Part Five

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 22

June 8, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Martyn Joseph – Whoever It Was That Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home
Martyn Joseph – An Aching and a Longing
Jean-Michel Jarre – Images: The Best Of Jean-Michel Jarre
Michael Jackson – Off The Wall
Martyn Joseph – The Great American Novel
Elton John – Elton John
Jean-Michel Jarre – The Concerts In China
Martyn Joseph – Martyn Joseph
Martyn Joseph – Deep Blue

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 23

June 14, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

The Eagles – The Very Best of the Eagles
Eels with Strings – Live at the Town Hall
Kathleen Edwards – Failer
Eels – Blinking Lights and Other Revelations
Electric Light Orchestra – Light Years: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra
Eels – Daisies of the Galaxy
Enigma – The Cross Of Changes
Enya – The Celts
Enya – Watermark

And this is what you do with your spare time

June 15, 2009

———

Two random thoughts on a rainy Monday that I considered worth sharing.

1. Who the fuck told Cathy Tyson she could sing, and

2. Pina Coladas I can understand, but does anyone really like getting caught in the rain?

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 24

June 21, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Neil Young – Decade (Disc Two)

Old Gods, Almost Dead

June 26, 2009

———

We were just turning in when we got the news. Emily’s mother is visiting, which means late nights, which I don’t really mind. The arrival of Daniel has to a certain extent put paid to my wife’s “be in bed by ten” ritual – this makes her tired and very occasionally cranky but it’s also nice to get to spend some time with her of an evening.

At about 11:30 her phone beeped, and she looked at it in astonishment: “Michael Jackson’s dead!”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Who says so?”
“Caroline. Is the computer still on?”
“No, but the TV will be in a moment.”

Unless you’ve been buried under a rock for the past twelve hours you will know the details, so I will not bother to report them here. The news reports were playing a curious mixture of grief-stricken crowds lining the sidewalks of Beverly Hills and the concert footage they’ve pulled from the archives. The words CPR and cardiac arrest were mentioned and that was all I really needed to hear. I scratched my head and then knocked on Elisabeth’s door to let her know.

At this point we switched off the television. There really was no point in keeping it on: the best you could hope for would be coverage from News 24, who – while I had no doubt that they’d be dealing with the story for most of the night – would in all likelihood singularly fail to produce anything of interest before the first press conference. There would have been continuous footage of the mansion gates with no updates to speak of, save the occasional comment from his greengrocer or newspaper delivery boy (who, let’s hope, has never actually been inside the house). The vapid emptiness of News 24’s broadcasts reached its zenith in the aftermath of the death of Milosevic: they spent the morning lurking outside the walls of the Hague, where absolutely nothing was happening. You half-expected a youthful Chevy Chase to creep on from the sidelines and announce that ‘Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead’.

Things were a little different some four years ago, when News 24 (and by all accounts, every other station in the world) covered the trial and its memorable climax: a stately, almost sedate procession from Neverland across California to the courts for the verdict, all viewed from helicopter, like a slow-motion re-enactment of the O.J. Simpson chase. I stood in the lounge and read off the verdicts (“not guilty…not guilty…not guilty…”) to a heavily pregnant Emily, who was in the bath and who tired of it long before I did. It was the culmination of a two-year legal battle that had begun in the aftermath of Martin Bashir’s 2003 documentary and the fallout from the revelations therein, but more on that later.

In any event, I was glad that I learned this news while the two of us were still awake. The alternative would have been turning on the PC in the morning, as is my daily ritual, learning what had transpired and then going straight into the bedroom to announce “Michael Jackson’s dead!”.
“Whu….” the response would have been.
“Michael Jackson’s dead. Heart attack.”
“Oh. S’too early. Talk ‘bout later. Sleepy. Mmnr zzzzz…”

And, of course, the impact would have been lost. As it stood, we spent the next half hour reminiscing. The first thing she said to me when I got back to the bedroom was “So what was your favourite joke, then?”
“What’s his favourite song?” I said.
“Don’t know.”
“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

During the 1980s this was about as bad as it got. Most of the jokes revolved around surgery or facial whitening or cheap puns on some of his song titles. It was some years later, when the trouble started, that the jokes took on a slightly macabre theme. They were generally even funnier when you told them to people who didn’t understand them, as Ewan once demonstrated when he informed a gullible Learning Support teacher that Jackson had attempted suicide:

“Miss, did you hear Michael Jackson tried to kill himself?”
“My word,” said Mrs Woolcroft. “That’s dreadful.”
“Yeah, he jumped off a bridge in Paris, landed in the Seine.”
“Really? How awful!”
“And the police found him about an hour later, bobbing up and down on a buoy.”
There was a pause, and Mrs Woolcroft said “Oh, the poor man.”

Between the two of them, Emily and Caroline managed to ascertain that the real victims in this tragedy were the paramedics who treated Jackson. “I mean, they followed procedure. Tilt head back, pinch nose. That’s when it all fell apart.”
“Oh God,” I said when we’d finished giggling. “It’s started.”
“It didn’t take long, did it?”
“There were a bunch of these jokes on standby. I don’t expect that the obituary programmes have been prepared yet, because this came out of the blue. But the gags were already written and ready. Besides, his nose is such an obvious target. It’s ripe for the picking.”

Jackson’s problem was that for the last thirty years of his life he was surrounded by a plethora of yes-men. This has the effect of getting him everything he wants but nothing that he actually needs, to the extent that he remained to all intents and purposes a boy trapped in a man’s body (and even that’s pushing it). The irony was that despite his supposedly ghastly childhood, with enough allegations of abuse to make even Dave Pelzer raise an eyebrow, he seemed to be on his way to becoming a sensible and relatively well-adjusted young man when Off The Wall was released. It was only when he started to believe his own hype that things began to fall apart, and over the years we witnessed a gradual downward spiral into eccentricity, then pomposity, then apparent insanity. Things didn’t get really bad until the turn of the millennium, but even before that the warning signs were there: you only have to examine the video for ‘You Are Not Alone’, as early as 1995, to see how dreadful he is starting to look, and his performance of ‘Earth Song’ at the following year’s Brit Awards is the stuff of legend.

It’s hard for me to explain why this deterioration was such a big deal to me personally, but to give it some context, a large proportion of my generation absolutely idolised the man. The songs were fresh and catchy, with lyrics you could not only sing along to but really believe in; the videos were always memorable (sometimes for the wrong reasons) and he could even give Fred Astaire a run for his money – to the extent that Astaire telephoned him the day after the Motown celebration to say that he was “a hell of a mover”. He had girls swooning, screaming, and seemed to possess a magical stage presence wherever he was. We watched Moonwalker and we wanted to be Michael Jackson.

All right, not all of us did. At the same time, for a while back there he was the embodiment of cool – you had to be able to strut to ‘Billie Jean’, master the moonwalk (I know he pinched it from the street kids but I sense that we’ll always associate it with him) – and you needed to be ‘Bad’ in order to get on, at least you did in our neighbourhood. (I didn’t grow up in a ghetto or anything, just a suburban street where we used to listen to ‘Smooth Criminal’ at full volume if our parents would let us.) Jokes circulated round the school like childhood crush rumours – what did Michael Jackson say when he met Princess Di? What did he say in the courtroom? (Who knew the prophetic insight of that one?) What did he say when his ear fell off? “It’s just another part of me…”

It seems funny to think of him as dead. To a considerable extent, I don’t really know who I’m supposed to be mourning. Jackson had become, in his later years, almost a parody of himself, albeit a grotesque and twisted one, and there was no longer any semblance of the man visible beneath the sunglasses and face mask. Bernie Taupin decided that Marilyn Monroe’s spirit shone far beyond her mortal life span, reassuring her in song that “your candle burned out long before your legend ever did”. The same may yet prove to be true of Jackson, but whatever you want to say about his hit roster, his career was over. Even when the ‘not guilty’ verdict was announced, amid a flurry of comeback predictions, I dismissed him as ‘Invincible? Hardly. Dangerous? Probably not. History? Definitely’.

