Steve Kane - The Almost Entirely Pointless Blog

Happy Bloomsday!

2009-06-16T11:11:00.000+01:00

Damn, the whole thing almost passed me by. I was down at the beach, see, cracking one off behind a sand dune while spying on this really cute chick. OK, so she had a gammy leg but I'd have still done her.

He knew Kung Fu

2009-06-04T17:54:00.002+01:00

David Carradine
1936—2009

Let off some steam

2009-05-04T09:42:00.002+01:00

Valves, originally uploaded by Guffmonkey.

The interweb defines me

2009-04-26T23:24:00.002+01:00

I am perfectly sane. It's true: a Facebook quiz told me so.

Uh

2009-04-23T21:27:00.003+01:00

Two albums by The Fall I ordered arrived in the post today. The "bonus disc" on one of them didn't contain the bonus tracks at all but was a duplicate of the main album; the other one had a bloody great scratch on it.

The fried eggs I cooked for dinner didn't turn out very well either.

Bollocks.

One of them days, I guess.

Christ, what a crap blog this is.

Off To Kingdom Come

2009-04-19T20:31:00.006+01:00

J.G. Ballard
1930—2009

Random conversation #2

2009-04-17T18:56:00.002+01:00

When at work, instead of swearing when something goes wrong, I say something like "fiddle-sticks" or "flibberty-jibberts".

"Why do you say those silly things?" a colleague once asked.

"Because otherwise I'd say 'fucknuts' or 'cunting ball-sacks'."

She looked horrified.

"You see my point," I said.

Photographic tomfoolery

2009-04-12T18:06:00.004+01:00

I always wanted to be on TV...

Random conversation #1*

2009-03-23T21:59:00.004Z

Female work colleague: "So, Steve, what team do you support?"
Me: "I don't support anyone."
Female colleague: "No one?"
Me: "I don't follow football."
Female colleague: [Uncomprehending face] "What... not at all?"
Me: "No."
[Momentary baffled silence]
Older female colleague: "Well, if you did follow football, what team would you support?"
Me: "Er...?"

* Don't read too much into the "#1" - this may be a series that goes nowhere.

34 years old. Me, that is, not the blog

2009-03-22T11:28:00.001Z

Yes, this morning I am flopping about my apartment after an evening of theatre and booze to celebrate another birthday. The play, incidentally, was an amusing show called Edward Gant's Amazing Feats Of Lonliness...

In 1881, one of the Victorian theatres most enigmatic impresarios, Mr Edward Gant, presented his famed travelling show for the very last time. In 2009, Anthony Neilson and Headlong Theatre are proud to present a reconstruction of this historic and extraordinary evening of mystery and magic, spectacle and strangeness. Behold . . . The Amazing Feats Of Loneliness!

Anthony Neilson is one of Britain's most acclaimed playwrights, creating pioneering, taboo-breaking new work in a bold and compassionate way. Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness is a beautiful and very funny exploration of performance and performers, of sadness, mortality and wonder.

Contains strong language and scenes of a wonderfully freakish nature.

And jolly good fun it was too, a sort of mix of Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, The Mighty Boosh and The League Of Gentlemen. I mean, any play that contains the line, "A woman so ugly I would not have shat in her mouth if she were hungry," has got to be good for a giggle.

Tuesday night - St. Patrick's Day, as it happens - I went to see a band called Stinking Lizaveta. I was meant to meet some acquaintances at an Irish bar but, oddly enough, the place was rammed with St. Paddy revellers and I couldn't find my chums so I went to the gig instead.

Turned out to be a most curious night. The venue was a small bar called Bloc. It's a tiny place that has no stage area; the three bands performing that night were all crammed into a corner with barely any room to move.

I was sitting at the bar nursing a pint of Guinness (what else?) when a tall, skinny woman approached me and asked if I was there to see the band. I said yes. She then asked if I was on Last.fm and was I the guy who's been listening to Tom Waits this weeks. Mad, isn't it, how you can be recognised by your online social networking profiles? I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. On the one hand I got to meet and chat with a really cool girl at a gig who might have never spoken to me if she hadn't recognised me (although maybe she would have - she was happily going around chatting to anybody who happened to be in front of her. I wish I had that kind of confidence); on the other hand, it could end up like this...

(Before you ask, the tall, skinny, cool, pretty girl was quick to mention she had a partner so nothing like that was on the cards. No, I ended up leaving the gig with someone entirely different but... no... not going to tell you about that. It wasn't good.)

