! </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">(Well, I wouldn’t know about it)</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I sincerely hope that this letter finds you in good spirits and wearing well. From this young callow whippersnapper’s point of view, 40 is a long way off, and I suspect I will be a different person by then. As I look in the mirror at the moment, I can report that the face is wearing well. Life was, as you know, pretty rosy as I write this — you are a week in Orpington College, which concerns a fair wee bit of your life at the moment. I trust you have made your life relatively trouble-free. If you haven’t, don’t worry, I can sympathise really!</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Contained within this box are certain fragments of your first 2 decades on this planet — most were garnered pretty recently but on the whole it will all seem pretty distant to you! Remember them in the spirit intended, not as pieces of a (perhaps) better, halcyon past, but as thanks for what is basically a good life up to 20. </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Can you sit there and say that you got the goals in life I want now? Perhaps you didn’t, but I trust that your priorities changed for the best in the situation.</span></i></span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I hope you are married! I cannot envisage being alone & 40. If you are married, do I know your wife yet? (God, I hope not!) There must be a lot of things that matter to me now that must seem gloriously irrelevant to you. I hope this box of trivia serves to remind you of these things. If they bring nothing but regretful misery, well, you’re only 40! There’s still time to change. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">THERE’S</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">STILL</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">TIME</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">TO</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">CHANGE!</span></span></i></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I’m round the corner, if you try. </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I hope you can look back at the time I wrote this as the start of a classic life! </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Best Wishes for the Future, </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Paul Aloysius Cainnech Murphy</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Age 19 years 360 days</span></i></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-60018543623905247562013-12-08T20:37:00.000+00:002013-12-08T20:38:01.697+00:00Captain Scott: a poem.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I am moving house at the moment. While disinterring and transferring all kinds of things from boxes perhaps best left unopened, I found a folder full of poems and other bits of writing dating back to the early Nineties. This poem comes from 1993, so I was probably 21 at the time. Forgive me. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><b>Captain Scott</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Ill with ‘flu and lying in bed one day</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I was struck by an alarming thought</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">about the final entry in the diary</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">of Captain Robert Falcon Scott:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">“Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.”</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">The story that hitherto for me was legend</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">suddenly took a human turn of thought</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">as I realised I could never comprehend</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">the feelings that could make a man write</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">not of regret at a lost chance of glory</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">but his life in past tense before he was dead. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">PM</span></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-55162210427803648002013-10-15T22:34:00.001+01:002013-10-15T22:40:28.934+01:00Between 6AM and seven: a poem<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Between 6AM and seven. </b></span></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">
</span></b>
<br />
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 15.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><b><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></b></span></div>
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">
</span></b>
<br />
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">For one moment</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></b></div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">(and maybe more than one)</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></b></div>
<b>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">everything — the potential — is yours.</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Emperor of dreams, fading</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the King of silence, preceding</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a Prince of darkness, diminishing</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the Lord of birds, awakening</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a Knight of day, dawning</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">squire of a squirrel, enquiring</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">scullion, cook, fast-breaking</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">your humble servant, counting</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">courting</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 15px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and lightening the hour.</span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'Times New Roman'; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0px;">PM</span></div>
</b></div>
Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-35298889051128198152013-08-18T23:56:00.000+01:002013-08-18T23:58:57.225+01:00These are the things that cause confusion: an anti-poem.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">These are the things that cause confusion.</span></b></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">When people</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">with pretensions</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">write phrases</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">that are short</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and stacked</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">the one</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">on top</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">of the other</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">so that when</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">you read it</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">the breaks</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">create pauses</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">that get</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">mistaken <br />
<br />
for gravity</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and then </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">call it ‘poetry’</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">we’re in trouble.</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">PM</span></div>
</div>
Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-45893641645196405652013-07-15T12:53:00.000+01:002015-07-25T11:18:26.331+01:00Oh well, whenever: a poem<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b><span lang="EN-US">Oh well, whenever.</span></b></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Your single-worded message,</span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">the frown in sympathy,</span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">even a kiss within a dream</span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">elicits a breath unbidden, sharply caught.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">A reaction more erotic</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">than anything thought.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">PM </span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span>
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</div>
Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-24723357937538426592013-07-09T11:27:00.000+01:002013-07-09T11:29:43.129+01:00Block: a poem<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Because when the music isn't coming, words are all there is... </i></span></span></span><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Block.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The passion, dissipated,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">contemplates indolence.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The doleful absence,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">a sense of hiatus<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">and high dudgeon<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">and does no good. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">PM</span></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-87587068564352973112013-06-17T11:49:00.000+01:002013-06-17T11:49:54.611+01:00Gazelle Twin CD review.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Please find my review of Gazelle Twin's CD The Entire City <a href="http://spitalfieldsmusic.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/gazelle-twin-the-entire-city-review/">here</a>.<br />
<br />
http://spitalfieldsmusic.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/gazelle-twin-the-entire-city-review/<br />
<br />
PM</div>
Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-15819082173437112392013-04-16T00:21:00.000+01:002013-04-30T10:33:51.359+01:00The politics of indifference. Part two: when everything matters. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many things make me angry, but you already know that. In my defence, I think the world is getting angrier. It’s certainly feeling a little crazier out there in the bigger picture than ever before — and in fact as I was preparing to post this article I heard the terrible news of bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, an event whose details are unfolding even as I write and will require calm analysis another time. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Take a look at the last six months or so: i</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">f you told me back then that Britain would lose its long-standing AAA Credit Rating I’d have found you a boring conversationist, sure, but distinctly credible. Undeniably though, is how it's an ignominious and highly public shame on this country. You can talk up the culture, the heritage, the noteworthy historical figures, but you can’t argue with the numbers. We’ve screwed up royally here.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Tell me six months ago that ‘anything up to 100%’ horse meat would be discovered in mainstream supermarket brand foods purporting to be 100% beef — possibly for a considerable time previously — and I would express amusement, mild dismay, but really, no shock. I reckon I’ve bought meat from a supermarket fewer than a dozen times in the last two years: in the past I’ve wondered enough about how loosely supermarket-supply butchers are monitored when their output is so much greater and more relentless than an independently run family shop. To maintain supply levels and frequency, corners are inevitably cut, along with the beef, it would seem. I must say I love the bullshit of whomever it was who stated ‘anything up to 100%’ in the recent reports — it’s like being diagnosed with an illness that could cause symptoms ranging ‘anywhere up to death.’ How can anyone say 100% of one thing be <i>another</i> thing? Ah well. If there’s some good to emerge from this, it’s that maybe the supermarkets will play harder, we’ll all learn to be more accountable for what goes in our mouths (food-wise, at least) and cultivate closer relationships with small, independent butchers (food-wise at least), who are clearly more strictly regulated, especially as they have more to lose from unscrupulous practice (er, food-wise at least. I’ll stop now). Besides, you simply find a better range of cuts, more negotiable prices, fresher produce and a bit of honest eye-contact with a small operation. Think about it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Tell me six months ago that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile and I may have wanted to believe you, but would need proof. I always thought he was oddly asexual if anything — living alone with no noticeable partner, and that slightly weird, but fairly textbook Freudian worship of his mother — not factors which could be conflated into the 400-plus accusations of insidious molestation and emotional (to say nothing of financial) blackmail. It seems the bigger the facade, the easier it is to hide in plain view. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">As for the Pope, resigning — weeeeell, not without precedent, but as every elderly Pope has died on the job since at least the 15th Century certainly made it unforeseen in the modern age. It has given my mother, whose conversation is somewhat circular in her old age, something new to talk about at the very least. I must say it has given me as much pause for thought as if I heard the Chief Cashier of the Bank Of England had changed — something I only found out the other day <i>had</i> happened six months ago. Gripping. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Best of all, tell me <i>only</i> six months ago that Oscar Pistorius would murder his girlfriend with a pistol…after claiming to mistake her for a burglar…on Valentine’s Day…<i>geddouttahere!</i> What? Oscar, the medal-winning Paralympian who made history by becoming the first Paralympian to qualify in the Olympics slightly over 180 days earlier? A man clearly unused to the idea of disability and failure, reduced to a pathetic, hot-headed, control-freak killer? Tch’oh!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Incredible, really. As Neil Innes said in a splendid Rutles tune: <i>“It’s a strange world we live in, but surely we’re forgiven if we don’t know where to turn.” </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">So what am I saying here? It strikes me that if I have got angrier over the years, then maybe many more people are buying into the collective madness than ever before — or rather we’re made more aware of them nowadays. The internet community, such as it is, has been in place for the best part of two decades, but the accessibility and ease of dissemination that social networking affords is probably the single most significant change in communication of the last ten years. I’m typing this intending to post it up on Blogger (thanks Blogger) and then inform my friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter that I have done so — thus, an instant transmission of ideology is attained to a considerable number of people who can disseminate it in turn should they so wish; this we know. