Julian Fane Our New Quarters. A spiraling bout of distortion and piano burst forth, immediately, your ears take a few moments to adjust. Then bliss. He sings like Thom Yorke, we forgive you. I watched a Radiohead bit of nonsense on VH-1 classic the other night. They are so tedious. Old men dressing like teen skate punks. And his Thom head movements, so offensive to my weak stomach. This first song is the title track. It actually reminds some of Fats Thompson? How many people want to agree with me? There was that wonderful Fats Thompson song on the Killing Kapitalism with Kindness compilation and then the album, that one marvelous song and a dozen other less marvelous songs. This has a sligtly more upscale Make Mine Music feel to it. It's beautiful. It is music for the weather that torments us this evening, the rain, so infrequent, made me wear a ball cap while running. I feel compromised when I wear a ball cap. Perhaps it is my very large head that makes me self conscious about wearing a ball cap. I don't have any cool ball caps. I used to wear a ball cap when I played ball I know, silly. Seocnd song is almost a parody of Thom with the pretentious h. I could be Keihth. The h is silent and intimidating. Fear my consonants! When the rain comes the landscape at first recoils, the trees droop then fall into a serene submission and then later they muster the courage to face this strange malfeasance. The wind has not acocmpanied tonight's downpour. A hurricane almost hit my parents' home. They were about to leave for Michigan. Who leaves for Michigan any more? I called them the morning after the nearly hurricane. It was a tropical storm. They live five miles from the coast. They can afford homeowners insurance. Was golf cancelled? That was the height of their calamity. When I spent Christmas there two years ago it rained four inches on the baby jesus' birthday. It was an odd sensation. I still have strange memories of when it was once 63 degrees in Detroit on Christmas Day. My wealthy cousins had received a snow mobile for their Christmas present and we rode it on the dry pavement and listened to the J. Geils Band very loudly. When it rained two Christmas' ago we watched mythbusters and I had an allergic reaction to cats. It is a holiday tradition. This Christmas I ran for hours after having fallen hard for the sea level abundance of oxygen and humidified inhalations. Third song. More skeletal, vocodered vocals, perhaps more Schengen or Library Tapes than Radiohead. Radiohead are very serious, they use loads of obscure chords, this means they mean business. I can't play Radiohead songs. My utter failure as a human being is revealed. Ha. This is a really really gorgeous record. It has that amniotic feel, wombedelia, a Third Eye Foundation sense of mastery and a commited fandom of all of the rock greats in the canon from Lake Orion circa 1991. Ride, My Bloody Valentine and the mighty Chapterhouse. Did you watch the Chapterhouse video I posted a few days ago? It is the original version of Something More with the kids looking all of 17 years old. Andrew Sherriff is the singer. He writes music for dinosaur documentaries now and wins emmys for his efforts. Bravo. Next song, more of a foreboding effort, Oscar Widle grinding corn on his treadmill whispered Yorke-isms. Surely there were fine people who sung like this before Thomas Y. The mumble seems less of an impostion in this case, his pain is entirely nonprepossessed. Hurrah. I have four toothbrushes now. Now Youth Cadet. I've begun "Kavlier and Clay" and wahey!!! it is really rather good. It is exactly the sort of thing I should be reading. It's filled with historical allusions, timelessness, youthful adventures and nostalgia. It was made for me and it triggered a thought about art or the pretensions of artists, the seeming contradiction it poses in relation to most other endeavours. In all other aspects of culture, especially in science and technology, there seems to be a gradual progression or forward momentum which raises all who follow in the wake to greater heights. Science builds on all of the knowledge that was constructed before the present, on Aristotle, Ptoelmy, Ibn Khaldun, Newton, Pauli, etc...and thus there is a confirmed belief that what is known today is more correct, greater, than what is known to have been known in the past. But art doesn't build on the past, at least not anymore, classicism is dead. There is this fascination with the novel. This record doesn't suffer from that in that it is merely a pretty reconstruction of a Radiohead record but in general trends in art are not seen as a gradual progression. There seems to be sudden fits and starts and left turns and moves back into primitivism. Is it the emotional register that infects this continuum, the whims of the human heart, a step away from the mathematical. A deviation from the harmony of the spheres. Possibly. Next song. No vocoder, gentle pastoral voices layered on top of gentle swirls of beauty. What would be a natural progression of art? I am not sure where we would be now if it was realized. Perhaps it is tied with the technology question. Clearly music "sounds" better than it ever has with the advent of technology but it doesn't sound as human but has anyone bettered Bach. Thus perhaps the reversion to simpler times is a result of cultural intimidation or the lack of catholic application in the arts, who knows, this is all too academic and pointless. I was just thinking of the monuments of our age when this society fails just the same as every other society has. There is a new steel obelisk or marker being constructed alongside the freeway here in Greenwood Village, it has taken months to construct and it seems to have no purpose at all. I love this. I have written before about the burial mound of the lost emperor of Greenwood Village alongside Arapahoe Road and its gorgeous non-utilitarian glory. I have spent many nights sitting at its apex wishing away all of the light pollution. I lie. In my heart truly the pollution makes the night sky more mysterious as if a dissembled codex cloud is hiding the true beauty that can be found only in words from the past. This marker is about 75 feet tall, it is like a column of vertebrae alongside a sterile public roadway and there have been "artisans" working on it for many many months now. I