sweet effay

It’s all go here at the minute what with the Easter Hols and our (well, Mrs effay’s) decision to equip the Little House on the Flatlands with a new kitchen. Cue arguments, indecision, and interminable visits to DIY shops; and that’s before we even get round to buying it and I have to fit the fucking thing.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom (although it is in a manner of speaking). Thanks ever so much to the anonymous benefactor who sent me that vast supply of metal via undercurrent. I’m nowhere near working my way through all of it yet, but can already say that Napalm Death are much better than I thought; Godflesh are as good as people told me; Celtic Frost aren’t, but they’re still okay; and everything else I’ve heard so far has been highly entertaining. The Little effay has been dancing to Earth, but looking askance at a lot of the other stuff: All that Coil and Krautrock I played to her whilst in the womb seems to have paid off then. Mrs effay’s reaction has not been favourable, but at least she has lots of kitchen catalogues to console her.

Thanks also to kek-w for my prize which will receive its premiere in the Little House in the next couple of days.

In other news: I found the new Dr Who quite promising, if a little frenetic; it will be interesting to see how it develops. I am currently checking the BBC news about once an hour to find out whether the Pope has died yet.

The Fall, eh? Great band no question, so I won’t labour the point here. My initial enthusiasm for them coincided with the acquisition of my first Walkman. Unhappily I came to the conclusion that, for optimal sound quality, stuff which would sound really good on a Walkman would be best purchased as pre-recorded cassettes. There was something so right about listening to the wrathful tones of Mark E. Smith whilst heading to work on a train that I now have a lot of Fall tapes which are deteriorating in quality, rather than a nice stack of vinyl I could tape from whenever I needed to. What can I say? I was young and the technology looked exciting.

A second upside of having lots of Fall tapes was the pleasure of playing them in the car: Who wouldn’t want to listen to ‘Mr Pharmacist’ as they drove back from a drug deal in North London, or ‘Hit the North’ as they headed up the A1? Well Mrs effay actually, but happily I used to have a strategy in hand to deal with this.

As the non-driving, music obsessed, record collecting sad-boy in the effay Tactical Nuclear Unit, I am the only one allowed to access the tape collection in order to choose what we will enjoy on long journeys. Being a loving husband, I would naturally include some material for my better half’s enjoyment, but carefully select stuff that you couldn’t hear very well over the noise of the engine (mid period Tangerine Dream, folk musicians with acoustic guitars, etc.). This would lead nicely into the following conversation:
“I can’t really hear this and it’s sending me to sleep. Put something else on”
Insert The Frenz Experiment.
“Oh no, not The Fall! What else have you got with you?”
“Um, not much; just a bootleg of Zappa in the rehearsal studios and my industrial compilation.”
“Oh God! Just leave The Fall on then.”
And I lean back and relax as we go zooming up the A1.

Still, with the advent of the Little effay, these simple pleasures are behind us. Long car journeys are now accompanied by the sounds of Stephen Fry and Jane Horrocks pretending to be Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that my Fall tapes are crumbling; curse them! So I am being forced to buy some of them again on CD. Happily this isn’t all bad news because of the marvellous reissues coming out on Castle with loads of bonus material. I picked up Hex Enduction Hour the other week, and whilst straining my eyes on the ridiculous small print of the fold-out cover thing, I found this by Daryl Easlea:

All Fall fans know that Hex fucking rocks. [The leap from Grotesque to Hex is] like the leap – and by now I now [sic] you well enough to say - from Obscured by Clouds to The Dark Side of the Moon.

Well you don’t know me as well as you think Daryl. Leaving to one side the fact that Grotesque fucking rocks as well, the idea that one could compare Hex to Dark Side is simply scandalous. One is a shambolic masterpiece, whilst the other has a couple of moments, but is mostly useful for seeing whether your speakers are working properly. I think that The Reaper has summed up all there is to be said for Dark Side (although, it must be said that we should probably be reassessing the musical credentials of the theme from Are You Being Served? now that we know it was the last thing Jhonn Balance sang on stage before his death). However, what is even more galling is that Obscured is much better than Dark Side. Okay, it’s rather bitty as soundtracks tend to be, but it’s the last album one can listen to all the way through without Roger Waters trying to make deep and meaningful statements with all the grace and subtlety of that later great prog rock lyricist: Neil Peart of Rush (I must confess that I haven’t heard the post-Waters Floyd because I was so sickened by The Wall, but my spies tell me I shouldn’t bother).

I rather like Pink Floyd (okay then, I really, really, like bits of Pink Floyd) but their best years were behind them after Meddle; which itself contained two tracks of absolute genius and a pile of dreck. Even if Hex Enduction Hour is the Fall’s finest hour (it isn’t, so there!) to compare it to Darkside of the Moon seems a very bizarre thing to do. Daryl proceeds to mention Radiohead as well, but let’s not go there shall we?

If Tony Blair thinks that faith should be kept out of politics, why did he throw the hereditary peers out of the House of Lords before the bishops?

Perusing the Cinestatic Latest Searches feature over the last few days has finally convinced me that Infinite Thought was correct in her contention that 'sonic porn' is simply pictures of a cartoon hedgehog getting his end away. All we seem to be seeing in the box these days is searches for 'Incredibles porn': How sad is that? There's a lot of twisted people out there, but they're neither as interesting nor having as much fun as you would hope.