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">You also know as well as I do that what this technology affords most people is the ability to post up deliriously cute pictures of cats, what they’ve had for dinner, or sanctimonious (albeit humorous) proclamations on the correct usage of grammar and punctuation. I’ve perpetrated these harmless conceits as much as anyone, and more power to them, frankly, but I’m sure we’ve all considered from time to time — if not these cheerful, happily unnecessary distractions, then what else is social networking for? </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">How often am I confronted on Facebook with a status update or posting shared by someone that states <b>“99% of people won’t have the GUTS to repost this”</b> preceded by some raving cryptofascist bollocks? You’ve all seen something like it. Here’s one I found at random: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Homeless go without eating. Elderly go without needed medicines. Mentally ill go without treatment. Troops go without proper equipment. Veterans go without benefits that were promised. Yet we donate billions to other countries BEFORE helping our own first. 1% will repost and 99% won’t. Have the guts to repost this.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">It’d be patronising in the extreme to go into statistical specifics to illustrate just how misguided these sort of statements can be. Let’s just highlight the essential cluelessness of assuming, as the paragraph would like us to infer, that the parlous state of financing for medical facilities, care for the elderly and so on, could have such a direct, simplistic correlation with the money supposedly being ‘drained’ in the name of foreign charities; that somehow the act of donating to charity ever boils down to a cruel choice for anyone who is kind enough to donate to anything, whether domestic or overseas (<i>“Let me see now: blankets for Syrian refugees — or Timmy’s dialysis? Hmm...”</i>). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">The worst part of this is that people really do let this kind of woollen rhetoric rule their reason — and I’m talking specifically about when they’re online here. I don’t see enough people using their brains — I see too many people just passing on half-baked ideas to other people who will only half-understand them, but believe that much wholeheartedly. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Do we really want to be represented by someone else's words quite so often? </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">This is not communication, nor education. It’s not even being politically active. When was the last time that one of these statements (as opposed to links to actual valid online petitions) truly fomented any form of productive <i>soi-disant </i>revolution? The riots that spread across the UK in 2011 were partly co-ordinated — if that’s the right word — by social networking media, you might argue. Well, <i>QED</i>, I say. </span><br />
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If you’ve ever thought this way, then, it’s time for me to patronise you: please, go away and think. Use your fucking brain. Think a little harder and further than your first thought and consider where this train of logic will take you. Consider the true meaning of that most-abused of expressions: ‘charity begins at home.’ It’s not about where you live in the world. It’s how you live in your head.</span></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-30381316274172804172013-02-24T17:15:00.001+00:002013-02-28T10:20:32.098+00:00The politics of indifference. Part one: why nothing matters.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Once upon a time, not long before school, when I was still tiny enough for my father to carry me to bed, I’d nod off on the sofa in the evening while he’d watch endless news and current affairs programmes. I remember thinking that all those people in suits on television seemed preoccupied with something I thought for years was called ‘polytex.’ It sounds like something you use to paper over the cracks. Well, insert your own shrewd social observation <i>here</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Politics never fascinated me as a career choice, an active profession. The Seventies were dominated by overweight middle-aged men in ill-fitting suits and wayward hairstyles — seriously, no exaggeration, do a Google search — or Mrs Thatcher and Shirley Williams. These people were never going to be lifestyle icons to the switched-on supercool hipcat I thought I was, evidently, and I suspected the conversation would be limited and dull. It all came over as so <i>grown-up</i>, so earnest. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">By the time I was a teenager, politics for me had social currency, but really only by way of being the main target of derision of so many ‘alternative’ acts in that most fecund of decades for stand-up comedy. It may seem hard to believe that Ben Elton was funny in those days, given his poor showings on more recent TV, but he was, yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen. Funny, quick-witted, impassioned and if he seemed a bit preachy from time to time… well, maybe I needed a little of that too. Margaret Thatcher in Elton’s hands became ‘Mrs Thatch’, indivisible from her coruscatingly insane, bouffanted and vulture-faced <i>Spitting Image</i> puppet, surrounded by hopeless eunuchs or equally insane wannabes. Like practically everyone my age, I got behind all the alternative comedians and their largely left-wing invective because it was cool, it was happening and it seemed to annoy the older generation, not least the stand-up variety acts — or at least those who lacked the courage to accept that things had moved on, socially speaking, and moreover felt their livelihoods were threatened. Comedy had indeed become the new rock’n’roll. Yet, still I was skirting around discussing any real politics, actual matters of Parliamentary policy. I didn’t know much about politics, but I knew for certain what I <i>didn’t</i> like. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">This vague, contrary conviction hardened up a little by the end of my time at school, when a number of my chums joined their local Young Conservatives Club. My grasp of Tory party policy was tenuous, but considering I’d spent the best part of the decade laughing at the contemptible Conservatives and their monstrous leader, I found this determination in my colleagues to vote for the designated bad guys (</span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">once they were of legal age, remember)</span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"> baffling at least. It’s entirely possible that they were encouraged to join a social club that met with parental approval, the better to meet girls and be out of the house for a few hours — but all that besides, they really were, in my eyes, the most pathetic specimens in the Sixth Form: one of their number had the nickname ‘Square’ in recognition of his achievements in the dullest aspects of mathematics and the other, it was well-known, had embarked on a weird insect torturing-and-killing spree after being dumped by a girlfriend of four days. Not exactly ideal poster boys for the Blue team I’m sure you’ll agree — but interestingly, none of this made me want to vote Labour by way of contrast, either. I had a sneaking suspicion <i>their</i> shindigs would be populated by Red Flaggers just as inept, awkward and boring. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">The situation became more intriguing at college where I witnessed firsthand the active abuse of politics by individuals for personal ends. I’m talking about sex of course — it seemed so blatant to me that shaking a tin to raise money for a campaign to stop atrocities in Bosnia (this should date my time at University for you all) was done less out of sympathy for the people of the former Yugoslavia and mostly to get that redheaded Student Secretary for Social Justice into the sack. I have alluded to this before (<a href="http://paulmurphyandthebishops.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/we-can-be-heroes.html">here</a>) and should point out instantly that I was as much a party to this hypocrisy as anyone. Believe me, my desire to attend a ‘die-in’ at Trafalgar Square in the mid-Nineties was motivated more by a shapely pair of pins and long blonde hair (neither my own, I hasten to add) than any previously apparent (or indeed subsequent) outrage at French Pacific Nuclear Testing. Apparently Greenpeace is 80% female membership, you know. However, as surely as I recognise this hypocrisy in myself, I’ve always been doubtful, in my dealings with people, of the motives in making their political affiliations overt.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Having said ALL of this, I find as I get older that my genial fence-sitting of old to be frankly rather spineless and increasingly feel the need to make a decision. After all, no-one’s truly apolitical, are they? It’s all just a question of whether an issue affects you, and/or if you allow it to do so. So, I’ll leave you with the promise that I have a countering essay lined up to argue this drivel. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">In the meantime, allow me to tell you a brief story of political terrorism that I perpetrated during my time at College. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">The end of the Spring Term of my first year at College coincided with the election of a new President for the Student Union and several ancillary positions on the Student Council. This was relatively exciting as I happened to know several of the candidates who went up for these posts. There was a tall, handsome, long-haired and cheerful chap called Wayne and his ever-present mate, Matty, who contrasted pleasingly enough by being shorter, fatter and bald, if no less jovial. There was another skinny, blandly earnest chap and a rather enthusiastic girl taking the number of Presidential Candidates up to four. Memory fails me on their names, but let’s call them, er, Phil and Clare. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">We had the hustings one lunchtime, where the four candidates stood up and stated their suitability. Phil came across as the crushingly mediocre kind of chap to run the Union like a business. He’s probably doing something tedious but well-paid in the City these days, in his forties like me. Clare sadly hadn’t really thought out her strategy but had been clearly put up for the job by being harmless, approachable and energetic. We won’t hear any more from her. But Matty and Wayne had the proceedings sewn up. Wayne outlined his plans to get bigger indie acts to play at the end-of-term College Ball — the rock’n’roll President card. Matty promised better funding for outdoor events, Extreme Sports Societies and other healthy fun. Both came off to the kind of applause a headline act normally gets at a gig. They were gonna give the people what they wanted</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">That evening I realised that Matty and Wayne had played their parts in the hustings almost as a double act. My feelings on who actually got voted in was secondary to my feeling that something didn’t seem right. I got out a pad of post-it notes and wrote on one of them, using block capital letters and writing upside-down, the better to hide my left-handedness further:</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A VOTE FOR MATTY IS A VOTE FOR WAYNE.</span></b></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Palatino; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I wrote on a second note: </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A VOTE FOR WAYNE IS A VOTE FOR MATTY.</span></b></span></div>
<div style="font: normal normal normal 11px/normal Palatino; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">My dormitory was part of the same building as the College refectory (it was a Catholic Convent, fascinatingly enough). An easy enough task to sneak downstairs in the wee small hours in stockinged feet, in near-darkness, and place the post-its respectively on Matty and Wayne’s candidacy posters on prominent display in the refectory lobby. I snuck back to my room and even destroyed the underlying post-it notes on the pad I’d written. Then went to sleep. The refectory opened at 8am the following morning. </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I padded downstairs at about 9am to considerable hubbub. It was hardly<i> V For Vendetta</i>, but I felt a thrill nonetheless as I queued for my breakfast to have one of my friends remark despairingly to me, “…but it’s sabotage!” and I nodded sagely. Oh, how I nodded sagely. Feigned ignorance. And felt mildly, deliciously naughty. </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Do you know, I think Wayne got voted in on a landslide majority. But I had expressed <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpMv76SIUhg">my pointless point of view</a>.</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px Palatino; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 15.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I have never told anyone I did this until now. So feel honoured! </span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 15.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">PM</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 15.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Now listening:</span></b></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Radio 3 as standard. And lots of Maria Callas. </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Now watching: </span></b></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><i>Monty Python And The Holy Grail</i> (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975) </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><i>Monty Python's Life Of Brian</i> (Terry Jones, 1979)</span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><i>Doctor Who: The Ark In Space</i> (BBC, 1975) — Top-form Tom Baker. Indomitable. </span></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 15.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><i>Ashes To Ashes</i>: series two and three (BBC 2009, 2010): after some wobbles in the first series the characters hit their marks and the plots are more engaging in the last two series, with a genuinely elegaic ending to round things off. Splendid and satisfying. </span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-63203168723248667912013-02-04T12:19:00.000+00:002013-02-04T12:33:49.842+00:00Rant-wank for 2013.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It has to be said upfront, if
the title of this essay didn’t convince, that your generally gentle and
hopefully genial correspondent is not enjoying his 2013 so far. This time last
year <a href="http://paulmurphyandthebishops.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/condition-of-music-decrescendo-e.html">I wrote an article </a>that expressed my fears for the future of HMV. It was
hardly the most adroit piece of prophecy, but the news of past weeks still
arrived with a degree of shock and suddenness; finally, this most eminent and
estimable of music retail institutions is going into administration, its outcome
uncertain. My main fear, voiced last year as now, is that without worthy
shopping establishments and the opportunities they afford people to venture out
into the Big Wide World and Deal With Other People (Possibly Strangers), we
will find instead that the West End — the very heart of London for many — will
become a deader place to inhabit. Sure, they could always open another
restaurant on the site, but that’s all it will be — another restaurant. </span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’m reminded of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv_TvSB-9Mk">a sketch Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie performed</a> on their supreme Nineties TV show </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">A Bit Of Fry & Laurie </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">which involved a discussion about the
then-burgeoning broadcast deregulation legislation that inaugurated the Satellite
television era: the fear expressed was that while the acquisition of dozens
more channels would offer more choice, and a break from the perceived ‘tyranny’
of the UK’s terrestrial televisual tetralogy (BBCs 1&2, ITV and Channel 4.