I hold steadfast to that opinion, because even without the madness, his music had gone into terminal decline long before his heart gave out. Even History, his last half-decent swansong, seemed grotesquely over-inflated next to the Wall / Thriller / Bad trilogy. By the time ‘Rock My World’ came along, we were indifferent. By the time the Bashir documentary was aired, we were concerned. By 2005 and the trial, with its inevitable media circus, we were downright hostile. The seeds had been sown in the depiction of his unusual relationship with Gavin Arvizo, but personally I’ve never believed that Jackson was guilty of the allegations levelled at him. I don’t think he’s capable of the things of which he was accused; like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I have always found it difficult to imagine him in the context of anything sexual, purely because that’s not what we associate him with. More than this, as he seems to have failed to mature in an emotional sense, doesn’t it stand to reason that he wouldn’t know what to do anyway? He can lie about the surgery and the origins of his children but there is a wide-eyed innocence about him that you can’t just turn on for the cameras, and somehow he just doesn’t fit the abuser profile.

In fact, he doesn’t really fit the human being profile. In the first half of the documentary Michael comes across as pleasant, likeable, friendly, if extremely eccentric – a $6 million shopping spree was a case in point, as was his reaction when (during an examination of an Egyptian sarcophagus) Bashir asked him how he’d like to be buried. Jackson, without making eye contact, said “I wanna live forever” – delivered without a trace of irony. Here was a man, you felt, that was stuck in his own autistic world, partly out of choice and partly out of obligation. When Bashir visited him in his Las Vegas hotel suite and asked Michael why he had a gigantic motorised scooter in his room, his answer was that he liked to “drive round the lobby and corridors, late at night”. For an instant, I got a mental picture of the kid from The Shining, racing around the corridors of the Overlook, running to – or from – something unseen, but monstrous.

What’s curious about the Bashir documentary is the juxtaposition between old and new. I remember studying the video footage of Jackson as a young boy, performing ‘I Want You Back’ (in nightclub terms, the floor-filler to end all floor-fillers) with his siblings. Generally, when you’re faced with these old videos you can find some resemblance between the young and the contemporary, despite the differing appearances and hairstyles – a way of standing, an approach to a particular vocal passage, other idiosyncrasies. But as Bashir was beginning “to understand how his childhood might have affected him” (or words to that effect), I was struggling to maintain any kind of link between the vibrant and energetic child and the misshapen Kraken wearing the red shirt.

Certainly he didn’t seem fit to be a father. Even ignoring the balcony scene, his virtual force-feeding of the infant “Blanket” was painful, worrying and more than a little grotesque – one baby looking after another. That didn’t stop him from having children to stay. Whatever went on in that house (and amid the accusations of unreliable witnesses, altered narratives and alleged hush money we may never know), one thing was clear: by admitting that he slept in a bed with children – no matter how innocent his remarks may have been – he was doing himself no favours. In a post-Megan Kanka / Sarah Payne world, we have become almost as paranoid about child abuse as we can get without resorting to lynch mobs, and as I cringed with horror at Michael’s use of the words “It’s a wonderful thing – everyone should be doing it”, I could see the rows of lawyers, making copious notes on legal pads, the dollar signs burning behind their eyes.

But despite the obvious cash incentives you still need to investigate these things, particularly where there’s something tangible. I may be trusting but I’m not an idiot, and my former admiration for the man and his music does not extend to blind devotion. It’s feasible that in this country he’d have been probed long ago, but let’s not get into logistics. Either way, once the documentary had aired, and legal proceedings instigated, his career – regardless of the verdict – was more or less over. I don’t know if it was the baby, the surgery denials (people do not just “turn white” like that; my aunt has a similar condition and it’s patchy) or the abuse allegations. I suspect it was a combination of all three.

Following the trial, Jackson disappeared into the wings again, resurfacing only to answer enquiries about his financial state, or tentatively speak via his P.R. department of glorious comebacks (to much scepticism and many a raised eyebrow). There would be occasional reports of visits to Bahrain and the odd lawsuit. And the next thing we know, he’s back, albeit in a lacklustre, thirty-second performance of ‘We Are The World’, which is apparently a precursor to a triumphant return to the stage, in a tour that is booked and sold out and then postponed (blacklisting him on the O2 insurance list) and then, finally, cancelled altogether.

That’s what bothers me. It seems awfully convenient, this sudden unloading of burdens just a few short weeks from a tour that realistically we didn’t think would ever happen. The official party line is that the fifty-year-old singer has pushed himself to the limit over the past few months, training and exercising and preparing himself for a triumphant return, all in the wake of ongoing family concerns about his general health. And now, of course, he’s dead, as a result of over-medication and the simple fact that he pushed himself too hard. Am I the only one here who finds this just a mite suspicious? The timing, in its own way, is quietly perfect: close enough to the tour for the conspiracy theorists to spot a connection and be branded nutters, but not so close as to arouse the suspicions of the populace at large.

Yes, we heard he’d been ill, but had he really? Could this not in its own way be another stunt – not one to raise his public profile, but one to get him out of the limelight entirely? Should we in fact blaming his allegedly dire financial situation on a reallocation of funds, perhaps to a goat farm in West Fiji, where he is heading even as I put finger to key this afternoon? Put another way, I think it’s quite plausible that he’s been sending his money out there in preparation for his retirement from public life, following one last tour – a tour that realistically could never take place given that the man has become increasingly frail and unreliable over the years, for whatever reason. Cashing in his chips right before the fact would cause a great many people to cry ‘foul’!, as they did in a memorable Carlsberg advert when a harassed CEO, faced with the prospect of having to admit that they’d been exporting lager from Denmark, faked a heart attack rather than face any further questions.

As it stands, however, this timing is far better – they had until the eleventh hour to solve problems and then, realising that the obstacles were insurmountable, resorted to ‘plan b’, which consisted of getting him out of the country and under the knife, before living out the rest of his days in obscurity, and hopefully a bit of peace and quiet. Am I being horribly insensitive? Probably. It’s just that in my experience things generally aren’t quite this neat. And if nothing else the astronomical record sales that are sure to follow will go some way towards clearing his extensive debts. When you’re an artist of any sort, dying is always a great career move.

It’s a moot point, really, because even if he’s still alive he has the money to stay hidden – and to be honest I think that would be best for all concerned. We have lamented for his career for almost a decade, and the loss of the man himself, whilst significant, carries less impact than that of an artist whom you felt still had something to contribute. Jackson’s death – whether real or staged – has, at least, relieved me of the burden of having to one day explain to my children why the skeletal, pasty-faced white woman who has once again made the headlines was formerly one of Daddy’s childhood heroes. I’ll just stick to the seventies and eighties and perhaps throw in a video or two from Dangerous for good measure, and avoid all subsequent archive footage. They’ll never know.