And work has been sucking the big one too. My "productivity" came under an unusual amount of scrutiny so basically I've been working my nuts off so as to ensure I don't get sacked. But fuck it, I won't bore you with that: it's my fault for working for an evil cunty bank. Suffice to say I've been putting in lots of overtime for some extra cash and going slightly crazy with stress over what's happening.

Interesting month. Been getting into lots of Tom Waits, something I've been meaning to do for years, and rediscovering Yello and Art Of Noise, the two bands who really got me into electronic music when I was a kid.

Let's finish on a song, shall we?

This is what I've been doing this morning

2009-03-01T13:08:00.002Z

Stuff what has happened recently and shit

2009-02-28T19:07:00.001Z

Went to see a band called Rampant Rabbit the other week who are a "doom-laden funkadelic" DIY noise rock band. Or, at least, they were a "doom-laden funkadelic" DIY noise rock band, for the band have now disbanded. Never mind. They were a three piece, two bassists and a drummer, who sounded like a cross between Melvins and Primus - noisy, shouty and fucking loud (the volume no doubt exacerbated by the confined space in which the gig took place). 'Twas an entertaining racket.

One of the other acts on the bill was a lanky, fop-haired, indie looking kid who thrashed out chords on his guitar to a backing tape of basic drum machine rhythms whilst screaming into a microphone. Ten out of ten for enthusiasm but he was little more than a mad busker. Hmm, "punk busking": an emerging genre, perhaps. Look out for it. Still, he was an amiable young lad.

What else, what else... oh yes, I went to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, his début as director as well as writer. Phillip Seymour-Hoffman plays a theatre director suffering ill-health and a failing marriage. When his wife eventually leaves him he decides to mount an ambitious theatre project: he builds a replica of the city in a massive warehouse and populates it with actors to play people from the real world and to semi-improvise the brutal truth of his painful life. Reality and fiction bleed into each other in a typically "meta" Kaufmanesque fashion.

It's all a bit of a mess albeit a humane and thought provoking mess. The film is not as tightly structured as Kaufman's collaborations with directors Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind). This is due in equal measure, I think, to the nature of the script and Kaufman's direction - it all feels a little unfocussed and flabby.

That's not to say it's a bad film, by any means. It is by turns intelligent, emotional, inventive and blackly funny with many strong performances. Having said that, I can't imagine that I will return to it as I have done to the aforementioned Kaufman penned films. I can't help but wonder if Charlie's scripts aren't better served by the fresh eyes of other directors. On the other hand, this is his first outing behind the lens and perhaps time and experience will see his directorial prowess grow.

Chomsky with dick jokes

2009-02-26T20:04:00.004Z

Because today is the fifteenth anniversary of his death...

Which is scarier: vampires or avant garde classical music?

2009-02-15T12:42:00.000Z

I've indulged in a bit of hardcore culture this week. On Thursday evening I attended a performance of seven movements from Stockhausen's Aus den Sieben Tagen, a collection of fifteen "text pieces" written in 1968. Instead of a tradition score of musical notation the players are given a series of textual instructions. For example:

Think NOTHING
wait until it is absolutely still within you
when you have attained this
begin to play

as soon as you start to think, stop
and try to reattain the state of NON-THINKING
then continue playing

This sounds like an horribly pretentious idea that would result in a mess of unlistenable noise but it produced a fascinating, engaging and curiously humane piece of improvisational music. The percussionist was particularly fun to watch as he bowed a giant cymbal, rattled beads, beat out rhythms on an empty plastic water cooler bottle and scraped a whisk around a hub cap. It was impossible to know how much of the performance was rehearsed and how much the musicians improvised on the night but it was a truly enjoyable performance.

On Friday night I went to the GFT to see F.W. Murnau's 1921 film Nosferatu complete with musical accompaniment by Scottish guitarist David Allison who, through clever use of a delay pedal, built up a live layered score as the movie played.

I thought the film was wonderful - those iconic images of Max Schreck rising up out of his coffin and his talon-fingered shadow creeping up the stairs... brilliant. In a way, I wish I could have seen it in an empty screening room: it was a bit difficult to fully immerse yourself in the film when there are chuckles coming from the audience. This is understandable because aspects of a 90-odd year old film are inevitably going to appear silly and outdated to 21st Century cinema-goers. A couple of the friends I went with commented that, although they thought it was great, it wasn't scary. Well no, if you judge an old, old horror film by contemporary aesthetic standards you are unlikely to conclude that it is frightening. The trick is to imagine what 1920s audiences were used to; to them it would have been astonishing. You have to regress, rediscover a certain innocence, lose yourself to the grainy photography, the jerky motion, the theatricality of it. Besides, as with the best horror yarns, the fear is in the subtext. The homicidal yet erotic suggestiveness as the shadow of Schreck's extended fingers creep over Greta Schröder's sleeping body? C'mon, that's frickin' creepy by anyone's standards!