can't quite grasp the appeal of it aesthetically, only idealistically does it conform to my own sensibilities. There should be more beautiful pointless things in this world. More Pram reords that no one will buy, more biographies of Flaubert that no one will read, more strange culinary concoctions that no one will dare, strip the homogenizd safety of modern society to the bone. Gorgeous piano ballad now, Downfall, Fats Thompson-y. Yes there should even be more Fats Thompson records, perhaps there are dozens alredy. It's a DIY society, when I finish my novel I can publish it myself, I will publish 8 copies and secretly place them in inconspicuous spots all across the city waiting for obscurantists to discover them with joy. As we did once, on a mountainside under a rock, a letter to the universe, a confession to some higher power, a promise to not give up. It was endearing, it served no purpose outside of one soul but when it leaked away fromt he source it has engendered a gentle reminder of love. But again speaking of future generations, when they rediscover this marker on the side of Interstate 25 will they ascribe such deeper religiosu meaning to it? Perhaps it will be mistaken for some astrological monument predicting the turning of the season based on the lunar cycle. It is oriented towards the west, it could be a air gometer, low tech, sensors built into the ribs detecting the coming of the age of deprivation. it could be a spiritual beacon to that same higher being who answered the prayers of our mountain friend in the light of a waning lights of a dying civilization. Beneath it there might be the remnants of a terra cotta army, I have no idea. I went golfing or the first time in 3 months this Sunday and I played decently. I can do everything. I say this humbly. Why do I lack confidence in my abilities then? I am not certain. it could go back to wrestlng. I wrestled in 9th grade. I was small, I was 5'6" in ninth grade, in my weight class there was a little man. You know the sort, those wrestling afficionados with squat builds, rippling biceps and the ability to grow a full beard by 2pm on their 11th birthday. I am not certain if I can grow a full beard even now. I shave even on sundays. There was a preposterous rule that you had to have a wrestle off each week to wrestle in an actual match. I never had wrestled before, I had never worn one of those silly headgears before, this little man was serious, I was just curious. He pinned me 13 straight weeks. I thought of quitting. Back then I only thought of it. I was in fabulous physical condition. The loser had to run for the rest of the week. It was good for my hockey career but then even though I was "canadian" my hockey career never took off. My friend played goalie for Michigan Tech. I studied endlessly for no apparent reason at the University of Michigan, beautiful pointlessness. This song is a rush of electric guitars, real drums?!, nasal vocals, it's a build up, all moments intense, driving, dreamy, soft. Marvelous. My beautiful pointlessness is not revered by anyone. It is a difficult search to discover those who are as enamoured with the idea of bettering yourself through the pursuit of fruitless aimlessness rather than through accomplishments. That reads like a copout. I don't mean it. I like Kornblum's dictum in "Kavlier and Clay", "Never worry about what you are escaping from, reserve your anxieties for where you are escaping to", it's a forward thinking strategy I should adopt. So it is alright that no one likes me now. I don't have any friends but nearby there exists a future to escape to with loads of beautiful moments and kind people, I only need to save my anxiousness in order to rescue myself. Rattle, a dreamy moan, no idea what the vocals are on about in this, its a cacophony of programming and synthesizers and static electricity. It could be samples of Thomas Edison electrocuting elephants and dogs in order to drive George Westinghouse insane. i don't know. It is lovely even so. I could have hair like Michael Chabon but not his cheekbones nor his intelligence or wit or humour, or wait...I could, I need only my reserve of nervousness to fall back upon. Life has been explained to me. I mock, but it really is a beautiful novel. Has literature progressed linearly? it is hard to say. i read Anabasis and it is amazing how little the human condition has been altered even in the past 2500 years and granted, the translation is modern and for a modern consciousness but the treachery, deceit and endemic failure of human character is all too familiar. My personality profile says I hold people to my own impossible moral standards. It is why I am isolated I suppose. I have strange reactions to people's pedestrian revelations. I dont' know why. Mostly I have little regard for anyone. I have discovered this is a truism that has been repeated to me often by my mother when I reveal to her that I don't mind being considered an ass in front of strangers and she tells me it is because I have the perennial flaw of believing I am better than everyone else. It might be true. But then I lack self esteem. This post is all about an examination of inherent contradictions. it may have been some time since my mother dissected my psyche but I have a phenomenal memory, I can recall entire conversations with unimportant people from almost 18 years ago. I recall sitting within the vibrations of a paint mixer in Kmart listening to a man retell his live as landing craft driver in WWII and all that he had to do to keep his diesel running and everything that a friend at work tells me, much to hers and everyone's annoyance. But then I tune out things I should remember. This one was stunning. The whole record is stunning. Are his other records this splendid? I don't recall him singing on his previous releases. When I was on a julian kick back when I discovered Julien Neto and had dreams of Julian Schwinger I considered Julian Fane but politely declined at the time. Did I err? Last song, church atmospherics and wanky electric guitar, odd. Contradictory masturbation in the house of the lord, soaring vocals. Would he have a hopeful expression on his face while singing this? It could be the pseudo pained expression of Thom Yorke is what really irritates me about Radiohead, you just never know. Our New Quarters is deliriously great.