But we will. And we will grieve for him, in our own ways, whether it is via the sycophantic lamentation on a hundred and one news websites, the sudden mass consumption of his back catalogue (according to reports, at time of writing the entire top fifteen slots on the Amazon music chart are occupied by Michael Jackson) or the simple act of going home and playing Thriller at full volume. The relative anonymity of the Internet has made human expression that much easier – this morning the BBC’s Have Your Say file was at 8,000 comments and rising by the hour. Interestingly they seemed to have filtered the negative remarks, which is more than can be said for the Sun: I gave up after the third page and the fourteenth time that someone had written “ROT IN HELL YOU KIDDY FIDDLER”.

As for me, I recall the comment in a 2003 edition of the Sun that “records like ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’ will never sound as good again, now that they are tainted in this way” – a sentiment that I’d have to disagree with, just like I disagree with most of the Sun’s journalistic ‘opinion’. As far as I can see, the early records sound even better these days because they remind us of better times – a period when Jackson was a shining beacon instead of a fading (and now entirely burned out) star, when other groups tried to sound like him instead of trying to avoid sounding like him, and when you really thought that with Michael at the helm we could Heal the World and Make It A Better Place. Regardless of what he may have done since, and regardless of the fact that at the time of his death he hadn’t written a really good song since 1991, the earlier material remains a telling reminder of who he once was.

But we watched him slide down that path towards insanity and final isolated seclusion, and it disturbed us, because whatever I can get away with telling my own sons, there are still a whole heap of children who are the same age now that I was when he was at his peak who will in all likelihood not understand what I once saw in him. However long I’ve had to get used to it, it’s the decline and fall from grace that’s astonished and upset me the most – the then-and-now photographs, the path that led from wackiness and eccentricity (“Poor people are crazy, Jack. I’m eccentric”) to out-and-out lunacy – all this is somehow far more disturbing than the fact that he once had a full-sized amusement park in his back yard. You listen to ‘Billie Jean’ – a song that he never bettered, as far as I’m concerned – and you’re swept away to 1983 when everything was good, and he shone, and was an untouchable god. And then you hear ‘Earth Song’ and you remember the Brits fiasco, and you realise that as much as you’d hate to admit it, this is the same guy, the same person, your former hero. “And so,” as Alfieri remarks at the very end of A View From The Bridge, “I mourn him – I admit it – with a certain…alarm.”

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 25

June 29, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

U2 – The Joshua Tree
U2 – Achtung Baby
U2 – Rattle and Hum
U2 – The Unforgettable Fire
Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain – Precious Little
U2 – All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Soundtrack – U-Turn

Identity Crisis

June 29, 2009

———

“So who did you listen to today?”
“David Bowie,” she said, rhyming the ‘Bow’ to rhyme with ‘cow’.
“Right.”
“I didn’t listen to Michael Jackson. I assume that’s who was on the other CD.”
“No, that’s Bjork. You didn’t think that was Michael Jackson on the cover, did you?”
“Only briefly. You can see what I mean.”
I could.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 26

July 6, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

David Bowie – Hunky Dory
Bill Bailey – Ultimate Collection Ever
Soundtrack – Batman
The Beatles – Yellow Submarine
Bjork – Debut
Bon Jovi – Slippery When Wet
Dave Brubeck – Time Out
The Beatles – Let It Be…Naked
James Blunt – Back To Bedlam
David Bowie – The Singles Collection (Disc One)
The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
Billy Bragg – Must I Paint You A Picture: The Essential Billy Bragg (Disc One)
Blue Oyster Cult – Champions of Rock
Kate Bush – Aerial: A Sky Of Honey

He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy

July 6, 2009

———

Last Monday, I broke the rules.

Actually, it wasn’t a break as such; more of a bend. There have been a few of them. Back in early February, for example, when the Js were still very much in hibernation in the depths of the hat, I listened to ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ in order to road test the speakers now that I’d finally managed to turn off the Windows volume limiter – because it was with that song that I had noticed the most obvious dampening. I’ll also admit that our stereo has been graced by the occasional compilation CD, but these have been few and far between. All things considered I think we’ve done remarkably well over the past six months. Besides, as I recall, the command to listen only to artists of that letter is prefixed by “As far as possible”. I felt, under the circumstances, that the loss I was now feeling as a result of Michael Jackson’s death was threatening to swamp me, and that to ignore it – as I had done for a couple of days – was simply no longer possible at all.

I’m rambling, and not in a good way. In any case, I threw caution to the wind and ignored the fact that we’d drawn ‘B’ the previous evening. At just after 8:25 a.m. I was bombing down the road to the business park, as a gospel choir bellowed “What about us?” at full volume. By the time I slowed down for the curve that takes you to the roundabout, Michael was Screaming, and I was in tears.

‘Earth Song’ is one of those songs that, like ‘Umbrella’ and ‘My Life’ before it, I appear to have hated for years without really knowing why. I’ve discussed the concept of the musical epiphany in a previous entry and have no particular desire to retread old ground, but suffice to say that in this instance the moment was probably linked with the song’s final detachment from its accompanying video. I’m one of those people who grew up with MTV, or at least its British equivalent: by the time I came of age musically the video had reached an art form, which was at least partially thanks to Guns ‘N’ Roses and their overblown concept films for ‘November Rain’ and ‘Don’t Cry’. We watched Slash turn away from Axl’s wedding and slouch off out the church, before strumming his guitar in the middle of a windswept desert, and we decided that in a few years time it would be remembered as iconic.

But it was Michael Jackson who’d paved the way for such cinematic indulgence back in the 1980s, whether it was turning into a badly animated werewolf (‘Thriller’), enacting sado-masochistic leather fetish fantasies with Wesley Snipes (‘Bad’) or re-enacting West Side Story (‘Beat It’). In November 1991, British parents settled down with their children to watch the eleven-minute premiere of Jackson’s new video, ‘Black Or White’, and spent the remainder of that week’s Top of the Pops wriggling and squirming in their seats, anxious and uncomfortable on a number of levels. For one things, there’s the apparent hypocrisy of the lyrics, which discuss the notion of racial equality – this from a man who had apparently spent years showing the rest of the world that it damn well does matter whether you’re black or white. (Jackson claims it on a skin complaint, which is a commendable excuse but also complete bollocks. My aunt suffers from the same condition, and it isn’t all over: it’s patchy. If he’d wanted to change things to match, and if race really wasn’t an issue to him, why did he have the rest of his skin lightened, rather than the appropriate patches darkened? Mind you, we’re also expected to believe that he never had his nose done.)

Then there was the masturbation. You can call it the “interpretation of the animal instinct of a black panther” if you really want to – Jackson apparently did – but the moment when he unzips his fly and rubs himself suggestively before re-zipping really doesn’t leave a great deal to the imagination. Parents also objected to the seemingly random acts of destruction and violence that saw Jackson destroy the roof of a car and several windows with some conveniently placed rubbish bins. This was, in fact, a stance on racism, given that the windows were digitally emblazoned with racist graffiti (‘KKK Rules’ and ‘No More Wetbacks’ among them) – but let’s be honest, who noticed that? We were all too busy watching Michael jerking off.

Personally, I’m of the conviction that the full length video – whilst undoubtedly indulgent and overblown – is something of a miniature masterpiece, encompassing as it does all manner of cultures, albeit in a mildly stereotypical vein (ooh, Cossacks! Bollywood! African natives hunting a lion!) It also contains some of the best dancing that Jackson ever committed to film: whatever your ethical hang-ups about the panther sequence, the showmanship and pace of that segment is absolutely incredible, building to a frenetic climax (again, on a number of levels). Even so, it’s not something you’d want to watch with children, who would presumably ask all number of embarrassing questions, like “What’s he doing now, Daddy?”. It should be no surprise to you that when I showed ‘Black or White’ to my sons yesterday morning, we decided to gloss over that chapter.

