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blue notes on the modern bürgerliches trauerspiel
As much as anything as an act of expiation, grief and guilt from safe exile — as if to say ‘Wish you were here’ — Adorno begins his Philosophy of Modern Music (1948) with a long crabbed mouthful of a...
View Articlehow to sustain an intellectual conversation (in your head)
one thread of the scott/amundsen post refers (without saying so) all the way back to something kogan wrote in why music sucks in 1989 or so: which i have been puzzling away at ever since — explanation...
View Articlei’ve seen lots of pretty girls
All the talking heads in the Peter Green documentary were male heads, I believe; and — for all they’ve achieved a kind of artless wondering openness towards the discussion of what must have been very...
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fah diddly qua quaaargh!
I’m writing about Adam and the Ants all week, at Hendrik’s excellent One Week One Band tumblr — a pleasure and an honour. I won’t quite say this is really actually what I became a music-writer to...
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multiplicities of vision
“… our expectation that avant-garde art must puzzle, shock, and, above all, resist immediate understanding”: pianist-critic Charles Rosen on Elliott Carter (1908-2012) back in 1973
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“Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, the same ‘logical multiplicity’. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning...
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Defending Adorno from his own devotees…
… or what happens when you cross the streams? My good friend Julio emailed me this: I’d come across Richard Taruskin before, many years ago, and been very taken with his work (via an essay on...
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explaining pop to a dead hare
Notes on Kraftwerk at Tate Modern Turbine Hall (also Russolo, Paik, Beuys, Warhol… )
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“some unsavoury part of the army”
Bashed-out notes on Wilko, Feelgood, Temple, collage, wives, mums and fans…
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the sugar in the plum (plum plum)
I have a short piece in this: about Boney M. I haven’t read any of the rest yet, there’s little essays on or interviews with people I like a lot — George Clinton, Delia Derbyshire, Bill Nelson, Martin...
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ketchup 2013
Three things I wrote recently (a catalogue essay and two reviews). Silence is an Irish film, about sound and memory (and between the lines a reflection on the work of John Cage). Michael and Cornelius...
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“shtick fur-balls revisited” (= proposed titles in my head so far)
It was called Virtual Space and there was just one issue, “issue zero: place-kicks”. We made less than 20 copies, mostly by hunting round town for a photocopier with an A2 bed. It was an experiment, a...
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schoolroom vs hallway vs hallway
or, Maybe this is the best place for my mean little joke about why they called their fanzine “monitor” hoho Little essay for FT on art, class and autodidacts: featuring Oasis, Joseph Beuys, Arthur...
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spotted recently on freaky trigger: sükråt of that ilk
Notes on Adam Ant (the “paper” I gave at EMP in Seattle this year) and the Spice Wars (feat.Russ Meyer and Buffy and the Powerpuff girls and early ilx); a long note on Lady Di and the old weird England...
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you can never go back back BAACK!
In which I take a break from organising a quasi-historical not-very-academic (but very exciting) conference (at Birkbeck, 15-16 May) and reflect on the ways your personal backpages as a hack begin to...
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… a kingdom called not, which although it is, yet is not…
In 1989, I was flown to Germantown in Phildelphia to interview Sun Ra (for The Face). Ra is long gone now, and so’s The Face: and while a couple of longish quotes of the interview ended up in the piece...
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whalers on the moon: curious despatches from an old dream
“It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Quite apart from anything else, the past — even the very recent past, maybe...
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re-litigating the 70s: what we wanted, what went right, what went wrong,...
“During the Conservative government of Edward Heath there were five declarations of emergency under this Act [viz the Emergency Powers Act 1920], by far the most any government. The first was in July...
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“Don’t let it be forgot/That once there was a spot…”
or NOTES ON A NOBLE IDEAL UNDONE BY ITS OWN WARRING FLAWS… (I wrote this up to place somewhere grown-up and get some traction, but no joy for one reason or another — the Camelot theme not entirely...
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