Smithology

I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and thought I’d share a little passage that really makes the book for me. It might be considered a spoiler but then again it doesn’t reveal anything that isn’t written on the back cover of the book. The fact that it appears on page 94 of 499 is testimony to Stephenson’s world building style. The plot moves very slowly for most of the book while you absorb a great deal of detail but you also feel you are exploring a new world and culture as you go which is what I enjoy about his books.

This passage is about Nell who is a four year old girl who lives with her mother, brother and her mother’s rotating boyfriends in a society that lacks for nothing except culture. Her brother has recently “obtained” a mysterious object from the rich “Vickies” who live up the hill. It has symbols in it which her brother says are called letters but there is something strange about it so Nell leaves it under the couch.

Also over the last 94 pages we’ve seen heartbreaking social conditions in which Nell lives contrasted with the lavish culture of the Neo Victorians. In this passage, we get a glimmer of what the rest of the book is going to be about as Nell begins her Pygmalion-like journey.

Oh and language warning.

“Ouch, god damn it!” Tad shouted. He looked down at the book in disbelief. “What the fuck is this?!” He wound up as if to kick it, then thought better of it, remembering he was barefoot. He picked it up and hefted it, looking straight at Nell and getting a fix on her range and azimuth. “Stupid little cunt, how many times do I have to tell you to keep your fucking shit cleaned up?!” Then he turned away from her slightly, wrapping his arm around his body, and snapped the book straight at her head like a Frisbee.

She stood watching it come toward her because it did not occur to her to get out of the way, but at the last moment the covers flew open. The pages spread apart. They all bent like feathers as they hit her in the face, and it didn’t hurt at all.

The book fell to the floor at her feet, open to an illustrated page.

The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily flinging a book at the little girl’s head.

“Once upon a time there was a little girl named Cunt,” the book said.

“My name is Nell,” Nell said.

A tiny disturbance propagated through the grid of letters on the facing page.

“Your name’s mud if you don’t fucking clean this shit up,” Tad said. “But do it later, I want some fucking privacy for once.”

Nell’s hands were full, and so she shoved the book down the hallway and into the kids’ room with her foot. She dumped all her stuff on her mattress and then ran back and shut the door. She left her magic wand and sword nearby in case she should need them, then set Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple into bed, all in a neat line, and pulled the blanket up under their chins. “Now you go to bed, and be quiet because you are all being naughty and bothering Tad, and I’ll see you in the morning”

“Nell was putting her children to bed and decided to read them some stories,” said the book’s voice.

Nell looked at the book, which had flopped itself open again, this time to an illustration showing a girl who looked much like Nell, except that she was wearing a beautiful flowing dress and had ribbons in her hair. She was sitting next to a miniature bed with four children tucked beneath its flowered coverlet: a dinosaur, a duck, a bunny, and a baby with purple hair. The girl who looked like Nell had a book on her lap. “For some time Nell had been putting them to bed without reading to them,” the book continued, “but now the children were not so tiny anymore, and Nell decided that in order to bring them up properly, they must have bedtime stories.”

Nell picked up the book and set it on her lap

Uncategorized books, neal stephenson, the diamond age

I’ve noticed on twitter a bit of voting going on against the #hottest100women hashtag and to a @hottest100women user who is apparently going to compile a list of the most highly voted female artists as a counterpoint to Triple J’s recent hottest 100 of all time list that had next to no female artists. Actually there were women hidden in some of the bands and some guest artists on the Massive Attack songs but compared to the amount of cock-rock on that list it was pretty saddening.

I really enjoy the feminine voice (both literal and literary) and would like to see just a little more encouragement for women to get out there and sling their guitars (or their keyboards or microphone stands or whatever else makes a noise).

I also realise that in other genres there are plenty of women: my Dad is a fan of country music and at one stage his MySpace page was embarrassingly overloaded with women singers (which he assured me was a coincidence). I think that’s just how country (and folk) music is: women have more of a voice.

And don’t get me started on the soul-delling (a combination of soul and yodelling according to Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock) pop idols that dominate mainstream radio.

So without further ado and to help “restore the balance” here’s my top ten list gals that sing and play in the order that they came into my head which would change if I wrote the list tomorrow or yesterday.