Jackson was always at his best when he was singing, dancing or doing anything that didn’t require him having to act. The acting was atrocious. Moonwalker was perhaps the most obvious example – that’s a whole entry in itself, and one that I’m not going to write today – but shades of his inability to deliver dialogue can be seen in ‘Thriller’, and to a greater extent in the eighteen-minute version of ‘Bad’, in which Martin Scorsese delivers a gritty New York ‘hood, full of rumbling subways and cold evenings spent huddled around oil drum fires. Jackson’s protagonist fails to connect with the homeboys he left behind when he was sent (presumably on a scholarship) to a posh public school, but the stilted, uncomfortable atmosphere has less to do with the cultural chasm that has come between them, and more to do with the fact that Michael really doesn’t know what he’s doing in these earlier segments. It’s only when the song itself begins that the panther is truly let out of the bag, as the film leaps to colour and the King of Pop relaxes in the role with which he is evidently most familiar: energetic, angst-ridden dancing.

Reams have been written about these earlier videos, and I didn’t want to turn this into a review paper, so let’s get back to ‘Earth Song’. It was just as I was pulling into the office car park, as we were told to “Stop pressuring me / Stop fucking with me” (dear God, did Michael Jackson just swear?) that I realised the connection between my erstwhile hatred of the song and its accompanying visuals. Because the problem is that ‘Earth Song’ happens to be a terrific number that’s saddled with a rotten video: the one where Jackson seemed to be have finally given in to his own hype. Images of a dead and decaying earth and war-torn Eastern Europe are followed by Michael’s miraculous (not to mention ludicrous) healing ceremony, in which he grasps the trunks of the tallest trees in the forest and manages to reverse time in a manner not seen since Superman flew around the world backwards in 1978.

If the video was bad enough, the 1996 Brit Award performance was even worse, and the cause of an argument I had online last week. You remember the story. Jackson was due to receive an ‘Artist of a Generation’ award, and his P.R. people had given a ridiculous, sycophantically fawning speech for Bob Geldof to read before introducing him, and with which Geldof was clearly uncomfortable. Earlier in the evening, (or perhaps later, I can never remember), Jackson appeared onstage performing ‘Earth Song’. So preposterous was the setup and execution that Jarvis Cocker, who’d presumably enjoyed the complimentary champagne, got up on stage and stuck his (thankfully clothed) rear end in Jackson’s direction, before being removed from the scene by security. Cue much tabloid scandal (although the gutterpress did, at least, eventually admit that they’d backed the wrong horse) as disgruntled parents announced that the Pulp lout had “ruined the occasion” for the stage school brats who took part.

Let’s leave aside the obvious ethical inconsistencies of complaining about the behaviour of a Sheffield socialist when you have allowed Michael Jackson to babysit your children, and actually think about this. Because over a decade later it’s clear that the memory hasn’t abated – as I discovered just a few days ago when a new thread was started on the Sun discussion forums, criticising the presence of Cocker on Question Time. It was an invitation, according to the thread’s originator (who will remain anonymous simply because he’s a semi-literate idiot who I don’t want to humiliate), that took place “simply because of what he done to Jackson”. Never mind the fact that he was invited before Jackson’s passing – it was a blatant publicity stunt and the BBC should be ashamed of themselves.

Mr X also took issue with Jarvis’ atheism in the light of his disapproval of Jackson’s Messiah complex, which he saw as a contradiction in terms: “Let me get this straight; you’re not religious but you took offence to this – or was it more to do with the fact Jackson’s music has more of an impact on people’s lives than yours? The majority of his answers proved he is just a …..COMMON PEOPLE.”

I’ve cleaned up the spelling and grammar; it really was appalling. I have no problem arguing with people who can’t spell, because literacy does not go hand in hand with intelligence. (Hence the joke about not hiring a dyslexic dwarf, because it’s not big and it’s not clever, really isn’t funny.) I do have a problem arguing with people who apparently have their own agenda and who won’t listen to reason. I should have known that this would go nowhere, but of course I waded in, pointing out that “Lack of a belief in God doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be OK with someone who is clearly in possession of a Messiah complex – which Jackson was that night…the Brit performance and the fiasco that surrounded it was an utterly revolting spectacle, and Jarvis’ very open display of contempt merely echoed the thoughts and feelings of a good number of the audience and the viewing public.“

“Although I agree with what you say,” came the response, “I’ve seen the Jackson performance and he was not trying to be God. Jackson was just an easy target and if he has a problem with that then I’m sure Kanye West is more of a threat to him because he calls himself the black Jesus, and rapper Nas calls himself God’s son.”

“Context is everything,” I replied. “I’m sure that Jarvis will take up any particular gripes with Kanye West. As for Nas, well, those who believe in God sometimes claim to be children of God. Not necessarily the same as calling yourself Jesus. It depends, though; does he refer to himself as God’s son, or the son of God? The first is OK, but the use of ‘the’ implies setting yourself apart for divinity.”

Part of me wondered whether this chap perhaps had a better recollection of the Brit performance than I did, so I went back and watched it again. And all my worst fears came to light, in a heartbeat. It is simply excruciating. There’s the outstretched arms Jesus-on-the-cross pose, for one thing. Then there are the war-torn refugee children, who appear to be actively turning to worship Jackson as he rises into the air on that crane, as if pleading with him to save them or heal them. This is best viewed in the context of the aforementioned video, in which – as we discussed – he appears to restore the Earth to its former glory by stomping on the ground.

Here’s the best bit. First he strolls down the ramp touching the outstretched limbs of the suffering children as he passes. And then he pulls off his coat and stands there in the middle of the stage, clad entirely in white, arms once more outstretched, as the miraculously healed children appear stage left and right dressed in brightly clad garments, to embrace him. He kisses the head of a rabbi. Seriously, how could you watch this and not get the idea he was setting himself up as some sort of Messiah? What’s ironic is that this overt display of Messianic tendencies occurred after Jarvis’ stage protest. Whether he knew what was coming was anyone’s guess, but even if he was a little premature at rushing on, his anger turned out to be quite justified.

If it sounds like I’m setting Mr X up for a fall, it’s largely because his views appear to be fairly commonplace. The comments on YouTube are often far more entertaining than the videos themselves, and some of the Brit award remarks are a riot. The thread in which we were discussing Jackson seemed to grind to something of a halt after my last comment (although I’m sure it’s not because I won the argument but simply because people got bored), but not before another user expressed her conviction that “it was Jarvis that had the Jesus complex flaming going up there on stage and deliberately interrupting Michael’s well rehearsed stage act and music…How totally dare he do that…Who did he think he was…arrogant pathetic guy.”

But here’s the bottom (no pun intended) line:

a) It was thirteen years ago
b) Jarvis was in any case probably drunk, and
c) He’s already said he regrets his actions.

The protest didn’t hurt Jackson’s career, Jarvis’ reputation or any of the children involved (despite what the press said). It was just a bit of rock ‘n’ roll social commentary, the sort of behaviour for which the Brit awards is renowned (look it up). Perhaps it’s time we moved on.

So: Jackson-as-Christ, then. The song itself contains echoes of this, but the video is ‘Earth Song’ amplified: implying, as it does, that the best way to save the world is to leave it to Michael Jackson. It’s a far cry from the sentiment expressed in ‘Man In The Mirror’, which does at least suggest, as the hot dog vendor told the disgruntled Hare Krishna who’d just given him a fiver, that change must come from within. Instead, Michael is now Saint Michael, a notion popularised by a small minority of fanatics who believed that Jackson was the living embodiment of the archangel, who, according to the book of Daniel, was “the great prince who protects your people”.