I stayed in on Valentine's Day, as usual, and watched Tod Browning's Freaks which I picked up for a couple of quid on DVD. I also got a classic 1960 French horror flick called Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face) and Get Carter for a fiver each. That's the rest of my Sunday sorted.

Yeah, not really happening

2009-02-04T19:39:00.001Z

OK, so "album in a month" may have to be re-designated to "EP in a month" or, more likely, "one frickin' song in a month".

Fourteen tracks ain't gonna' happen at my current work rate which stands at one four-bar riff in four days.

Therefore my revised objective for the month of February is to simply write a new track, maybe two if I get on a roll. All things considered, I want to produce some quality rather than quantity.

I suspect that all these produce-something-in-a-month challenges simply aren't the kind of motivation I need, and that successfully completing National Novel Writing Month in 2005 was a fluke. Any substantial piece of work produced in such a short space of time is not going to be of the best quality and I don't feel inclined in expending so much energy on something that will basically need to be completely redone from scratch in order to make it any good.

No, I want to concentrate on producing one or two good pieces of music this month rather than fourteen tracks of shite.

Stalled

2009-02-01T18:54:00.000Z

Okay, February 1st! Let's go! Let's write an album! Let's do this thing!

Let's wonder why music software is running so slow! Let's frown at constant audio drop-out! Let's curse as sequencer crashes after opening just one plug-in!

Let's think what the frickin' problem is! Let's remember that hard drive is full of video files and it would be a rather good idea to dump them all to external drive! Let's also notice that hard drive is in desperate need of defragmenting! Let's do general computer maintenance gubbins that we probably should have done before attempting to run CPU hungry music-making applications!

Let's go make a stew while computer gets cleaned up, drink a beer and try again later!

Yeah, haven't exactly hit the ground running. Hey ho.

A foolhardy challenge

2009-01-30T22:39:00.003Z

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, I am going to try and write a fourteen track album in February.

February Album Writing Month

I have a load of sound recordings I made with my MP3 player that I haven't used yet, a few half-developed tunes knocking around my head just waiting to be written/born/farted out of my brain, and I'm going to an exhibition of Impressionist art tomorrow that will hopefully stimulate my creative muscle in a roundabout sort of way.

Fourteen tunes in twenty-eight days? Piece of piss.

At rest, remembered

2009-01-27T22:38:00.002Z

John Updike
1932—2009

Half-Arsed Review Of The Year 2008: Music

2009-01-18T13:03:00.001Z

I'm probably the least qualified person to be summarising the year in music because, despite buying a van-load of CDs in 2008, my choices continue to regress to days of yore. What started last year as a determination to educate myself about classical music (conclusion: I like mostly late-romantic period and 20th Century composers) has broadened in scope to embrace other genres about which I knew pitifully little. Hence, I have been delving into old-school blues, jazz and a little soul, listening to artists like Lightnin' Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James; Fats Waller, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk; Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave.

I did manage to buy some records that were actually released during the auspicious year of 2008. Five to be precise. So this is not so much a review of the best releases of 2008 but rather a review of the handful I have actually got.

First up is Jamie Lidell's Jim, the white English soul record that Duffy can only dream of making. Jamie certainly has a fine pair of lungs on him and the fact that he isn't a massive twat like Jamiroquai's Jay Kay is much to his credit. Jamie made his name as a techno producer, to which his work as one half of Super Collider and his solo debut Muddlin' Gear attests. However, Jim is more of a straight soul album rather than the fusion of soul and electronica of his 2005 record Multiply. But what Jim may lack in experimentation it makes up for with charm, wit and good tunes, and Jamie still mucks about with a sampler and effects box when performing live, building loops on the fly of his backing band, beatbooxing and layering up vocal improvisations over the top. It's a bit of a shame there is not so much of this aural tomfoolery in evidence on the album but it is a still a damn fine collection of songs.

dan le sac Vs. Scroobius Pip proved that they were more than a one-trick commandment spouting pony with the album Angles. Dan's electro/hip-hop production may be a little musically pedestrian but it provides solid, simple and effective backing for the Scroob's rhymes. His words are by turns funny, ruminative, angry and tragic. Scroob is less a rapper than a performance poet who eschews the usual trappings of hip-hop lyrics. To quote the man himself, "Thou shalt always remember that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be." Darn tootin', Mr. Pip. le sac 'n' Pip put on a great live show, too, sharing an easy banter and sense of wry humour. May their collaboration be a long and fruitful one.