We only had four channels on telly in those days. Yep, four. All terrestrial)
we would be getting less quality overall as the new channels would be full of
shit, to put it… er, much as it turned out. The corollary, as Fry & Laurie
imagined, would be analogous to asking a waiter in a posh restaurant to
exchange a single, dirty, solid silver spoon for a bin filled to the
brim with thin plastic coffee stirrers. They may be all crap, so the punchline went, but at
least you’ve got</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"> choice</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">, haven’t you?</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sigh.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">If truth be told, I wasn’t
enjoying 2013 even before it had arrived. It’s strictly personal, not stuff I’m
prepared to discuss, I’m afraid, as much as I suspect it would unburden me to
do so. Please take my assurance that I have resolved, beside my New Year
Resolutions, not to wallow in past problems and try to take this year as I find
it.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As to the matter of those
pesky Resolutions, I confess I did not make it easy for myself this year. Two
this time around: no messing, no philosophy, both tangible and publicly
achievable ventures. The first was simple in its unambiguity: Drink No Alcohol
Throughout January. You may appreciate that the weeks leading up to and
including Christmas involved a prodigious amount of jovial cavorting and
carousing, to the extent that I presume my liver never caught so much as a
whiff of a day of unqualified cleanness and sobriety throughout. All this
Bacchic revelry ended, not with a bang but with a bit of a pop, on the evening
of January 1st 2013, with the last of the inaugural bubbles and a valedictory
cup of mead.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But now — it’s February and I
have completed my task. Only on one day over the whole of the previous month
did I imbibe, and since this was due to a friend’s birthday celebration — a day
I had predetermined I would allow before I even embarked on this crazy venture
— I can consider myself clean and sober for just over five weeks. Boy, were
they long weeks. During the first fortnight on the wagon I would have told you
that out of all my attempts at a health drive, this one was a right fucker and
no mistake. Richard Harris once memorably referred in interview to the ‘fourteen
boring years’ he spent on the Temperance Train and in some small way, I
received an insight into how that felt. That sinking feeling that descended
each and every time I realised that a particularly bad day at work could not be
mitigated with a pint at lunchtime or several afterwards. The prospect of a
sociable lubricant on a congenial Friday or Saturday night with friends — gone.
I found myself spending more evenings in at home in January than I probably
spent in the previous three months put together — and with that, a comcomitant
insularity. Fortunately, I had Mrs M as my </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">guardo
camino</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">, my
co-traveller on the road to purity. I have to say that she seemed to operate as
evenly and as sweetly-natured as ever she did, with none of my fuss and
mithering — for which I was not only grateful, but quietly impressed. She is
evidently a tougher cookie than I am, and a better person for all that too.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As for any physiological
effects, well, I admit I did look forward with a morbid — albeit undeniably
excited — trepidation to the prospect that I may wake shaking in tremulous
delirium of a morning several days in. This has not happened. There </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">have</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">
been two notable changes in my bodily function. First off, I have visibly lost
some weight, mainly in my face, hands and about four inches off my waist. My
double chin has receded to the point where I appear to have a discernible
jawline. This has been a few years in remission, so it was a strange feeling,
upon trimming my beard, to notice parts of my face that go in where previously
they went out. I have knucklebones instead of dimples on my hands, and my
fingers closely resemble those of my octogenarian mother, a detail pointed out
to me by Mrs M and one I find delightful and reassuring.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The second change has been in
my sleeping pattern. Whereas I used to be a strict 7am riser irrespective of
workdays or weekends, I have found that I lie in dozing much as I last did as a
teenager, and if left unchecked of a Saturday morning will awake some time
after 9am. On more than one occasion I’ve not set foot on bedroom carpet before
10.30am, and frankly this appalls me. There aren’t enough hours in my spare
time as it is. However, it has shown me that my main motivation in getting up
was mostly dictated by hangover — and that’s not a good reason to spring out of
bed prematurely. I do like my sleep, in its place. </span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Anyway, while this hasn’t
exactly been the most exciting thing in my life at the moment, I thought it
would prove to be quite a useful thing to chronicle, given that it’s not been
lost on me these past weeks that my announcement to undertake a month off the
sauce was greeted in most camps with incredulity and a distinct whiff of
scepticism. Before I took this on, I wouldn’t class myself as pathologically
addicted to drink. Well, now I know for certain that I am not. It seems I have
simply not tried hard enough in my alcoholic efforts. Well, good-oh for that.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oh, my second New Year
Resolution: learn to read and write music. It may come as a surprise to some of
you that I have about as much technical aptitude in music as a spoon knows the
taste of soup. As a child I remember learning the road signs depicted in The
Highway Code. The colours and graphics fascinated me, but clearly not so much
as to make me take up driving. Well, it’s time I learned how to navigate the
High Cs, if you’ll forgive me. I’ve been crotchety of late, but now I’m
positively quavering with anticipation. I used to stop at the pub and now I’m
going to rest at the end of a bar. You’re not paying extra for these tortuous
musical puns, you know.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thank you, you’ve
been kind. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’ll go now. </span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But first, a drink. </span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">PM</span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";">Now
listening:</span></b></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lots of Radio 3. Like, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">lots </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">of
Radio 3.</span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Khovanshchina</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881). Exotically orchestrated
Russian opera, written by a gifted man frustrated by his day job and
consequently driven to drink. Well, aren’t we all?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";">Now
watching: </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Doctor Who: The Reign Of Terror</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> (BBC, 1964) — The magical, mercurial
William Hartnell as the original Time Lord, in a story set in Revolutionary
France and featuring two episodes restored with stylish animation. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Doctor Who: Legacy Boxset</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> (BBC 1979, 1993) — A fascinating
odds-and-sods collection of documentaries and all extant footage of the
‘legendary’ unfinished Who story, 1979’s </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Shada</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">, with the magnificent and
unmatchable Tom Baker as the Doctor. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Life On Mars</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>:
</i>series one and two (BBC 2006/2007): splendidly pungent and frequently hilarious
1970s procedural cop/time travel drama, with Philip Glenister’s immense
portrayal of non-PC DCI Gene Hunt a standout creation. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Ashes To Ashes</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>: </i>series one (BBC 2008): the not-as-good but still-worthy
sequel to </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Life On Mars</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i> </i>and</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">
<i>The Dead Pool</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">
(1971-1988): Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry canon. Seemed appropriate after all that
Gene Hunt. </span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-25248714852382131012012-12-29T15:28:00.000+00:002013-01-02T15:29:26.310+00:00Ivor Novello’s piano — a slim tale from the Green Room.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">In the summer of 1997 I landed a job running the Classical Record department of my local Virgin Megastore. Whisper it quietly, but according to my line manager I was the first person in the history of that now sadly defunct chain to be hired specifically for my Classical music knowledge. Previous incumbents in the Classical Departments of Virgin stores nationwide presumably landed the job as a short straw duty option, or only made their knowledge of Classical music manifest after working in other departments — but I really don’t know. I still find it rather hard to believe, but anyway, that is what I was told. The following eighteen months saw me increase sales of Classical music in the local area by an alleged 25% but much more importantly, forge some lasting friendships. A full account of our rousing antics is worth an entire blog entry all to itself. But not today, as the late, great Bob Holness would no doubt have said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">All of this is largely irrelevant detail but I include it because when I was eventually sacked from my position in the spring of 1999 (Yes, sacked. Yes, yes, another time, I promise), I spent the following months in abject freefall. I never knew I had a work ethic until the framework upon which to apply one was suddenly taken from me. My parents greeted the news of my sudden ‘career’ halt entirely not as I’d anticipated, meeting it less with anger or argument, but mostly with a sense of puzzlement and denial. Then again, they were both of over pensionable age and had probably not expected their youngest son to be of any more trouble to them. They could have done without my woes. </span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">My girlfriend of six years had left me several months earlier, although as often with these things, the relationship had, retrospectively, wound down to a grind rather than reach a decisive crunch point. At this stage in proceedings I still felt I could keep in touch. I remember her precise words to me, over my friend Rich’s brand-new mobile phone that he’d kindly lent me for the purpose: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“You lost your job? What’s that got to do with me?”</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> To be fair to her, she could also have done without my woes for some time, too. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I can’t quite describe the stomach-dropping and deeply depressing sensation that followed me around like a pestilential storm cloud for the following five months. Depression is a far-too-casually bandied-about word in conversation and I am wary of using the term on myself. During this period, I sought help from my doctor who told me that I wasn’t ‘painting a picture’ of clinical depression. I believed him, but it was of small comfort. Besides, the depth of my despair had started to run to the pathological, as over the course of the coming months, I visibly lost weight; a considerable amount of weight — about four to five stone — which on a chap my height was severely noticeable and a source of concern among my long-term friends who had known me as an amiably rotund person at the best of times. I don’t recall deliberately not eating, as such, but then again, nor do I remember eating all that often either. No, my days were spent skulking sulkily about the family home, smoking the ever-appetite-suppressing cigarettes and the odd joint in my bedroom, only venturing out to draw my dole, buy more ciggies and make occasional forays to the pub, where my friend Rich would buy me scotch and cokes and try to keep me laughing. He was particularly worried for me. One time I borrowed a three-quarter-length jacket from him and I remember the evident shock on his face as I buttoned it up as neatly as he could do on his own, notably slender frame. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">As my waking hours had become miserable, so my sleeping ones, perhaps through a slightly stoned, subconscious instinct for self-preservation, became wondrous. Sleep became my favourite activity — easily achieved, and oddly, of as high a quality and duration as any I’ve ever enjoyed in my life. Indeed, waking every morning brought the grudging realisation that my perceived nightmare was facing reality. I never quite wanted to die — but I remember reasoning to myself, with baleful calmness, that nor did I particularly enjoy being alive. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Now of course, you must not trouble yourself with thoughts of compassion, or at least not for too long. In truth I was idle and wasteful with the hours to myself I had suddenly acquired and my job-seeking lacked, shall we say, not as much rigor or consistency as my smoking and drinking at the time. Nonetheless, the summer of 1999 saw me sorely vexed, rattled to my very foundations as events in my life thus far had failed to do quite so perniciously. I was unemployed and worse, I felt unemployable. In the weeks to come I started to have panic attacks, episodes of shooting pains across my chest and down my arms, breathlessness — indeed everything, it seemed to me, symptomatic of incipient heart failure. I ended up in hospital after one specially harrowing sensation alone at home. A trip in the ambulance to Casualty, while getting high on pure oxygen, culminated in having my disturbingly scrawny chest wired up to the ECG and subsequently X-rayed. The doctor gave me a gentle smile, a flimsy copy of the image of my immaculate-looking ribcage, a bottle of glycerin tablets and the rather un-medical (I thought) advice to “just calm down.” I was left sat alone on the gurney in the X-ray suite, semi-naked and sobbing profoundly with a mixture of relief, and extreme guilt at all the kind, serious attention I had clearly wanted — and got. I never opened the glycerin bottle. I learned to recognise my (admittedly real-feeling) symptoms as mere panic, nothing more. The hospital could also have done without my woes, that was for sure. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Fortunately, I had two friends in particular who spent the next several months ‘looking after’ me. I use this term quite precisely as there were times when I was of the distinct impression that I had been placed under some kind of low-level ‘suicide watch,’ and who’s to say my self-destructive behaviour didn’t suggest otherwise, outwardly, even if I really didn’t feel quite so fatal, so final, myself. The redoubtable Rich you already know. The other was my ex-Virgin colleague Sarah, who had been so outraged by my sacking that she sent me a card expressing her sorrow and anger — and offered to buy me some drinks. Sarah wore her hatred for her job like a big, bright badge with a snarling face on it, but outside of work hours or in briefly snatched staff room conversations she was convivial, witty, and of similar outlook. She lived in a house in South London that she shared with several people, nearly all of whom I can’t recall with much clarity, save for Sara (don’t get confused), who was a delightful — and delightfully shapely — Northern lass who dispensed cheerful informalities along with an endless supply of cigarettes from one of those self-rolling devices. Sara was great fun just to talk and drink with: chatty, sympathetic, complimentary, unflappable, with an endless line in salty stories, filthy jokes and encouragement. She was probably about only half-a-dozen or so years older than me, a woman in her mid-thirties but she seemed untouchable and magnificent to me, which is a real shame now, looking back. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sara worked in London theatres, although I’m afraid I don’t remember the precise details. I think she was someone in Stage Management, but her work ran all the way from basic admin to dealing with the ‘talent’ and even painting the odd background flat. She knew of plenty of short-term work going, so it was that in the June/July of 1999 I found myself helping out backstage at the Peacock Theatre in Holborn. It was part of the Sadlers Wells group and so I felt I was in the environs of a genuine theatrical institution, even if the Peacock was nowhere near as famous as its parent venue. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My job involved repainting the dressing room and there seemed to be endless cups of tea on the go at any given moment. So far, so straightforward. Sadly, my previously dormant asthma, coupled with my receding, but still ongoing panic attacks, rendered me useless at the job within an hour or two of arrival. Sara was briskly attentive, spiriting me out of the building and down Holborn way to get me something a little stronger along with a ciggie (yeah, like </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that’ll</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> soothe the chest pains...) and a sit down. I was subsequently given some other tasks involving handling the lights onstage for the rest of my stint, which also afforded me the opportunity when quiet to stand up front, gaze out at the vast expanse of seating in the auditorium, imagine a full house and ‘have a moment’...<br /><br />
Thanks to Sara, the Peacock Theatre provided me with gainful part-time employment for several weeks, enough to stand a round or two for the pair of us in the pub after work. It was a splendidly sunny and warm summer, the kind worth staying out in, until late. One evening, after several drinks in Theatreland and with the pubs close to chucking-out time, Sara suggested we continue the frolics to a members club she knew. Sounded good to me. </span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Good Lord, The Green Room. I didn’t know it then, but of course I’ve since learned of its preeminent status as one of the most prestigious clubs for anyone in the theatrical profession in London, with a highly illustrious roll-call of members over the decades, both renowned onstage and backstage (for all the right reasons). It has since closed (and reopened) several times in several places since I entered the door of the Georgian town house of its most famous location, on Adam Street, off the Strand and ventured into the basement with Sara. At the time, I merely thought it was somewhere open into the wee small hours and that was fine enough with me.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The small bar room was famously described by Sir Peter Ustinov as a place where giving an after-dinner speech to a capacity crowd was “like addressing sailors in a submarine,” but was empty enough at 1.30am on a weeknight as we found it. Here and there were several expensively dressed individuals, sat at small round tables as if waiting for a cabaret act, clearly soaked to the eyeballs and enjoying the calm tolerant atmosphere in which to be so. Sara knew the barman and as they chatted she introduced me as someone who was musical and could play a bit of the piano. I found this odd as I don’t think Sara had ever seen me address the ivories. I should point out, if I’ve not done so in a previous blog, that my piano playing technique is dubious, more of a fight between me and the keys, and one I only occasionally win. Nonetheless, the barman was a genial and accommodating chap and offered me a free pint of Guinness if I were to give the assembled patrons a tune. I sipped my current, paid-for pint of the Black Stuff and said, “Maybe later!” He added, as if by way of incentive, that the piano belonged to Ivor Novello, the legendary actor, singer and composer — and the invitation was not bandied about willy-nilly. I brightly promised to knock out a ditty for them all before I left, thinking the incident would be forgotten and I’d be able to drink in peace. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">However, after a pint of two more of the Sauce, and with the conversation flowing, I felt magically encouraged and emboldened, until eventually I indicated to our host that I was ready to have a bash. I was hustled over to the piano, which was a marvellously battered old upright on a dais. After a short announcement to the rare few in the room at such a long hour, the bartender let me have it. I announced apologetically that my repertoire was slender and unconventional and that the best thing I had on me was a rather frantic and tricksily percussive piece I had composed myself. This won me some polite, smattered applause. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I then forget the next three minutes. Entirely. The only part I remember was some slightly more enthusiastic applause at the end and a pint of Guinness appearing magically beside me. I’d done all right. As I returned to the table and Sara, one of the elderly, floridly-sozzled chaps sat adjacently continued to applaud a little longer, but I noticed that his was the sarcastic, slow handclap of derision, of disapproval. He continued until his rheumy eye caught mine. He smiled joylessly. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“You play like Béla Bartók,” he offered. <br /><br />
A stunning, disproportionate comparison. I suspect I gasped. “Why, thank you, that’s very kind of you to say so!”</span>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">loathe </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bartók.” he concluded with coddled conviction, continuing to smile thinly. <br /><br />
“I’m sorry,” I said, all too delighted, “but that’s a compliment. I’m having that!”</span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Never was I insulted so fulsomely!</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Due to an administrative cock-up at the Peacock, I didn’t get paid for the majority of my employment there for a couple of months afterwards, by which time I had secured a decent full-time job and glad to do so. The money I earned was barely more than my dole, but acquired more agreeably. In the middle of all the craziness I experienced in the summer of 1999, I never expected that I would ever end up in The Green Room, playing Ivor Novello’s piano, for beer — and it was in tune. </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sara — if you ever happen to read this, thank you ever so much, you were awesome. </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and I wish you happiness in the New Year. </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">PM</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Currently listening:</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Lots of medieval and Renaissance Christmas music — too many to mention individually. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Currently watching:</span></b></span></div>
<div style="font: 10.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The eight </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Harry Potter</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> films. The winsome, racy and charming magic of the early years gives way to something grittier, greyer and possibly taking itself far too seriously. But that’s enough about me, the films are pretty good.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Red Dwarf X</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (Dave, 2012) resurrected series, back by popular demand and almost back to basics too, with less emphasis on effects-driven high concepts and more of the snippy dialogue and hilariously embarrassing situations that endeared it to millions originally. It’s like they never left. Not the dizziest heights of</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Dwarf </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">yore, perhaps, but still excellent post-pub viewing.</span></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-58814077462207502282012-07-16T12:56:00.001+01:002012-10-31T12:33:18.715+00:00Retcon artists.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When I first created this blog, like many people
undertaking this sort of caper, my primary desire was simply to entertain,
write regularly and enthusiastically on things in my life that I enjoy and
things I hate — essentially, the spectrum of my ongoing involvement with Planet
Earth, its denizens and what we share therein. It still is my </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">raison d’écrire</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, and I can’t think of
any worthier </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">raisons</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Those who know me would also believe that a detailed</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> article would inevitably rear
its multiple heads. However, I never thought that my first article on the subject would consist of an exposé on the provenance of a single, specific
sound effect heard in one of the films <a href="http://paulmurphyandthebishops.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/rain-and-revelations-but-mostly-rain.html">(my last article) </a>— I mean, that’s
pretty nerdy. Nor did I think I’d follow it so hot-footedly with this one —
which is going to be a bit of a moan about the franchise. I thought I’d at
least start by writing something a trifle breathless on why I like it all so
much — but I guess criticism is a more prolific mother of literary invention
than mere praise. How negative of me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’ve never quite got to the bottom of my precise
fascination with George Lucas’ epic space-fantasy, although the simplest
explanation is that, like most chaps of my generation, it gave me lots of exciting
Boy’s Stuff to look at and listen to at the exact age I needed it most, and as
such its effect on me was formative. That’ll do for now. Unlike </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doctor Who</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, the other great piece of