The pomposity and sincerity in Jackson’s vocal performance is on a par with that of Bono, who was mocked by the Edge during the recording of ‘Pride’ when he appeared to be taking things a little too seriously. Jackson himself has been a target for satire on many occasions, but one of the more memorable turns was an episode of Britain’s Got Talent, when he was ridiculed by a stuffed monkey. For all that, the song itself is immaculately produced, building from a slow and tinkly piano introduction into a swelling call-and-response coda that seems to go on for eons but which never seems to become dull.

It’s unfortunate, when viewed musically, that the video for ‘Earth Song’ – and the media furore that surrounded the Brits – has become something of a Marley’s chain, at least in the UK. It happens occasionally: the song gets so entangled with its video, or some other aspect (as in the ‘legendary’ live performances that are sometimes remembered for all the wrong reasons) that the two art forms – music and video – and seemingly permanently fused. It happened to ‘Hello’, which, to anyone who’s seen the video, is always going to be about a creepy middle-aged stalker relentlessly pursuing a blind girl, who has her revenge by sculpting a large monkey, proclaiming “This is how I see you”. If it can happen to Lionel Richie, it can happen to Michael Jackson, and it happened to ‘Earth Song’. Free of the shackles and constraints of the video, it’s a masterpiece, one that caused everyone in their cars to throw open the windows and turn the volume up to eleven when it was played on Radio One the day after Jackson had died. Perhaps that’s how we ought to remember it, although if the antics of my friends online are anything to go by, I somehow doubt that we will.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 27

July 12, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses
Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A.
Simon & Garfunkel – The Sounds of Silence
Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska
Supertramp – The Very Best of Supertramp
Simon & Garfunkel – The Definitive
Simon & Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme
Bruce Springsteen – Greatest Hits
Sigur Ros – Takk (Disc One)
Neil Sedaka – Classically Sedaka
Bruce Springsteen – The Ghost of Tom Joad

The Road Ahead

July 13, 2009

———

“So I had an idea.”
“Mm-hmm?”

It’s that mid-evening patch between the post-bedtime cleanup and Daniel’s last feed before sleeping. The two of us are perched on the sofa. Actually, ‘perched’ is the wrong word. I am holed up at one end in my usual place next to the lounge wall; Emily is stretched, cat-like, across the cushions.

“I thought about next year. My idea is that we could listen to whatever CD we want, on a daily basis, but then that’s it. We’re not allowed to listen to that one again for the rest of 2010.”
Emily contemplates this, and then says “I’m not sure about that. I don’t think it would help me actually listen to much. Right now, I can’t choose from the whole selection. I prefer having a restriction in place.”

She’s right, dammit. I have a horrible feeling that I’m boxing myself into a routine, and that we will have to do this again next year. Six months down the line, part of me feels restricted – knowing, for example, that due to my own self-imposed set of rules I’m not going to be able to listen the Beatles’ Love until January. But part of me knows that the next time I do listen to it I’m going to be savouring every moment. I glance at calendars hoping that a ‘K’ will come up soon so that I can listen to ‘The Angry Mob’ while I’m still feeling politicised. I pray that when we’re travelling to Pembrokeshire next weekend we’ll be able to do so with a broad selection, which means drawing anything except ‘Y’.

There are two factors at work here. The first is the sense of delay. Part of my procrastination in choosing records to play stemmed from the knowledge that I could always listen to them another time. In thinking about this I recall a 1983 TV movie starring a young Sarah Jessica Parker, years before she hung out with social climbing nymphomaniacs in Manhattan or started shooting bad perfume commercials. The movie in question was called Somewhere Tomorrow and was a third-rate love story / ghost story about a teenage girl who falls in love with Tom Shea, who may or may not be dead. In one of the more memorable sequences, the moping Sarah comes across a little philosophy in her father’s journal: “The ultimate secret in life is the sure knowledge of death, for without it mankind would not strive to leave his mark upon the earth”.

I’m thinking about the paradigm I’m about to construct with this and realise that when put in these terms it really is very silly, but I do think there’s an element of truth: I had no urgency to choose particular songs because I knew that I’d have the same opportunity again tomorrow. Applying a finite time frame – a deadline, of sorts, after which the CD is once more off limits – means I’m far more likely to listen to a song that I know I like. The danger attached to this ideology is that my playlists, though by necessity varied, will nonetheless become predictable – and indeed I’ve seen evidence of this throughout the year, when for the sake of listening to as many songs that I like within this compressed time frame, I’ve been more likely to pick up a Greatest Hits compilation than a slightly more obscure studio album. Resisting the temptation to do this has been an active and sometimes difficult process, and there have been times when I’ve skirted dangerously close into commercial radio territory, seemingly eschewing the unknown and dangerous in favour of the conventional and predictable.

Connected with this is the sense of savouring the moment, and this comes back again to the Beatles. Because there are some songs that I hold sacred: certain pieces of music that are designed to be treated with reverence. I will never forget the review of Johnny Cash’s Unearthed box set in Mojo (or it might have been Q), in which it was established that this was not music to have on as background when you’re driving, or in the kitchen at parties: it was to be listened to with reverence and respect, demanding as it did your full and undivided attention.

There are two blog entries waiting to be written here: my love affair with Cash (which I’ll save for later in the year when we draw the C’s), and the inevitable monologue about my musical preferences when on the road. This may seem a trivial subject but it’s mentioned because I tend to listen to music far more carefully when I’m trapped in the vehicle with it, and have no distractions save the autonomous job of keeping my eyes on the road (for the same reasons, Emily and I have some of our best conversations when we’re on long car journeys, particularly once the boys are asleep). In any event, I would dispute the notion that the Unearthed set is unsuitable for driving, because if I’m alone in the car I’ll inevitably have the volume up high and my brain devoting a good deal of its powers of concentration on the music and what it’s doing – and all while maintaining a safe speed and respectable stopping distance from the vehicle in front. Who says men can’t multitask?

There’s a degree of relativity at stake. At the one extreme there are records that I absolutely must play at full volume to enjoy properly. ‘Comfortably Numb’ is one example. Arvo Part’s ‘Credo’, discussed at length a while back, is another. So is ‘Africa’, reminding me as it does of speedy jaunts up the A14 to Cambridge in the summer of 2003, the late-evening sun casting long shadows across the bonnet of my Corsa, as I contemplate the lunacy of “sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti” (which you can’t even say, let alone fit into a convoluted melody).

At the other extreme are the songs that I’m happy to have as background: this includes most jazz, particularly bebop. Jazz formed the soundtrack to my student years and coffee-fuelled late night letter-writing sessions of no real consequence, and I don’t have to really be listening to it in order to enjoy it. Somewhere between the two extremes are the records which I can enjoy as background or as a fully participatory experience. Curiously enough I count Meat Loaf among this number, but that’s largely because when it’s being played as background it’ll be when Emily is sitting in the passenger seat of the Zafira, and it’s always quite fun to work out when she will suddenly stop whatever she’s doing to bellow “YOU TOOK THE WORDS RIGHT OUT OF MY MOUTH / OH, IT MUST HAVE BEEN WHILE YOU WERE KISSING ME…”

Here’s the thing. The restrictions that the hat has imposed have meant that pretty much every listening experience I’ve had this year has been meaningful in a way that I’d not expected at all. Songs have taken on new meaning and I’ve understood lyrics that I’ve never before been able to grasp, presumably because I’d never really listened to them. I’ve saturated my day-to-day life with music to an extent that I hadn’t visited since I was a student, but have experienced no adverse side effects or desire to stop the noise. I want more noise. I want to hear things. And when I do hear things, they sound incredible.