I was gutted when Red Snapper called it a day around 2001. I was chuffed as a doped up donkey when they reformed at the end of 2007. I positively shat myself when I was able to see them play live again. Oh, and they also released a new "mini album", which was jolly decent of them, and that album was A Pale Blue Dot. There is always a little trepidation when a favourite artist releases new material, especially after a prolonged hiatus, a slight fear that they may have lost it and the new stuff will be rubbish. Fortunately, though, the Snapper boys have delivered and A Pale Blue Dot is as good as anything in their esteemable back catalogue. It's back to basics, in a way, with the sound concentrating on the core elements of bass, guitar, drums and horns. There is a stronger rock feel mixed in with the familiar jazz, dub, funk and trip-hop ingredients of previous albums. It is raw and energetic, and a sense that the band are simply having great fun playing together again permeates the music. "Wanga Doll" kicks all kinds of arse all over the shop.

Slime & Reason by Roots Manuva is brilliant. If you think that Dizzie Rascal represents the apex of British hip-hop then put some Roots in your ears and reassess. Like Scroobius Pip, his rapping style is resolutely English. His lyrics are witty, intelligent, playful, gritty and melancholic. The music and production are an inventive blend of dub and grime, and yet there are plenty of catchy hooks in amongst the dirt. Superb stuff.

My final choice is a bit cheeky because, although the album was released in 2008, I only bought it last week. But this is my blog so I don't care.

David Holmes is a bit of a musical chameleon. After making a name for himself as a DJ, his first album, This Film's Crap, Let's Slash The Seats, was a collection of minimal and menacing techno. The follow up, Let's Get Killed, was full of funky, soulful, urban electronica inspired by an acid-fuelled lurch around New York. Bow Down To The Exit Sign added rock to the palette. There was a brief stint as band leader with the Free Association and then Holmes went off to Hollywood to score Steven Soderbergh movies like Out Of Sight and the Ocean's triptych. What was always evident in Holmes' work was a great love for all kinds of music. His music is effortlessly cool whilst remaining unpretentious. But while his previous albums have their fair share of haunting and moving tunes such as "Gone" and "Hey Lisa", you never felt that Holmes was revealing much about himself other than his love of music. That's not a bad thing by any means and that's not to say that his music was soulless; there was simply a distance. It's not about me, just listen to the music, man.

His latest album, therefore, is a revelation. The Holy Pictures is an astonishingly personal record, a piece of work that has been bubbling away inside Holmes since the death of his mother in 1996. It is a touching tribute to his late parents and a thanksgiving to love, family and friendship. Musically, it is a typically effective blend of styles from rock to electronica. Unlike the roll-call of zeitgeisty guest singers on Bow Down... Holmes assumes vocal duties, his hushed delivery permeating the music to haunting effect.

The result is a wonderful and genuinely affecting record. The instrumental "Theme / I.M.C." is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music I have heard for a long, long time; "I Heard Wonders" and "Love Reign Over Me" are brilliant atmospheric pop songs; "The Ballad Of Jack And Sarah" is achingly beautiful.

Oh, just go and buy the fucking thing.

To round things off, here is my Top 50 Most Played Artists of 2008 according to my Last.fm stats:

Otis Redding
Howlin' Wolf
Arnold Schoenberg
Karol Szymanowski
Ramones
Muddy Waters
Lightnin' Hopkins
Wilson Pickett
Elmore James
Charlie Parker
Sam & Dave
Roots Manuva
Krzysztof Penderecki
Fats Waller
Miles Davis
Fudge Tunnel
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip
Alban Berg
Igor Stravinsky
Béla Bartók
Faith No More
Jamie Lidell
Tommy McClennan
Crass
Claude Debussy
David Bowie
Red Snapper
Killing Joke
Amon Tobin
Nirvana
Sergei Prokofiev
Wire
Pixies
Orbital
Pavement
The Orb
Death in Vegas
Atomic Hooligan
The Fall
Primus
mclusky
Four Tet
Underworld
Living Colour
Robert Johnson
Prefuse 73
Aram Khachaturian
Luke Slater
Kettel
Alexanders Dark Band

Here's to all the amazing music I find in 2009. Cheers.