To celebrate the news that Our Tone will soon be naming the date of the election, here is the first in an occasional series of questions we really need answering:

Does Michael Howard support late abortions for gypsies?

Further to my recent post on Keannu as John Constantine, here's what that bloke from Current 93 who used to be called David Tibet, but is now called David Michael (and aren't Current 93 just called Current now?) had to say about it:

I went to see the film CONSTANTINE yesterday and was so exhausted with boredom that I couldn't even leave the show early, desperate though I was to get out.

Can we trust his judgement? On the one hand, Current 93 are jolly fine indeed, but on the other hand, David whatshisname thinks that Tiny Tim is a great artist...

Here in the Flatlands, we are blessed with a visitation from my mother. Consequently I am drowning in a sea of wine and not really doing a lot.

Wednesday is the day we trundle down to the village library so that the Little effay can get more books and videos (she’s currently working her way through the entire Balamory catalogue) and the librarians can fawn over her. Yesterday was quite a successful trip as, not only was she given a sticker and one of those bug things sad people in offices attach to the side of their monitors, but we discovered this:

Sad Dads everywhere should be snapping it up for their wee ones, and the rest of you should be checking it out in bookshops. It really is very fine indeed, and I’m sure you could do with cheering up following the news that a ‘compassionate, decent man’ has been nominated to be head of the World Bank. I’m not going to spoil the plot for y’all by going into detail, but I guess that you can work out the main theme by the title.

I’ve been away immersing myself in the murky waters of Our Nation’s Capital. Still trying to get over the culture shock and return to Real Life, or whatever it is we do around here. The bad news is that, once again, I returned to discover an all-but-ruined computer; the good news is that it’s not mine, but that of my brother-in-law. I am being very sympathetic, but this one is way beyond my help.

Whilst I’m trying to fall far enough back into normality to actually write something rather than just lounging around with a pair of headphones nailed to my ears, check out this by Mark K-P, which is pretty much spot-on apart from the fact that he’s wrong about Sylvester McCoy (at least, in the final series); not all Fantasy is shit, just most of it; and he fails to mention the most famous unheimlich Dr Who scene of all:

For those who aren’t as hip as the rest of us, that Dalek is coming out of the Thames and the picture doesn’t really do the scene justice.

If children’s sci-fi doesn’t do it for you, then check out Merrick’s piece here, which is simply the best thing I’ve read online in ages.

You know how people always go on about how Zizek is so great because he relates difficult philosophical and psychoanalytical concepts to popular culture? Well, Psychbloke is a bit like that but better. Check this out.

I may not have publicly admitted the fact that the recent reconstructions of my wrist have enabled me to start playing guitar again for the first time in eleven years. The Little House rocks these days: Little effay joins in enthusiastically and Mrs effay runs for cover. Anyway, perhaps this explains my renewed interest in metal. I finally managed to extract some Carcass out of the Flatlands today: It’s very good but, ‘way beyond metal’, u/c? I’m not so sure. Worth checking out, but not a patch on Venom. I really can’t believe that Venom have passed me by for the last twenty years. What the hell have I been doing all this time when I should have been listening to 'Countess Bathory' at least twice a week? Is it true that they’re not much cop after the first three albums? I’ve got the first two, but should I get any more and risk disappointment?

I couldn't really let this one go by. Mark K-P on raising children:

It is, to say the least, by no means self-evident that the best way to rear children is in a domestic space with their mother. I speak as someone whose upbringing was of that type. Being the sole subject of the attentions of a young woman who - as she would now admit - had limited confidence was unlikely to do much for the mental health of either child or parent. A world inhabited almost exclusively by mother and child cannot but be cloyingly, suffocatingly confining: and any security and safety that both experience is inevitably achieved at a high price, namely the coding of the world Outside as a place of uncertainty, fear and loathing. To be brought up partly by 'strangers' and with other children is not only to let some air into the fetid closeted space of the domestic neurosis factory, it is also to go some way to weakening the distinction between what is familiar/ familial and what is 'strange'.

It may well not be self-evident Mark, but you really should think twice before universalizing your own upbringing. I probably shouldn't universalize either, but having over twenty years of close-up experience of non-working mothers bringing up the younger siblings of the children in various primary schools across several parts of the country and diverse social strata, I can promise you that the world you describe is not at all common. Do you really think that these people lock themselves away with their babies all day? They spend a significant percentage of their time with their peers in social groupings of one kind or another (some organised, some not). Most children are interacting with non-family members on a regular basis from a very early age. 'Suffocatingly confining' it is not. 'Collective child-rearing by groups of women' is actually a much more apt description of how many children are brought up than your own. Consequently, I would suggest that this:

one of the most dangerous presuppositions is the unargued view that the 'best' (='most natural') way for a child to be reared is in a private domestic space by its female parent.

Is simply untrue, although there is an argument that there is a presupposition that the 'most natural' way for a child to be reared is by its female parent. Surprisingly enough, sociobiological studies seem to bear this out in that even newborn infants respond differently to female and male voices.

And before anybody starts leaping up and down about how I'm relegating women to the second classs position of domestic servants, I should point out that Little effay is brought up by me in our not-very-private domestic space, whilst Mrs effay gets to be a wage slave. What a saint I am.