I can remember Bill mentioning something similar: I don’t recall whether it was in the book, or in his introductory talk when we attended a performance of The 17 in August 2006, or perhaps both. He describes going on a year-long hiatus during which he listened to nothing but the A’s: he experienced a lot of wonderful music but also a lot of junk. And then he describes listening only to music that had been recorded over the last twelve months, and how that in itself was on many levels curiously unsatisfying. And then he talked about the euphoria of visiting his shed and listening to Pet Sounds for the first time in months, and about how amazing it sounded. The other week I tried the same thing and found I experienced a similar effect – diluted somewhat by the presence of two small boys who were arguing over a pirate ship, but there was something there nonetheless.

Bill subsequently gave every CD he owned to Oxfam, and while my admiration for the man runs deep I’m afraid I hold my material possessions too dear. I’m the rich man who cannot get through the eye of the needle. (And that sets Bill up as the Messiah, which I know he’d hate.) Even so, there may yet be something in this musical Lent, this self-enforced period of abstention. Perhaps that’s why No Music Day – although it was ridiculed by a populace who simply didn’t understand it or the man who came up with the idea – makes an awful lot of sense. If Joni Mitchell posited that “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”, it stands to reason that when it comes back, you appreciate it with a renewed sense of vigour. Perhaps that’s the point of The 17, or if not the point then at least a possible constructive use – not to destroy the concept of recorded music entirely, but simply to make us hear it properly by having to do without it for a while. I wonder what Bill would say if I asked him. Presumably shrug his shoulders and say “Maybe”.

Legs, bums and opposable thumbs

July 14, 2009

———

Friday. 7:30 a.m. in the morning (thank you, Mike Oldfield), and I’m watching the video for ‘You Can Call Me Al’ with Thomas. Chevy Chase theatrically mimes to Paul Simon’s jaunty discourse on life, uncertainty and the concept of being soft in the middle (seriously, it should have been called ‘Days of Whine and Neuroses’. Simon himself is reduced to playing the pennywhistle and dancing a bit, an extra in his own video. Thomas is jiggling on my lap, something he does quite a lot when we’re watching MTV. Then he points at the screen and says “A ba bah-bu bah ba ba gab a ba drum.”

In the second verse of ‘Thank You For The Music’, Agnetha suggests that she (or at least the character she was playing) could sing long before she could talk. This is a horrible cliché but in the case of Thomas it’s actually true. This has very little to do with any in-built musical talent – Thomas was simply a late starter as far as conversation was concerned. Instead he would mumble coherent sentences, complete with clauses and grammar, that were in a seemingly made-up language with the occasional word of English thrown in, as witnessed above. He would point to the fridge and shout “Bah gi gee fa ba ba ba buh bah juice”. It was like being in an episode of The Fast Show.

These days, he babbles a little less and talks a little more, and while our dialogue is not yet up to Brechtian standards we do, at least, manage to more or less understand each other. While I’ve spent a long time trying to understand his speech, I do at least have few problems identifying the songs he sings. The opening song from Postman Pat was, I think, the first tune that we could actively recognise; he now likes Frère Jacques and the theme from Scooby Doo. There are few words to speak of but he drops in occasional vowel sounds to surprise me. So even though we have yet to really make much progress on the spoken words front, we do at least get to sing songs. It would sometimes be nice to have him understand what you’re saying, but you don’t get to choose.

It’s funny how he differs from his brother, who was speaking coherently at a considerably earlier age but who took time to catch up in other areas. In thinking about this, and the idea of child development, I’m reminded of a diary entry I wrote three years ago, when Joshua was half the age that Thomas is now. It’s particularly telling when you consider the remarks I make about CD towers – one aspect of infancy in which Josh and Thomas (and, I presume, all other children in the world) have been absolutely identical. Flashback to July 2006…

——

A few weeks ago, Emily expressed a mild sense of annoyance that Josh hadn’t done anything new for a while. Watching him develop is great fun but after mastering crawling and then pulling himself up, he seemed to reach a temporary hiatus of sorts, apparently associated more with laziness than an inability to do anything. Walking was a theoretical possibility, but why bother when crawling was faster and Daddy can pick you up whenever you want? I can empathise with this: I think if most people had the option of an enormous, twenty-foot giant taking them to the supermarket or home from the pub, very few of us would actually walk anywhere.

You’re anxious to view your child as your own and avoid comparisons with other children. Nonetheless it’s difficult to avoid falling into the trap of competitive parents: that of comparing your child’s abilities to those of his peers (i.e. your friends’ kids) and wondering why he’s unable to speak / swim / paint by numbers. There’s a fine line between pushy parent and neglectful parent – the one who is overly concerned about his child’s development versus the one who doesn’t interact enough. Similarly, you’re equally likely to revel in your own family triumphs (in private of course), typically by singling out the child of someone you don’t really like very much, and generally with the words “Stephen hasn’t managed to do that yet!”. You do this simply because you figure they’re probably doing the same thing, and therefore it doesn’t matter.

In any event, if Josh’s progress had slowed for a while, it seems to have come on in leaps and bounds over the past month. Actually, ‘leaps and bounds’ is probably the wrong choice of words. ‘Taking great strides’ is more appropriate. All right, little ones. Toddling ones, to be precise. After spending six months crawling everywhere, Josh has realised that not only is walking easy and quite fun, but it actually enables him to get somewhere as fast (if not faster) than crawling, once his speed is up. He’s been able to do it for a while, but the actual transition from fifty per cent walking to about eighty five per cent occurred, Emily tells me, on Tuesday, when he realised that all his ante-natal friends were doing it. You don’t like to think of children that young as experiencing peer pressure, but it obviously happens. At least it was something constructive, rather than having him take up smoking.

It was genuinely wonderful watching him learn: gentle progression from sliding along caterpillar-like to a fast, rhythmic crawl (which I have to admit I’m going to miss quite a lot – it reminded me of Alien 3) to the pulling-yourself-up phase (assisting objects included chairs, the bed, Mummy’s legs, and coffee tables containing mugs of steaming liquid). And then those final, blissful steps along the carpet, the two of us standing nearby – one counting steps, the other ready to catch him if he fell. The other week he managed thirty-two in a church in rural Yorkshire, and another eight running. Part of the problem has been a desire to run before he can walk, in a quite literal sense. A sign on the church door read “Ye are treading where the saints have trod”, which made me grin.

It may be sweet, but unfortunately the desire to move about extends beyond a few steps across the lawn: I’m hoping that it’s just a weather-related passing phase, but this week he’s also developed a tendency to wake up obscenely early in the morning, and it seems the only thing that makes him happy at this point (apart from the reassuring familiarity of Mummy’s nipple) is to crawl around on the bed. This largely entails sitting on my face, elbowing my ribcage or sticking his finger into my eye. He can, at least, work out how to climb off the end of the bed without falling down, but he doesn’t actually have any real desire to do this, despite our constant reassurances that there are toys on the other side of the room, or even (on occasion) the odd game of ‘fetch’, whereupon his cuddly monkey (surgically attached all night, ignored as soon as he wakes up) is hurled into the door frame in the hopes that he’ll go and retrieve it, leaving us to untangle the duvet.