I am not a number...

2009-01-14T21:52:00.003Z

Patrick McGoohan
1928—2009

Whores!

2009-01-11T18:00:00.003Z

Iggy Pop hawking insurance on TV? Iggy Pop, corporate shill? Iggy, dude, I thought you of all people would have more integrity than that. It just ain't right. Ron Asheton will be spinning in his grave just as soon as they bury him.

I haven't felt this disappointed in an artist since Ewan McGregor's horrifically pretentious journey-of-the-human-spirit perfume advert.

But what's the use of bemoaning celebrity endorsements? It has always been and ever shall be thus.

Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell

2009-01-08T09:54:00.003Z

Ron Asheton
Guitarist & co-songwriter with The Stooges
1948—2009

I dunno' nothin' about nothin'

2009-01-04T14:01:00.001Z

There's a good article in today's Observer newspaper by Tim Adams about our anxiety over the current world financial crisis and society's ability to successfully assess risks. A passage towards the end of the article concerning a book called Expert Political Judgement by Philip Tetlock struck me as particularly interesting:

Tetlock's book is based on two decades of research into 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends". He asked them simply to do what they apparently did best: predict what would happen in the world next in answer to specific questions. Would oil prices rise or fall, would there be a boom or a bust, would we go to war? And so on. When the study concluded, in 2003, Tetlock's experts had made 82,361 forecasts and the results were correlated with the facts as they had turned out.

The experts were less accurate in their forecasts than a control group of chimpanzees choosing entirely randomly would have been. Even specialists in particular narrow fields were not significantly more successful than reasonably informed laymen.

This neatly encapsulates a growing suspicion of mine that takes stronger hold as I grow older: that those in authority, politicians, managers, consultants, movie studio executives, advertisers, teachers, clerics, parents are as clueless as you and I, that the entire human race doesn't have real idea of what is going on, that we as a species are blagging it, making it up as we go along, grateful to blindly follow anyone who has the arrogance to stand up and say that they have figured it out and equally grateful to use them as scapegoats when it inevitably turns out that they have not.

As Stanley Kubrick once said, “If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.” If we believe that there is somebody out there who claims to understand what's going on then it provides false reassurance that the world in which we live is predictable, stable, safe and not a big bloody maelstrom of chaos. If somebody claims to understand how it all works then it absolves us from the responsibility of trying to understand how it all works.

This tendency makes us naive and easy to exploit. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I am woefully bad at managing money and yet even an economical dunce like me can see the folly of the government trying to persuade the people to spend their way out of an economical crisis caused by public overspending. Does Gordon Brown really think that people whose credit supplies are rapidly disappearing and leaving them with huge debts in a time of dwindling confidence in job security are going to spend more money on unessential crap?

Even an economical dunce like me can grasp the notion that giving multi-billion pound bailouts to the people whose irresponsible lending fuelled the public's overspending is going to keep money flowing. Are the banks going to use that bailout cash to keep lending or are they going to hang on to it to cover the own arses until this crisis blows over? Gee, Gordo, whaddya' think?

Who is ultimately to blame for this crisis? Irresponsible lenders? Irresponsible consumers? Irresponsible advertisers? Irresponsible media? All of the above? Everybody complicit in creating a culture of superficial aspiration, consumerism and unfounded self-entitlement? Hasn't anyone read Madame Bovary?

There's another all too human trait for you right there: we never fucking learn.

Not going out today...

2008-12-27T12:27:00.003Z

Two reasons:

I'm suffering from a pesky cough and sore throat that took hold on Christmas Eve (but didn't spoil my Crimbo too much - just annoying).
Rival Glasgow football clubs Rangers and Celtic are playing this afternoon at the Rangers' home ground, Ibrox Stadium, which happens to be about half a mile from my tenement building. Whenever Rangers play at home there are always big crowds wandering around outside the building and a massive queue to get onto the underground train at the station right under my living room window. This is the first Rangers vs. Celtic match at Ibrox since I moved here. Big, big rivals in the way that only same-city football clubs can be. Might see a bit of action from the safety of my second floor flat after the match.

Hope you all had an enjoyable and peaceful Christmas Day.

[UPDATE] - Everyone appeared to leave the game in a civilised and orderly fashion. A good thing, really, except from a morbid entertainment point of view.

[ADDENDUM] - Sorry, I realise that this post is virtually identical to this one. Have I really run out of fresh material for this blog?

No more birthday parties

2008-12-25T14:36:00.004Z