1. Delerium: Silence. I first heard this in Broke Down Palace and then obtained it on a mix disc that some record shop gave me (called Beat Me ‘Till It Feels Good). The guest vocal is by Sarah McLachlan who actually does kind of yodel in the chorus but in this case it works.
2. Wicked Beat Sound System: I Don’t Wanna Know. Inna Styles was my favourite album for a couple of years after I bought it. I love the way it blends the flute with the drum and bass and Linda Janssen’s wonderful voice. In this song I love the way she pours the emotion into the line “The world and all that’s beyond, I can’t conceive how it goes on forever / this earth, this life, how can it be taken away so easily?”
3. Jill Sobule: Supermodel. I have this from the Clueless soundtrack. Apart from her lyrics “I didn’t eat yesterday and I didn’t eat today and I’m not going to eat tomorrow!” I also like the ferocious out of control guitars. I might have also included “I Kissed a Girl” for the line “dumb as a box of hammers but he’s such a handsome guy”. I suppose I should listen to one of her albums some day.
4. Goldfrapp: Human. I loved felt mountain from the day Richard Kingsmill featured it on his Sunday afternoon show where he plays new stuff. The mix of operatic vocals and epic sounding strings with samples and beats really grabbed me. I also bought Black Cherry and Seventh Tree which are great but I’ll always go back to Felt Mountain because the music just transports you.
5. Pretenders: Brass In Pocket. This is the Pretender’s big hit but they have written tonnes of other rocking songs and Chrissie Hynde’s sardonic delivery is perfect. I would also put in a vote for “Precious”, “Up the Neck” (for the line “I rubbed my face in the sweat that ran down his chest / it was all very … run of the mill”) and “Pack it Up” (“I may be a skunk, but you’re a piece of junk / and furthermore, I don’t like your trousers…”)
6. Regina Spektor: Fidelity. (“and it breaks my har har har har har har har har har heart…”) This is pretty new to me, but I’m digging Regina’s music more and more and will probably buy her new album
7. Garbage: Vow. I can give or take Garbage but their music’s fun (in a dark way) and it rocks. And yes I know there’s that Curve band that is apparently way better but you must remember that prior to 1995 I only listened to Dire Straits and Eric Clapton.
8. Massive Attack: Teardrop. This is just a wonderful artful song. The guest vocal is Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. Actually I own a Cocteau Twins song: Alice from the Stealing Beauty soundtrack which is also a wonderful haunting song.
9. Portishead: Glory Box. Also on the Stealing Beauty soundtrack and I realise this list is a little heavy on the acid jazz side of things. But I had to pick a Portishead song and this is the most popular.
10. Nina Simone: Love me or Leave Me. Maybe Nina doesn’t count as rock/pop but I think she rocks.

And there are heaps more now I look through my record collection like there are heaps of little eighties pop songs that I’m a fan of: Blondie, Divinyls, Eurythmics, even Cyndi Lauper (The eighties was a great time for girl-pop before the age of soul-delling). Also one-off stuff that I only have because it’s on a soundtrack like The Muffs version of Kids in America on the Clueless soundtrack. And then I enjoy the occasional listen to Sinead O’Conner and PJ Harvey that might have made the list on another day.

Note I have kind of broken the hottest100women rules by including bands/songs where only the guest vocal is a woman.

I have a lot of trouble choosing real musical favourites because so much of what I enjoy listening to at a given time is due to the mood I’m in and changes over time and repeated listening. Most of the time I just like a whole album so I’ve just chosen singles when in doubt to make it easier for myself.

Uncategorized music

Some may recall I had borrowed three Wizard of Oz books from Catriona and had been reviewing them as I read them. I realised today that I never got around to writing my thoughts on the third book Ozma of Oz which is a shame because I think I liked it the best.

If you watched the movies (other than the first one), the chances are you’ll remember Tik Tok and the Wheelies from the opening chapters of this book. Tik Tok is a mechanical man and the wheelies are a bunch of bullies who get around via the wheels on their hands. Maybe the Wheelies show that Baum had prescience of skate-punks. Another character who will be familiar is Princess Langwidere who is fricking scary because she has a walk in wardrobe full of heads.

Poor old Tik Tok spends the book being told that he has no emotions and can’t think given that he is a mechanical man and both the Scarecrow and Nick Chopper (the Tin Man) are at the forefront of these accusations (apart from Tik Tok who also states these facts upfront). Yet as you would guess, there are several times that Tik Tok demonstrates that he is loyal and clever.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because I’ve failed to mention what this story’s about which means I haven’t mentioned our heroine, back by popular demand: Dorothy.

So in this book, Dorothy is a little older and accompanying her Uncle to Australia when she is shipwrecked and manages to cling to a wooden crate which also serves as a haven for her new friend Billina the hen. They float on the ocean for a bit and end up in a strange country.