And I do wish he’d keep still when I’m changing him. Lying down and wriggling the way he does is symptomatic of someone who would rather be doing something else – every second that you spend on your changing mat is time that could be spent chasing the cat, or eating the grass in the garden. I’ll sing to him, and we’ve tried giving him toys or mobiles, with some success, but when he’s in the mood for dancing there is not a distraction on this planet that’s going to keep him still. Predictably, the wriggling factor is increased along with the contents of his nappy – i.e. the more faeces he’s deposited, the more he’s determined to put his hand in it or (better still) rub it all along the changing table. If the hand gets down to his exposed bottom then that’s it: it’s all over his ankles, legs, face, clothing, and usually all over me as well. I’ve found that the best way of preventing a faecal disaster, if he’s in a particularly wriggly mood, is to grab the poor child’s arms and legs in one hand while I wipe with the other. He lies there like a trussed chicken and screams blue murder, but at least the bathroom stays relatively clean.

Joshua’s newly-discovered skill of walking is also of paramount importance in his ongoing game of ‘Short Attention Syndrome’, or ‘Guess My Mischief’ to use its alternative title. Said game consists of child sitting playing, quite happily, in a corner of whatever room you happen to occupy at the time. All of a sudden, completely unprompted, he will get up and immediately slink off to another area of the house. The goal, of course, is to get you to follow him. Just how long you can stay wherever you are without following him is dependent on a) how comfortable you were, and b) your sense of hearing. I generally tend to leave it until I hear the first crash; that’s when I know he’s in the middle of doing something he shouldn’t be.

As you’d guess, that happens quite a lot. People seem to describe this phase as “being into everything”, but it wasn’t until I was a parent that I realised precisely what that meant. And to be honest, it’s not entirely accurate: what it should be referred to is “being into everything that you’re not supposed to have”. This means that you can put Joshua in a room full of toys with a butcher’s knife in the inconspicuous corner of a dining table, way out of sight and out of reach, and take bets that he’ll go for the knife before he’s been in there thirty seconds. (No, of course we haven’t tested that theory.) Nothing is sacred anymore: the cat’s water dish doubles as a finger bowl, the apricots in the vegetable rack are mauled and nibbled before Mummy can get a look in, and we no longer need the shredder – we just leave confidential paperwork strewn across the floor and then he takes care of the rest.

A lot of this is harmless, and the stuff that isn’t can be avoided with simple preventative measures: child locks on the video cabinet, or moving the water dish out of the way whenever he’s headed for the kitchen. However, certain things are off-limits, and we’re currently trying to impart this knowledge to our son. This is less easy than it sounds, primarily because while he now understands the meaning of the word ‘no’ (or according to the books he should, anyway) getting him to actually obey you is a completely different kettle of fish. The other day we saw him heading for the drinks cabinet (which is hidden behind a curtain, I should add) for the umpteenth time, emerging with a huge grin on his face and a bottle of Grenadine in his left hand. Reprimands had no effect (unless you count turning round with more grins and an expression that said “I’m over here, what are you gonna do?” as an effect) so we put back the bottle and brought him away, whereupon he promptly crawled off again. The fourth time it happened I said “Joshua, NO!” in a suitably loud and assertive voice, and then gave his hand a slap – not hard, but hard enough to reiterate that he wasn’t supposed to do it. Cue another grin – and almost immediately he began to clap his hands together with great enthusiasm, whereupon I gave up, and fetched a couple of glasses so that Mummy and Daddy could drink the Grenadine.

Josh’s favourite habit, however, is pulling out CDs. I can live with that. Never mind the fact that I spent all of Holy Week 2004 amalgamating them in alphabetical order, and then another week earlier this year reordering and reclassifying them so that we knew exactly where things were. I know it’s anal, but I take great pride in being as anal as possible, so I don’t particularly care. What surprises me was the speed at which I adapted to having them jumbled up: I think it was having to replace them in the storage tower for the seventeenth time in the space of a week that pushed me over that particular edge. There comes a point where you no longer care if your Divine Comedy albums are arranged precisely chronologically, or the folk compendium is stacked from CD1 to CD3 going downwards, or that Kate Rusby comes before Show of Hands and not after it. You’re more concerned with getting them back on the shelves before someone treads on them, and given that it’s a multitasking thing (i.e. something you do in the thirty seconds you have before running back to turn off the bath taps) you tend to get a little less obsessive about ordering and classification. I will admit that I spent fifteen minutes on Tuesday evening sorting out Jimmy Hendrix, Billy Joel and Elton John, but in my defence I spent most of that period on hold to BT, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

It’s nearly always the towers in the hall: one either side of the bookcase. The left one contains folk and C-D in our rock / pop files, and the right one contains our modest collection of dance albums and all the cover CDs I’ve collected off Q and Mojo over the years. The tower’s design means they’re easy to insert and easy to take out, which is presumably why he does it with such alarming regularity. Unfortunately he can only reach the bottom two thirds of the tower, leaving the upper third rather top-heavy, which means that a happy evening removing CDs and chucking them on the floor can be brought to an abrupt end when gravity kicks in. You know that this has happened when you’re beavering away in the study and you hear the sound of a crash outside: cue the sight of the tower lying on the floor, suddenly empty, with Joshua lying beside it, generally upset. Whereupon one of us picks him up and cuddles him while the other one starts to clear up the mess. He keeps away for the towers for a while after that: generally at least an hour or so, after which the whole process starts again: you’ll be picking them up and putting them back in while he’ll be pulling them out, creating a neverending cycle of tedium that can only be broken by death. I sound like a bad parent. I’m not, honest. I know you have to watch them all the time, but it’s not an easy task. The principle is to keep anything he could damage (or, specifically, anything he could use to damage himself) out of the way, and see what happens next.

If Josh refuses to learn from the toppling tower fiasco (generally he likes knocking things over, except it seems when they fall on him) he has made one evolutionary development that startles me. Yesterday morning I found – as per usual – a pile of CDs by the kitchen door, two leaning against the back of the dehumidifier and one down behind the bookcase, while Em recovered several from the laundry basket (along with a sponge and a shoe). But what was particularly disconcerting about this particular rummage was that one of the CDs was missing its inlay, which was lying beside it, slightly crumpled. Now, it’s theoretically possible that it slipped out of the case on the way out of the tower, but extremely unlikely: given that the sleeveless box was lying next to it, I don’t think it would be rash to assume that Joshua has managed to work out how to remove CD inlays.

This is quite staggering, really, because I sure as hell can’t do it. The CD inlay is one of the most problematic and fiddly tests of manual dexterity since flipping beer mats (something else I’m no good at). What the Compact Disc brings in terms of sound quality it lacks in terms of user-friendliness: as well as actually opening the case (forefinger underneath, thumb on the side) you’ve got to prise the disc off its spindle without bending it too much, and then – well, let me hand over to Giles Smith in Lost in Music:

“And then there were those tacky plastic boxes, with their push-together fastenings and hinges. Tricky, too. I know people even know who own large quantities of CDs but who have yet to master the art of opening them. (As a rule, any approach that involves use of the nails under the right-hand edge is flirting with disaster in the shape of a possible popper rupture up at the hinge-end. I myself go for a left-hand dominant, two-thumb manoeuvre, which was about eighteen months in development. The left hand is spanned across the front of the disc with the little finger clamped firmly against the spine low down, the thumb parallel with it, working at the opening edge. Meanwhile the right-hand thumb, cupped round from the back in a mostly supporting role at the top edge, woggles the back free of the front.)

“As for the booklet, if it’s an effort to extract the thing (you’ve got somehow to slip it out from under the semicircular retaining tabs while getting it over the nobbles that hold the lid shut) then this is as nothing compared with getting it back in again, which requires the combined skills of a watchmaker and a seamstress. (I would suggest rotating the open case ninety degrees clockwise and easing the booklet upwards with both thumbs from the bottom but, to be honest, I’m fallible here.) All highly unsatisfactory.”