‘genre’ I love, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> has already
achieved a global appeal that has made the characters of Luke Skywalker, Darth
Vader, R2-D2 </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">et al</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> into iconic images
and individuals, introductions unnecessary, familiar to people who may not have
seen the films for decades — if even at all. However, there are conditions,
limits to my love for </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and
these are subtle and far-ranging, but I can pin most of them down to a single,
sweeping statement: I dislike other </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star
Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> fans.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now, before I go any further, I want to clear
something up. Contrary to popular belief, I generally detest getting into
detailed discussion of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.
Writing about it, fine — because here I can quantify, evaluate and crystallise
my thoughts on the matter without getting into a tiresome exchange. A </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> conversation with another fan
only really ever goes one way: how well do you know </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">? How boring. There’s a terrier-like tenacity about their
need, on learning you are also a fan, to blether on about the films, to offer
up their knowledge of all aspects of the toys, the endless spin-off novelisations
and the smallest snippet of news on the on-off TV series — as high marks of
social distinction. As a reasonably intelligent and hopefully sophisticated
individual, whose tastes can run from subtle all the way to gross, I would
dearly wish not to be defined solely as ‘the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> guy.’ To that end, I prefer not to bring up the films in
casual conversation until I’m asked directly. Really — ask yourself the last
time I mentioned them unsolicited. There are many more inclusive conversational
gambits.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I can say with confidence that my interest in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">runs to slightly more than
casual. My degree thesis contained a great deal of recourse to the original
trilogy of films, though it’s not something I’m particularly proud of —
especially when you consider the fact that my dissertation claimed me the
lowest mark of all work I undertook for my BA. Trust me, I can sing the first
three </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">films like they’re
opera but I have no desire to impress you by proving this. I know it isn’t
impressive. Merely obsessive. And that rhymes, you know. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> is the</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> ne plus
ultra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> of geek topics if you ask me — although for the most part, I’m as
glad as you that you don’t. Better to keep the faith inwards, contemplative,
loving, tranquil — and on a strictly need-to-know basis. Believe me, a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> convention, rather than being
a place to enjoy chewing the filmic fat with other like-minded Lucas freaks, is
in actuality quite my idea of hell. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Speaking of conventions, my friend Brother JCC
recently attended a Film and Comic convention and related gleefully his chance
encounter with an actress guesting at the event: she had played a regular and
memorably shapely character in a well-known and widely syndicated sci-fi TV
series some years back. Additionally he asked me if I'd heard of a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">actor who also attended. I
hadn't, so suitably intrigued by this possible lacuna, I looked him up. It
turned out he played an uncredited member of the entourage of the galactic
slug-gangster Jabba the Hutt in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Return Of
The Jedi. <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For those of you who haven’t seen </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Return Of The Jedi, </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the final instalment
of the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Saga,</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’ll say this much with wagging finger
aloft: seriously, if you’ve not seen it, I recommend you do so — it ill behoves
anyone intelligent to affect lofty, studied ignorance of a phenomenon that’s
impossible to neglect in any reasonable discourse on popular culture. People
will just think you square, stubborn and possibly even smelly. The </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Saga — particularly the three
released between 1977 and 1983 — contain many stylistic, literary and visual
tropes that are essential vocabulary in any conversation about the cinematic
arts. Grab an opportunity to add the original trilogy of films to your
discursive repertoire. Besides, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Return Of
The Jedi</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> is, as I believe the Mods used to say in the early Sixties, a
right flashkick of a flick, mostly — and it’s not even the best of the Saga.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have a point to make coming up, don’t worry, but
please allow me to digress briefly and precis the first half hour or so of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Return Of The Jedi</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> as crisply as I can.
It concerns the heroic, wisecracking hotshot pilot Han Solo (Harrison Ford) —
last seen in the previous film in dire peril, frozen in suspended animation and
delivered as a macabre prize to the villainous, oleaginous and aforementioned
Jabba the Hutt — and the stealthy, measured plan by Solo’s friends to
rescue him. To this end, they infiltrate
the gangster’s compound and inveigle their way by any means available into the
complacency of his entourage. This done, they unfreeze and retrieve the hapless
Han Solo and proceed to unleash hell upon the slimy crime-lord and his cronies
at the precise moment our heroes appear to be in greatest danger — being
dangled above the doom-laden jaws of a giant monster mouth, no less. They then
get the hell outta Dodge </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">sans </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ado,
destroying everyone and everything around them in the process with considerable
panache, just to be certain. Jabba the who? We’ll say no more about </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">him. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">They really do pack in a lot in
under thirty-five minutes. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So it transpired that the actor Brother JCC saw was
a background extra in the closing minutes of this first act. He had no speaking
part and his face and body were hidden under piles of latex, foam rubber and
fake hair. Furthermore he has done no other film work of note to date and thus
you would pass him in the street and never know. I’m certainly not begrudging
this gentleman’s right to be at the convention, nor the pleasure his presence
must have given to many people — for there’s no denying his involvement in the
film — but I'm willing to bet his character wouldn't be remembered by anyone
but for two facts: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">a)</span><span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the majority of
his scene was cut from the film, but the stills survived to generate fannish
speculation and lend mystique.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">b) the action figure made of his character is highly
collectable and commands huge sums of money due to it being made in smaller
quantities than its counterparts. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Fan fiction and spin-off novelisation has often
retroactively imbued such characters with character, furnishing them with a
name and an impressive backstory. It’s called retroactive continuity, or
‘retconning‘ — the act of lending some detail or person in a series a degree of
significance it never had at the time of production, usually due to subsequent
plotlines increasing fan interest in the character or event for some reason. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the case of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Return
Of The Jedi</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, a short story anthology was published several years later
called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tales From Jabba’s Palace</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, and
featured the fictional accounts of numerous alien persons seen in the films as
background extras. I’ll spare you the need to read this risible publication —
all the stories end pretty much the same way: that nondescript green-skinned
critter onscreen for five seconds turns out to be some master criminal who absconds
with some money/important documents/etc when Jabba’s little enterprise goes
bye-bye 35 minutes into </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Return Of The
Jedi</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. It’s all crap. Every scar has to tell a rousing story. Every
character has to have amazing lineage — or grew up witnessing all sorts of key
moments in the narrative history, like a veritable army of George Lucas’ very own Zeligs. It all
really annoys me. It seems that </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">no-one</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">
in the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">universe could ever
simply be called Colin and work in a garage or something. No-one is allowed the
right to be unremarkable, to be prosaic. Remember that mission: get inside the
lair, rescue the good guy, serve the bad guys with a writ of pure whup-ass and
get the melonfarming flip out of there. Job done. So did anyone really die in
the huge explosion in the closing seconds? It seemed pretty fatal, fiery and
final to me — but apparently no — they all live out their deeply interesting
and interconnected lives according to </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tales
From Jabba's Palace.</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Did Luke's plan fail? Cheapened in fact, just so someone could
write up a poor story about that </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">kewl</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-looking
critter in one shot who wibbles about in the middle background? To quote the
villain in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Incredibles </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">again:
when everyone’s super…no-one will be. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The trouble with all of this, </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I
find, is that while it can be trivial and playful on the surface, it betrays a
deeper, sad and somewhat pathetic aspect of the human condition: that some
people simply can’t accept sometimes the stark truth that when certain things
go, they’re gone. Gone forever. No coming back. When did we start assuming we
always have a say in the matter? Sometimes, that</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1c1c1c; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1c1c1c; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">s just the way the real world
works. It’s tough, it’s harsh, sure, but sometimes…that can also be all right.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Anyway, speaking sidewards, there I was the other
day, discussing forthcoming films and such with Mr Hickey — he who writes the
marvellous blog <a href="http://hickeyshouseofhorrors.blogspot.co.uk/">Hickey’s House Of Horrors</a>, which you must visit — and he
mentioned several proposed TV series, spinning off from well-known feature
films. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Bates Motel </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">was one such
mooted title — I’m imagining a kind of creepy, sadistic, ultra-violent </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Fawlty Towers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> week in, week out —
obviously set long before Janet Leigh checked in with a suitcase full of hot
cash and a pressing need to freshen up. Also, Mr Hickey spoke of a show
concerning the earlier career of FBI Agent Clarice Starling, the plucky and
dogged heroine of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Silence Of The Lambs</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">
and</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Hannibal</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> fame, and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">still </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">another featuring the younger,
saner, less anthropophagous days of Dr Hannibal Lecter himself — working
alongside his future nemesis, Will Graham. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have no doubt all of these ventures will work a
reductive spell on the original source material, retconning them into something
so much less than the promise it had before it was forced into existence.