It turns out that Dorothy isn’t in Oz but in a neighbouring country which has a few problems that need sorting out and who better than Dorothy to set things straight? Along the way Dorothy encounters the characters mentioned and many others good and bad.

One of the most interesting characters to me was the hungry tiger. The hungry tiger has two problems, the first that he never feels satisfied no matter how much he eats, the second that he feels morally compelled not to kill his food even though he strongly wishes to devour pretty much everyone he meets.

I guess the tiger struck a chord with me because I immediately made the connection between the tiger and our current consumer driven society that we keep hearing about. The tiger is like a typical modern corporation that is driven by a constant need for growth and a conflict of interest between wanting to rob every cent from every citizen but at the same time needing to maintain a good public image. I wonder if Baum had that in mind when he thought of the tiger. Of course there are many other ways you can read the tiger which is what makes him so interesting – and I would be interested he perhaps turns up in some form in mythology and other fiction.

Uncategorized

After I finished Anathem, I still had a hankering for some Neal Stephenson so I decided to revisit Zodiac, his “eco-thriller” from 1988. Apparently Neal’s concept for the book was to write a hardboiled crime novel in contemporary times. Set in Boston, the gangsters are the Industry bosses and their favourite crime is to dump toxic chemicals into the harbour.

The protagonist Sangamon Taylor is a natural born rebel: too smart for his own good and contemptuous of a world that promotes dumb people to high places. He chooses to live outside the system, exposing toxic criminals using trial-by-press with extravagant media stunts. At the same time he has a soft spot for the little guys: the not-so-old men dying of cancer after working in chemical plants, the Vietnamese and lobster fishermen who scrape their food and livelihood from the bottom of Boston harbour. Speaking of Vietnamese, there are also lots of references to Agent Orange as Sangamon’s arch-nemesis is a family run business named Basco (fictional) who got started making the stuff for the U.S. government during the Vietnam war. They are now a major corporation based in Boston.

Things turn ugly for Sangamon when some very bad things start turning up in the harbour just as Basco’s CEO decides to run for president. Who is behind this mysterious poisoning, are there links to Basco and will Sangamon survive to find out?

One of the things that struck me about this book on the re-read is just the amount of drug use. Sangamon has a belief that all molecules bigger than just a couple or atoms are very bad so his drug of choice is Nitrous Oxide on which he binges in just about every chapter including the first page of the book. When things get really bad, he drops acid and at one point resorts to taking speed. It just seemed a bit over the top that just about everyone he meets just happily joins in on this drug use, no worries.

It’s unusual (for me) to come across a book that depicts drug use in this way. In his later book Cryptonomicon, a main character Sergeant Shaftoe develops a morphine addiction but in this habit, the negative aspects of drug use are well represented. For Sangamon, they are always a positive experience: helping him have fun and get through mundane work.

I wonder if the positive drug thing is just one of those little literary taboos that you learn to avoid if you want your books to be popular? Maybe that’s why it seems rare to see depictions of positive drug use.

Apart from this, the book suffers no ill affects from 20 years of time warp: I can imagine the whole story taking place this year except instead of listening to Pöyzen Böyzen cassettes not bad for a two umlaut band, they might have it dialed up on the iPod.

There are a couple of references to PCs running CP/M, an ancient operating system but these are in the context of referring to them as ancient so it still works – they are just implausibly ancient as I doubt that there would be any surviving media that could boot CP/M. I tried to boot a CP/M disk once at work in 1999 but the media had degraded in the filing cabinet and that was after I’d hunted through the junk-pile to find a 5.25” floppy drive.

So Zodiac holds up pretty well on re-read and has maintained its worthiness to remain on my bookshelf. Give it a read if you get a chance.

Uncategorized books, neal stephenson, scifi

Discussion of the absence of female artists in the recent Triple J Hottest 100 poll seems to just keep going and going. Maybe it is being kept alive on twitter by all the people who keep tweeting how dumb it is that people keep tweeting about it. Every few hours I see a tweet come through on the #hottest100 twitter tag along the lines of “judging by that #hottest100 of all time, straight white males. Not sure how I feel about govt $ indulging such an audience.” ref and converse replies “I picked MY best 10 in @triplej #hottest100, so what if none by women? What a lot of patronising, pseudointellectual rubbish some ppl write.” ref. Then there’s the proliferation of “all-vagina” rock lists: “my sister’s attempt at a #Hottest100 of vaginas… RT @bettydee ALL-FEMALE #Hottest100 of all time: http://bit.ly/xwL1F” ref and “My response to the ‘JJJ cockfest’ = ladies only play list #hottest100 http://bit.ly/2lxvWy” ref (These tweets are just from the most recent page-full of tweets that loaded in my client)

The first observation here is what an echo chamber Twitter can be. If not for twitter I wonder whether this issue would be so talked about, sure the usual blogs would have picked up on it and the usual readers of those blogs would have commented but those who follow the #hottest100 twitter tag are more diverse that readers of those blogs so a greater response has been provoked, even a special on Triple J Hack (mp3) to discuss the issue.