You get the idea. If ever there was a device that should be by its very nature intrinsically childproof, the CD case is it. And here’s my son, who at the age of just over a year has managed to figure it out. Either it was sheer coincidence (and I’m willing to concede that it might be, but please don’t spoil my fun by telling me that) or his fingers are beginning to develop faster than the rest of him. Which leads me to wonder if I might be able to use him for something, preferably financial: perhaps an evening class, or at the very least a handy guide to household maintenance told from the point of view of a baby (with appropriate diagrams).

If this were a Warner Brothers cartoon I’d have had large dollar signs spring up beneath my eyelids by now, accompanied by the sound of a cash register. Even without the special effects, Em and I still think we could be onto a winner – on a small scale, at least initially, before the ‘BABY GENIUS’ headlines go national and we start to get onto the cover of Time magazine and then, eventually, Josh gets his own reality TV show (think The Apprentice, only with nappies). And it’s with a heavy heart that I realise the irony of our situation: leaving him to rummage around all the music towers and tearing the dust covers off my Bill Bryson collection has not, it seems, been without its advantages. Now if we could just keep him away from the Grenadine…

“I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

July 15, 2009

———

Re-reading yesterday’s flashback post, and thinking about how anal I can be with classification and filing, I’m reminded of the memorable interchange between Daniel Stern and Ellen Barkin in Diner.

——

Shrevie [Sorting through his record collection in the living room]: Beth? Beth…

Beth [Painting her finger nails at the dining room table]: What?

Shrevie: Come here!

Beth: I’m doing a crossword puzzle.

Shrevie: COME HERE!

[Beth walks to the living room]

Beth: What?

Shrevie: Have you been playing my records?

Beth: Yeah…so?

Shrevie: Didn’t I tell ya the procedure?

Beth: Yeah. You told me all about it, Shrevie. They have to be in alphabetical order.

Shrevie: And what else?

Beth: Uh, they have to be filed alphabetically and according to year as well…right?

Shrevie: And what else?

[Beth gets a quizzical look on her face]

Shrevie: WHAT ELSE?

Beth: I don’t know!

Shrevie: You don’t know? Well, let me give you a hint, okay? I found my James Brown record filed under the J’s…instead of the B’s. I don’t know who taught you to alphabetize, but to top it off he’s in the Rock ‘n’ Roll section instead of the R&B section. How could you do that?

Beth: It’s too complicated, Shrevie! See, every time I pull out a record, there’s this whole procedure I have to follow. I just want to hear the music, that’s all.

Shrevie: Too complicated to just KEEP MY RECORDS IN THE CATEGORY, OK? Just put the Rock ‘n’ Roll in with the Rock ‘n’ Roll. Put the R&B in with the R&B! I mean, you’re not gonna put Charlie Parker in with the Rock ‘n’ Roll, would you?

[Beth gets that quizzical look on her face again]

Shrevie: Would you?

Beth: I don’t know. Who’s Charlie Parker?

Shrevie: JAZZ!! JAZZ!!! HE’S…HE WAS THE GREATEST JAZZ SAXOPHONE PLAYER THAT EVER LIVED…

Beth [interrupting]: SHREVIE!! What are you getting so crazy about? It’s just music…it’s not that big a deal.

Shrevie: IT…it is. Don’t you understand? This is important to me!

Beth: Shrevie, why do you yell at me? I never hear you yell at any of your friends!

Shrevie [Picking up a handful of records out of their sleeves] : Look…pick a record, okay?

Beth: What?

Shrevie: Just…pick any record! ANY RECORD!

[Beth picks a record]

Shrevie: Okay…what’s the hit side?

Beth: ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’.

Shrevie: Okay…now ask me what’s on the flip side.

Beth: Why?

Shrevie: JUST…JUST ASK ME WHAT’S on the flip side, okay?

Beth: What is on the flip side?

Shrevie: ‘Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey’, 1958. Specialty Records.

[Beth nods blankly]

Shrevie: See? You don’t ask me things like that, do you? No! You never ask me what’s on the flip side.

Beth: No! Because I don’t give a shit. Shrevie, who cares about what’s on the flip side of a record?

Shrevie: I DO! Every one of my records means something! The label, the producer, the year it was made. Who was copying whose style… who’s expanding on that, don’t you understand? When I listen to my records…they take me back to certain points in my life, OK? Just don’t touch my records, EVER! You! The first time I met you? Modell’s sister’s high school graduation party, right? 1955. ‘And Ain’t That A Shame’ was playing when I walked in the door!

[And Shrevie promptly walks out the front door]

——

When I played Emily the YouTube stream, she said “Now, who does that remind me of?”.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Imagine him with Thomas.”
“I wasn’t that bad, though, was I?”
“You’ve certainly cared about it less since he started emptying the racks.”
“Yeah, but even before that, was I? I mean, I wasn’t that bad. Tell me I wasn’t.”
“Well, if you feel you have to ask…”

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 28

July 19, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
Genesis – The Way We Walk, Vol. 1: The Shorts
Guns ‘N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction
David Gray – White Ladder
Lance Gambit Trio – Cocktail 2000
Gorillaz – Gorillaz
Gomez – Bring It On
Andrew Gold - Thank You For Being A Friend: The Best Of Andrew Gold
Peter Gabriel – Four (Security)
Peter Gabriel – Three (Melt)
Peter Gabriel – Two (Scratch)
Peter Gabriel – One (Car)
Goldfrapp – Supernature
Macy Gray – On How Life Is
Goldfrapp – Seventh Tree

An aspirin would be good

July 21, 2009

———

I call it Radiohead Syndrome. You know what I’m talking about. The moment when you realise you’ve been internally humming a particular song for the last half an hour, and it won’t leave you. It’s the fly that’s buzzing round the kitchen who can’t understand that there’s a pane of glass preventing its journey to the outside. It’s the annoying idiot who latches onto you at parties. It’s the telesales rep who appears to be lonely.

I wouldn’t mind so much except that the songs that get stuck inside my head tend not to be wondrous works of beauty that benefit repeated listening in order to determine each subtle nuance, each layer of intricacy and each fresh corner of mystery, like a classic novel. I wouldn’t object if, for example, I was afflicted by a repeat play of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, a song that will never, I suspect, come even close to wearing out its welcome. Or perhaps something from Chess. Something with a bit of substance that I’m not ashamed to hum out loud. (I would also like it noted for the record, your honour, that a friend of mine was once so in the programming zone that he went three hours before realising that his Media Player window had been cycling the opening track from Chess on repeat since nine a.m. that morning.)

But it seldom (if ever) happens that way. Instead, this afternoon, I’ve been humming Brian Macfadden’s No. 1 from his 2004 solo debut – a little ditty co-written with Guy Chambers, no less. The song in question is ‘Real To Me’, and is perhaps the most excruciating example I can produce of bad lyric writing since – ooh, since Liam Gallagher’s ‘Little James’. Proclaiming, in the first instance, that he relishes the day that he’ll see his “babies run” (which, to be honest, would spook me out – I’d rather mine learned to crawl first), the Irish twerp then produces a charming picture of domestic bliss that is matched in sheer kitsch only by a Care Bears Holiday Special. Here’s the middle eight:

“Picnics in the garden
Then the children they can play
The first day of the summer
And I laze here all the day
And we’ll invite the family round
And drink some English tea
Then I raise up my finger
And watch football on TV”

Brian. Guy. Seriously. What the fuck were you thinking?