Again, undisciplined fanboy over-thinking is what causes everything
to have a prequel or a sequel now. Whatever happened to ‘happily ever
after’ — or better still: ‘never to be seen again’? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I quote my friend Mr Hickey
again: “</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It's probably especially true
when it comes to horror. Horror is scary because you don’t really know
everything. Fear of the unknown is the most potent. So telling us where Freddy
[Krueger] bought the knives for his glove and what grade he got in metalwork
just diminishes his air of menace.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Don’t you wish I could have put it that succinctly? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">PM<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Currently listening:<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">100% </span></span></i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(Ginger
Wildheart, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Everything by the Neil Cowley Trio. </span></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Currently watching:<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Alien</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> ‘Quadrilogy’ — hideous branding
neologism hides an entertaining — albeit variable in quality — collection of
films.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Thing</span></span></i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">
(John Carpenter, 1982) — accept no substitute.</span></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-27803608385600079652012-07-09T10:13:00.002+01:002012-10-31T13:00:50.044+00:00Rain and revelations. But mostly rain.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Good day to you.</span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Oh,
is it? Is it?”</span></span></i><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I hear you reply wearily — possibly over-theatrically, but with
feeling, I get you. Is it, indeed. If you’re reading this in the UK, I feel I
can speak for all when I say — albeit with varying degrees of understatement
depending on where exactly — that we’ve had quite enough of this summer’s
weather. Since my last posting, typed ruefully from a rain-lashed caravan on a
wild and windswept stretch of East Anglian coastline during the washed-out
Jubilee week, I have seen approximately two days of splendid, sun-blest skies.
The Scots have a word to describe depressingly wet, cold, endless and pitiless
days: ‘dreich’ — such a pungent, original word, instinctively conveying to me
all the dour, sodden meaning of ‘dreary’, ‘drab’ and ‘drench</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> distilled into
one crisp, poetic-yet-monosyllabic word — and it even contains ‘reich’ if we’re
talking about unrelenting oppression.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now, far be it from me to
revert to that Greatest of British clichés and discuss the inclement climate in
further detail (although clearly I’m not above using hoary and hackneyed
phrases like ‘far be it from me’, so don’t quote me on that. Oh, look, there’s
another one!) but it truly is amazing how far an unrelenting and lengthy bout
of dismal, dreich days can go towards wearing away the old humour, as surely as
sea water on sandstone. I’m warning you now that I have an article prepared on
the Olympics in the dank recesses of my mind to post up in the coming weeks and
it’s going to be a bit of a ranter. I’m saving my best nature for brighter days
in the autumn at this rate.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Perversely, I have plenty to
be happy about right now. I would not consider myself to be unreliable, but
there is a certain waywardness to my nature that would preclude absolute,
guaranteed consistency in most of my dealings with the world. However, I’ve
been keeping myself busy and of happy use to others in the past weeks with that
most honourable of endeavours: making music. The results of my work(s), and my
fruitful collaboration with other quite brilliant and creative conspirators,
will make itself known and heard before too long. But for now, I’m going to let
you in on something I think may, in certain (admittedly rareifed) circles,
rival the twin discoveries of the Higgs Boson and dark matter in its sheer
sublimity of revelation. I won’t waste your time any longer in building this
up: it’s a piece of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">trivia.
I await whatever passes in cyberspace for the clatter of shifted chairs that
accompanies the mass exodus of a dissident faction from the lecture hall. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">OK, if the rest of you would
like to close up the circle and move a little nearer to me… I have something
marvellous to impart unto the pair of you. In fact, let’s have a new title and a bit of a
drumroll...<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #0d0f21;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The voice of the Imperial Probe Droid - solved.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Those who know
what I'm on about love it — the weird chattering language of the Imperial Probe
Droid, or ‘Probot’ — the first ‘character’ seen in the original </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">sequel, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Empire Strikes Back</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. It makes a literal impression upon first
arrival. A meteorite slices through the atmosphere and into the electric blue
skies of a cold, ice world. It strikes ground, sending up a tall flurry of snow
— and from within the steaming, blackened heart of the impact crater, the
Probot emerges: a mechanical spider-squid device, floating like an ironclad Art
Deco jellyfish over the frozen wastes. Later in the film we hear it speak.
</span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C54WKf_Ubg0"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here's a sample of it for those that need reminding (please ignore the idiot who starts chipping in!)</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’m not
exaggerating when I say that this voice has fascinated and puzzled me for over
thirty years. That it is a human voice, processed in several different ways I
hope is clear to you — as it was to me aged nine upon first hearing it. When I
was old enough to gain more of an interest and appreciation into how sound is
designed and realised for film, I always thought it was a sample from another
film — possibly a resonant line of dialogue best known to the sound engineer.
In this case, like all the sounds in the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star
Wars </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">saga, the Probot voice was a product of sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr
Burtt has won several Academy Awards — among other well-deserved plaudits — for
his outstanding, resounding and astounding work on the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> saga. He brings considerable musicality and organic
rhythm to his soundscapes, often creating sonic ‘events’ to visual set-pieces
that are tantamout to an alternative, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">musique
concrete</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> movie score.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Oddly, Ben Burtt
has been cagey on the source of the voice sample (and by ‘sample’ may I
make myself quite clear when I mean something that has been lifted (and in this
case looped) from elsewhere, as opposed to the more modern idea of ‘digital
sampling’ which did not exist for Burtt to use in 1980 — his work was largely
confined to analogue recording and manipulation). The 2010 book </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Sounds Of Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> comes complete
with a sound card of over 250 effects created by Burtt for George Lucas’
franchise, from which the actual ‘voice’ of the beastie is conspicuously and
curiously absent. Burtt claims it comes from a recording his grandfather, a
radio ham enthusiast, made of a transmission. I don’t doubt this — but what
transmission? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’ll come to
that, but may I digress for a moment? Charles Manson famously cited The Beatles
1968 album (the ‘White Album’) as a source of hidden messages that instructed
him and his ‘Family’ to embark on their bloody, notorious killing spree at the
close of the Sixties. Like the rest of the right-minded world, I can detect no
correlation between Manson’s claims of darkness, insurrection and destruction,
and the delightfully varied splendour, the musical joy, that I find upon
hearing the White Album. However, I once
experienced a nightmare in which a friend and I decided to try playing
the White Album backwards to see if we could hear the sonic sedition Manson
heard in it in 1969 — </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and we did</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. I
awoke feeling I’d never feel truly happy again. Thank goodness it really </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">was </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">only a bad dream. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I mention this
because the other day I was listening to a piece of music and…something
happened. An inner moment of immense portent, gravid with significance. All
right, all </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">right</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, I may falute most
highly, but you know that passing, chill realisation that hits you momentarily
when you learn that someone famous who you like has died? Not dissimilar to
that it was, it really was. The music in question was ‘</span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLwWIIqObkg"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Motorcade Sped On</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’,
by Steinski & The Mass Media‚ a cut-and-paste classic of urban dance music from
the mid/late-Eighties. The closer students of 20th Century history will
recognise the subject matter from the song title, culled — as are the rest of
the quotes laid in voiceover on the track — from newsreel footage on the 1963
Kennedy assassination.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yes, I think
the Imperial Probe Droid's voice is in reality that of Ike Pappas, the reporter
who was live on-the-spot when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot — and taken from
that moment. Pappas entered US broadcasting history when </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4gYWBr8Z1M"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">his outside broadcast account</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> of Oswald’s transfer from the holding pen became the second recorded
assassination event in as many days. Regard the famous picture of Oswald’s
intense, pained reaction to Jack Ruby’s point-blank bullet: see there, the
figure on the right with the Brylcreemed hair and dark suit, left hand raised
to his mouth, right hand outstretched, holding a mic obscured by Jack Ruby
himself — that’s Ike Pappas. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aItcJXT-Rak/T_qiWKeeScI/AAAAAAAAAHI/MlcV9XGjpPk/s1600/original.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="235" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aItcJXT-Rak/T_qiWKeeScI/AAAAAAAAAHI/MlcV9XGjpPk/s320/original.gif" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #151515;"><i></i></span><br />
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<i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Now the prisoner…wearing a…black sweater — he’s changed from
his t-shirt — is being moved out toward an armored car… Being led out by…
Captain Fritz </span></span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">[HORN BEEP]</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">… Here
is the prisoner... Do you have anything to say in your defence? </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">[BANG -
someone howls as if winded]</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">…there was a
shot… Oswald has been shot! Oswald has been shot!”</span></i></span></div>
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</i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Listen again
to the Probot sample. The first part is Pappas remarking </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Here is the prisoner…” </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">as Oswald is brought out and the second
part is his next line, delivered directly to Oswald: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Do you have anything to say...”</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> right up to just before the shot is heard (</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">at 47-51secs on the link above) </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.