Some of you who have a greater emotional distance from this discussion may be asking what’s it all about? Who cares?. In answer to that, keep in mind that Triple J is Australia’s only national youth radio station that explicitly aims to engage young Australian culture. A poll like this gives an indication of what young Australians are into so a lot of different groups pay attention apart from the youth themselves: me I’m just an old fogey clinging to fond memories of my early twenties and the dream I had of being a rock star. A lot of us stale old onlookers have an interest in perpetuating a certain culture that once had an ideal of equality between the sexes. Other groups include various stakeholders in the music industry: artists themselves, producers, record label decision makers (whatever they’re called) who will be deciding where they’re going to spend money (or not) in the next few years. Then there’s Triple J itself getting valuable feedback on what their audience or potential audience want to hear.

But there are a few big problems with the data from this poll. The first is that we don’t know who voted. We can guess that the bulk of the 500,000 ish votes came from under fourties. We can guess that it was mostly middle class people with access to the internet. From the result we might surmise that more men voted than women. Others have speculated that a large contingent of “Bogans” ie working class males flooded the poll to produce the result. But the truth is that we don’t know and we never will.

Having said that, there is a little bit of evidence that a different demographic voted and that is the results of the yearly hottest 100s from earlier in the year and previous years which have plenty of female artists.

Another problem is that we don’t know why people voted the way they did. Again there has been speculation that a lot of the voting was along the lines of what people thought they should be voting for based on results of polls in other settings. This might account for a greater number of baby-boomer staples such as The Beatles, The Beachboys and Bob Dylan in the result. As for the gender exclusion in the result, we could speculate that it was a conscious choice of the voters on one extreme or that it was mere coincidence on the other. The truth is likely to be somewhere in between but again we can only speculate.

There’s a saying I’ve picked up somewhere along the way that goes “never attribute to malice what can be explained by misunderstanding”. There has been a fair few defensive comments both on Twitter and on the radio defending any misogynist agenda. I tend to agree that voters were not consciously excluding women when they voted. Even the fact that Triple J’s original history of rock was all male is atypical of Triple J who in my mind have promoted many female artists and have lots of intelligent women DJs. So I think the accusations of misogyny or neglect of feminist ideals are unfounded.

To me the most convincing speculation as to the result is that the demographic who voted was different to the one that usually comprises the Triple J audience and that this demographic doesn’t consider female artists to be worthy of “hottest of all time” status even through they may on average enjoy female rock. Why is anyone’s guess but mine is that there is a growing culture in Australia of associating rock with male aggression and a growing privileging of male aggression over the last ten years. This stands to reason as we look at a revival of aggressive male nationalism on Australia day coupled with awakened xenophobia in the wake of 9/11.

See also Where Were all the Sisters on The Memes of Production for commentary from real cultural studies people.

UPDATE; On further reflection, another explanation is that the trend towards excluding female artists from the hottest 100 over the last twenty years is due to the changing place of the Internet. Maybe all this proves is that the educated middle and upper classes (who used to be the only ones on the internet) were more into women rockers than society as a whole who now have greater internet use – at least amongst rock fans. And mixed in with this is John’s idea from Memes Of Production that it is also due to the mainstreaming of what used to be alternative rock.

Uncategorized feminism, music

I’ve uploaded Matt and Sol’s Favourite Things 09 only a month and a half after the event. I recorded all of this in late May but somehow just haven’t had the time or energy to edit it and upload. Perhaps it was the drama of Felicity being very sick for a few weeks. Anyway, here it is: the topic is Felicity’s birthday and in case you can’t catch the text in the opening credits, it goes: “Set phasors to stun”, “It’s”, “Matt and Sol’s Favourite Things”. I set the interval on my timelapse thing a little high and didn’t leave room to write on a clear background.

View larger version on youtube

The music behind the slideshow is Leo Kotte : Buckaroo and comes from a best of album that I was given for my 21st birthday. (Who gave me that? Was it Tim? Dad?)

P.S. While I was writing this post, I came across this piece of awesomeness on youtube from Leo Kottke.

Uncategorized matt and sols favourite things