It’s a little sped up (it is a sampled loop on a tape reel after all), but the
rhythm works: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Here is the prisoner...you
have anything to say… Here is the prisoner...you have anything to say…”</span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now, you can
appreciate that Ben Burtt wouldn't consider this a trivia point to throw
casually into conversation! Nonetheless, I'm certain this </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">is</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> where it's from. As far as I can tell, there's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">nothing</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> about it on the Internet
anywhere. Seriously, I've not seen anyone else mention this. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mr Burtt, if
you're reading this — love your work — could you elucidate, please? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">PM<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Currently listening:<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Captain Swing 1, 2 & 3</span></span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> - spooky
spoken word fiction by the writer Cathi Unsworth, with music by yours truly,
available as free downloads on </span><a href="http://www.cathiunsworth.co.uk/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cathi’s website</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Everything by
the Neil Cowley Trio. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Everything by
Morphine. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Alt</span></span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (Van der Graaf Generator, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Symphonies 2,
7, & 12 by Henk Badings. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Currently watching:<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #151515;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ealing
comedies! Lots of Ealing comedies! Alec Guinness! Joan Greenwood! Stanley
Holloway!</span></span></div>
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Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70655132865831731.post-81207242005312835932012-06-06T11:20:00.000+01:002012-06-11T13:00:47.300+01:00“Paul Murphy Is On Holiday”<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">May I say up front that I think you’ve got off lightly and don’t you forget it. It’s the time of year again when I find myself in the dilemmic (it's now a word) position of being both on holiday and feeling the need to provide you, gentle downloader, with something to read in my absence. To that end I was — </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">was </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">— going to present you with another fugitive from my by-now customary annual clearout of my literary lumber-room: a piece that I originally had no intention of posting online. Mind you, you're never </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">really</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> absent when you travel with a laptop and have Wi-Fi, are you? OK, let's call it laziness, then. In any event, I decided to shelve my half-baked and only semi-digested prose and cook up something a little fresher for you. So there you are and here it is. You know that crap you could be reading right now but aren’t? Yeah, I bet you do. What do you mean, you can’t comment on the crapness of something you’ve not read? Am I not merciful?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(It </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">was</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> crap, in any case, you can trust me on that)</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Instead, for your reading pleasure, I offer you:</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The condition of muzak: how pop nearly died in the Seventies — and how Punk nearly shot itself in the foot. </span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b></b></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">There. A groovy Hawkind-y, Moorcock-ian literary pop culture ref, and two snappy, controversial assertions, all in one literally bold heading. Not a bad way to start, especially considering that I’m typing this from the seclusion of a caravan stationed on the Suffolk coastline, it’s a quarter to four in the morning and it’s lashing down outside. </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Recently I was involved in a lively email discussion with my friend Richard, an erstwhile writer for the now long-defunct </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sounds </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">magazine, which if you are not aware was, to keep it brief, certainly more cutting-edge and breaking fresher territory than its rival, the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">New Musical Express</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> could claim to be doing in the Seventies and throughout the Eighties. Just a look at </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounds_(magazine)"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">the Wikipedia article</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> on the magazine should tell you everything you need to know about the high calibre of people penning passionate pop prose under the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sounds</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> banner. Richard remains at the age of fifty a diehard — and enviably ageless — Punk of the absolute first water. His first out-and-out Punk gig was seeing X-Ray Spex at The Roundhouse and with typical relish and attention to detail, recounted to me the debate he had with his Rush T-shirt-wearing, gig-going chums afterwards over whether it was time to get their shoulder-length hair cut and throw in with the Punk lot wholeheartedly (he did, needless to say). </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So there it was that we were having a cheerful spot of e-banter about BBC4’s recent re-showing of old </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Top Of The Pops</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> episodes (God Bless BBC4) — principally ones from 1976-78, those most watershedding years in Seventies pop — and arguably, of pop history itself. During this exchange, Richard popped a pertinent question. It was this: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">why did pop nearly DIE in the mid-1970s? I'm blaming Rod Stewart. Your own theories would be most welcome! </span></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i></i></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">At this point I should say that some praise of Rod Stewart — at least to a certain degree — is going to ensue, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. That said, I’m going to concur with Richard and assert that Rod Stewart’s career is as neat a thumbnail of how the Seventies nearly derailed, indeed. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The sharply dressed and coiffed ex-Mod Rod Stewart had played in a number of promising, but strictly third division bands in the mid-Sixties. Go to 1969 and look, there he is — a promising, talented, charismatic, hungry young vocalist, still learning his chops but fast finding his balls (to mix my metaphors for a moment there) in amongst the Marshall amps onstage with the high-profile Jeff Beck Group. Having been bumped up to sing with the big boys, he found his stage fright obliged him to sing hidden between Beck’s immense speaker setups — at least to begin with. Ex-Yardbird Jeff Beck already had immense pedigree — witness his guitar-smashing star turn alongside a young Jimmy Page in the 1966 David Hemmings film </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zeza1xeWKM">Blow-Up</a>. </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Elsewhere, his solo alone on ‘Shapes Of Things’ by his former band earns him the keys to the kingdom — and his talent as planksman, combined with decent enough moody looks, had him marked down by his management as perfect solo pop idol material. After reluctantly recording ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ — which almost demands him to hand the keys back again — Beck had made his point: a good-looking guitarist of modest singing ability needs to subsume himself into a band where his true calling can shine. Thus the band that bore his name was assembled from a crack unit of musicians so talented that Ronnie Wood was the bass player — and brilliantly so — on a bass he’d ‘liberated’ of necessity, from a music shop, so sudden was his appointment. The same crow-headed Wood whose guitar playing ability has been of sufficient skill to make him Keith Richards’ right-hand man in The Rolling Stones for over 35 years. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Bespectacled drummer Mick Waller may have looked like a mild-mannered chap but he was a hard hitter and the Beck Group played loud. They did ‘heavy,’ as the burgeoning parlance of the late Sixties had it. Volume was paramount. The bands who did it best — Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin for example — learned to temper the overly simplistic noise level issue with a studied intensity and structure, and in doing so created a whole new genre of Rock music whose boundaries have still, in the Twenty-first Century, yet to be established.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">By the time Rod left Jeff Beck’s group, he had taken Ronnie Wood with him and before long they had landed themselves prime jobs as lead vocalist and guitarist respectively, in The Small Faces. Mark them with pride: Ronnie Lane, ace Face of bass; Ian McLagen, fiery keyboards; Kenney Jones, snappy drummer. They had enjoyed a slew of hit singles and well-regarded albums as first a Mod band and then as a Mod-ish soul-chedelic pop group before suffering the loss of their brilliant, but increasingly wayward lead singer and guitarist, Mr Steve Marriott. Yes, it took two guys to fill the void Marriott created — but Stewart’s leathery blues rasp and Wood’s pleasingly mucky riffing did admirably — and effected a change in both the name and the direction of the ‘new’ band, shortening themselves down to ‘The Faces’ and shrugging off their lysergic late Sixties psych-pop trappings to retool themselves as a bluesy booze-fuelled rocking hot rod (pun only partly intended). I have nothing bad to say about The Faces and neither should you.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">For Rod, it was only half the story. The former kid shuffling in the speaker-stack shadows had emerged, duded-up in a kind of more streetwise sartorial cousin of Marc Bolan’s fey satin and tat (another ex-Mod who really knew what good threads and hair could do for a chap) and sporting the feather-cut spiky-fronted mullet that said ‘business’ for many of the more hard-rock-minded Glamsters in the early Seventies — from David Bowie and his lieutenant Mick Ronson to Brian Connolly of The Sweet, who always insisted his outfit were tougher than all</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> that</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. With Stewart’s easygoing, good-time guy stage persona and deft mic-stand-swinging swagger, it wasn’t long before the band increasingly became known as ‘Rod </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> The Faces’ — a solo career beckoned, but Rod didn’t intend to jump ship. No, Rod remembered who his friends were, it seemed. Between 1969 and 1974 Rod Stewart released four kick-ass solo albums for the Mercury label, concurrent to his Faces output. 1969’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (with the definitive reading of ‘Handbags And Gladrags’), 1970’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Gasoline Alley</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, 1971’s classic </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Every Picture Tells A Story </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(standout track: ‘Maggie May’), 1972’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Never A Dull Moment</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (with ‘You Wear It Well’) and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Smiler</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, from 1974. Consistent happy-go-lucky rock’n’roll rubbed pleasingly with folksy tales of lost love and soulfully salty stories (or a mixture of all three), told almost with an arm round your shoulder and more often than not backed in whole or in part by The Faces. Some of the songs were assimilated into the Faces’ live set, with minimal complaint from anyone. Micky Waller, his former Beck Group bandmate, played drums on most of the other songs and many of the session boys were consistent from album to album, tour to tour.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Again, I have nothing bad to say about these years in Rod’s career. The inevitable perks of the job — the booze, the big houses and the blondes (who seem to come in that most remarkable of plural form: ‘strings’) — may all have been questionable, but who are we to pass judgement on Rod’s taste? All joyfully acquired, earned and consumed on his own merit and quite frankly that’s his own lookout.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Skip to 1975 and the release of Rod’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Atlantic Crossing</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> and, whoa, we’ve hit coke-fuelled </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Götterdämmerung! </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Everything about that album flags up the sea change (pun fully intended considering the mega-smash ‘Sailing’ is on it), the axis whereupon everything changed. Start with the title: word-playing on his move to LA and a lucrative deal with Atlantic Records, a bigger, more expensive label (usually the death knell for any lean and hungry artist, eh?) but also commenting on the album’s drift away from the British rock stylings of yore. Check out that naff, airbrushed cover of a shining neon Rod, bottle in hand, cockily bestriding the bright lights of New York (with the Houses of Parliament glinting, distant and forlornly, on the back cover, the Scottish (!!) flag blowing above the towers) – a super–slick image, but doomed to date within months of release, a transient world apart from the more hangdog, grittily assembled earlier album covers. Rod’s image always suggested a booze-loving lifestyle, his music never really selling as the ideal toking material for those of you who like to roll a fat one on a gatefold record sleeve, but by here in 1975 we have forsaken the sauce to have ourselves an album cover you can chop lines of Charlie on. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It should have been amazing, in theory: Atlantic’s legendary producer Tom Dowd backed Stewart with three-quarters of the mighty Booker T and The MGs (including the T man himself) plus The Memphis Horns and Lennon’s favourite axe-wielding sideman, Jesse Ed Davis — but the virtuosic playing couldn’t disguise that Stewart effectively did away with Messrs Jones, McLagen and the two Ronnies in a cutting </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">volte-</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Face. No room for stalwart Stewart sticksman Micky Waller either. It’s a narcotic hit of an album, assembled by said seasoned session guns of thoroughbred quality, no question, but assembled to order, and most likely lacking the intuitively close camaraderie with Stewart that he had enjoyed with close mates of his own age and background performing in previous years. Result? Immense hits, instant impact and insane commercial success beyond the wildest dreams of Ronnies Wood and Lane! But nothing lasting, nothing with any real </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">soul</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. Thus it was that Rod the Mod passed and became Rod the God — untouchable, aloof and away from the matey reality that endeared him to so many fans. He compounded the error over the following years by releasing trendspotting, unimaginative, unsubtle and tiresomely sexist songs such as ‘Hot Legs’ and ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ — the last of which he claimed to be ironic, but the general public, sadly, tended not to pick up on the subtleties. By the time </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVfgnD-2XjM"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Kenny Everett is lampooning you</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> on TV, pouting, waving an arse the size of Ayers Rock at the camera, with leopardskin spandex stretched improbably across its expanse, it’s safe to say your cred has dropped significantly.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But let’s not be too down on Rod alone! Didn’t David Crosby say in passing that the Seventies were like the ‘better version of the Sixties’? Coming from a chap with Crosby’s, ahem, ‘intake’, I take that statement to mean a surfeit of sex and drugs – at the increasing expense of rock’n’roll. To be fair, I think the Seventies hit anyone who had been anyone in the Sixties still capable of sustaining some album sales. Dylan had arguably copped out a couple of years short of 1970 and only regained partial form by 1975. Marc Bolan had risen and fallen in the first half of the decade and tragically met his maker just as he was starting to gain ground after several years treading water, recycling his old glories. Stephen Stills went from solo songwriting genius in 1970 to the doldrums of dated disco flirtation in just over five short years. And speaking of five years, David Bowie, while managing to avoid any significant loss of quality in his music and songwriting during his own Atlantic crossing to LA in the mid-Seventies, prefers to forget this time in his life, written off as a period when his marriage, health and mental state were fraying. I wrote </span><a href="http://paulmurphyandthebishops.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/man-who-fell-to-earth-performance.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">a blog on The Man Who Fell To Earth</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, which inevitably touches on this dark part of Bowie's life, if you're interested.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Remember also at this time that vinyl was a bit of a commodity and as any record collector over the age of 45 will tell you, one simply couldn’t afford to buy records willy-nilly. No, the act of purchasing a record was one of investment, buying something you knew — or suspected — would be your cup of tea. Record playing was a social activity in which friends could gather, hear the latest ELP, Van der Graaf Generator or Jethro Tull etc and swap records for a time, the better to dig each other’s scene. By the mid-Seventies, the big-hitting rock bands of your actual 1970 had mostly eschewed the single format to concentrate on the heavier trip of the album (and sometimes double album, with frequently frightening consequences) as their primary musical text. The Album had become an expensive and often daunting entity to casual record buyers – the heavy expanses and excesses of the early Seventies had seen to that. As it became more isolated, Rock’n’roll went wretched, and pop had long become pap — by the mid-Seventies the public sought easy, mindless solace in the likes of Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, novelty singles like ‘No Charge’ and everything by Kiki Dee or Tina Charles, safe in the knowledge (or blissfully unaware, take your pick) that there was no emotional, artistic, creative angst between the lines of those kind of singles.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So you see, I believe the real enemies Punk kicked against weren’t — or rather shouldn’t have been — the so-called ‘dinosaur’ rock bands like Pink Floyd or King Crimson (most of whom couldn't get on </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Top Of The Pops</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> themselves by 1977), but in fact the steady accretion of dreadfully banal MOR and novelty crap that the British public seemed to buy in their complacent, lotus-eating droves and made </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Top Of The Pops </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">precisely the kind of bland arse-drivel that any self-respecting Seventies kid would want to rail against — and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">this</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> incidentally, ladies and gentlemen, is possibly the longest sentence I’ve ever written. It made for better copy and controversy if Johnny Rotten wore an “I HATE PINK FLOYD” T-Shirt rather than, say, Linda Lewis or The Jacksons or anyone else on that night’s episode of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Top Of The Pops</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, because Floyd and their ilk were more substantial targets. Remember this is the same Mr Rotten who was subsequently ‘outed’ as a fan of Hawkwind, Peter Hammill and the French prog-jazz band Magma — but even ‘outed’ is too strong a word: I doubt if Johnny ever denied his love for these guys when confronted head-on with it back then. Slightly more recently, I remember Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes wearing (brandishing in fact) a “NEW KIDS <i>SUCK</i>” T-shirt on the cover of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Q </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">magazine in the early 1990s and thinking, ‘oh, come on, Chris! Choose a harder target’ — it'd be like picking on a 12-year-old, or wearing a T-shirt saying “I HATE TINA CHARLES” back in 1977.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I think it's a little sad that history has written the Rock music of the early Seventies as villain of the piece in the late Seventies Punk equation, when it's clearly not the main problem. No, in fact I’d like to think I could build, with minimal change of allegiance, something of a bridge between the worlds of early Seventies Rock and late Seventies Punk, showing them to have certain things in common not immediately apparent until a perniciously mediocre third faction makes enemies of them both! After all, I know Richard’s Rush and Deep Purple albums sit happily on his record shelf alongside X-Ray Spex, The Sex Pistols and The Clash in a joyous coalition where, as Ginger from The Wildhearts put it </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">‘the Beatles and the Stones get to hang out with Ramones.’</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> I know mine do too.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">PM (thanks to Mr Richard Newson for his inspiration and assistance in compiling the narrative of this one)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Currently reading:</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The Seventies</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (Peter Doggett, 2011)</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Currently listening:</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Captain Swing Part 1 </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">— a musical/spoken word collaboration between the writer Cathi Unsworth, Pete Woodhead, Michael Meekin and myself. Available </span><a href="http://cathiunsworth.weebly.com/captain-swing.html"><span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; text-decoration: underline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">HERE</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Currently watching:</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Pink Floyd: The Making Of </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Wish You Were Here (BBC, 2012)</span></span></div>
</div>Paul A. Murphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13157589237242639953noreply@blogger.com0