What was your very first job?
My first job was for a vet in the town near my school picking up dog crap for a study and checking to see if it had Toxocara Canis.
Then I worked at a sort of restaurant-cum-bar-cum-newsagent affair in Germany. I was a handyman during the day which mostly seemed to involve sweeping, fixing things, carrying heavy boxes, emptying the oil traps from the deep fat fryers and washing the vans using paper towels and dish washing liquid (yeah, I didn't get it either) from about 8am till 2pm. Then I'd go home, do nothing for 4 hours and then head back at 6 to work the bar until midnight. Then I'd clean up and head home.
For all that I got the princely sum of DM8 an hour or approximately £3.50/$5. Fortunately beer was only DM1 a pint and a bottle of Smirnoff was about DM3 so, using my own equivalent of The Big Mac Index I figured that since beer was about £1.50 a pint at home so, as long as I spent it all on beer then I was getting 8 x £1.50 = £12 an hour which was much better.
Details of that summer are, unsurprisingly, somewhat fuzzy
Because I'm in a thoughtful mood today - mostly bought on by some vigorous rafting, exposure to rich people and french nudity -
The official 2.0 is below
I know that traditionally the English and the French don't get on - there's a whole history of wars, them beating us at sports we invented etc etc that keep coming up and spoiling the whole entente cordiale thing - but I must tip my hat at them this time
I want to make plans on the toilet
I want to have (Sebastien) Tellier on my Ipod
I want your Mother’s Black Amex
I want your Father’s car
I want to go out with your mates - I will wear my cutest panties
I want a hot sex session - You can look but you can’t touch.I want to be in a Justice hit - Gaspard (Ulliel)’s hand on my thigh
I want to be able to count without my fingers - and I want yours in the right spot
I don’t want to take the stairs - Perfect, carry me in your arms then
I want to be the only person on pictures - And I want to model for St Lau (Yves Saint Laurent)
I want geniuses as children - And I want my dog to graduate
I want your head on a platter - I want mine on (Michel) Denisot (a TV program)I don't want a piece of cake - I want coke
I don't want Kate, I want Ethan Hawke
I want to jump off of big ladder - you're on your own for the rainbow
I want chocolate and vanilla flavoured ice cream - I want your blueberry balls
I want to dance like Vanessa (Paradis) - I want to see her boyfriend (Johnny Depp) in Ibiza
I want to sleep while you get up - and I want Yelle’s tshirt
I want to fit back in my jeans - and I want you to buy me drinks with your bonus
I want ice cubes in my glass - I want to make your grandma smoke weed
I saw your ex, the slut. Tell her that I found her boots
I don't want any stones in my cherries - I want you to straighten the Tower Of Pisa.
I want to come in a 2CV (a type of car) - And I want to do it behind your back.
My knowledge of French slang is pretty limited to be fair though. I'm wondering if the first line is something more ... amorous than 'make plans' for example. Also, is it "I want your blueberry balls", "I want your balls to taste like blueberry" or something else?
It's possible the video is inspired by this one
But, for various reasons, I prefer the french version. *cough*
Anyway, if you're in the mood for more incomprehensible French tomfoolery
Hemingway famously once wrote a short story in only 6 words
For Sale: baby shoes, never worn
which, if nothing else, only goes to show you how powerful you can be by expressing little[*].
I get a similar vibe for Chris Milk's "Last Day Dream"
[*] On a similar vein the Film Classfication board requested that Fight Club be reedited to make the fights less violent. The interesting thing about this was that the fights had previously been cut so that you only saw the faces of the spectators and heard the sound effects but it was considered less violent to show the fighting.
This is going to sound weird but one of the punk as fuck, raucous, straight up balls out entertaining gigs I ever went to was Ben Folds Five back in 1996. It sort of embarrasses me to say that actually but it doesn't change the fact that it's true.
It may seem hard to imagine - the titular Ben Folds is the epitome of nerd chic and his two band mates at the time, Darren Jesse and Robert Sledge - aren't obvious candidates for the rock'n'roll hair raiser hall of fame. Plus the fact that it's a dude with a grand piano plus two other dudes on drums and bass.
But seriously, the gig was wild. For a start there was a huge amount of energy - Folds plays the piano like he's having hate sex with it and since the band was relatively unknown at the time the smallish venue was completely packed with nothing but hardcore fans. And me - I'd gone on a whim and was probably the only one in the joint who didn't know all the lyrics to all the songs.
And for a guy tied to a piano he was surprisingly mobile - I mean the dude climbed on top of the thing, stamped the keys with his feet, pounded them with his fists and elbows and smacked it with his stool. The encore ended with him hurling the stool across the stage at the keys to play the final crescendo.
The interaction with the audience was continuous - since then Folds has regular segments at the end of shows where he encourages different sections of the audience to do the trumpet and saxophone parts during "Army" and a 3 part harmony during "Not The Same". If you're lucky then during the latter he'll start conducting the audience like a demented puppet master - one gig I went to he manipulated us like an instrument until we were doing, if I remember correctly, the them from Jaws.
At this gig however it was much more intimate - lots of requests shouted out (and often fulfilled, if only for a few seconds) for odd cover versions. I stumbled out later without any idea what time it was, my legs sore from jumping, my (probably flannelet) shirt drenched in sweat. I think I stage dived (dove?) a few times - to be honest it's all a bit of a blur.
At the time the whole thing was a refreshing palate cleanser in the post grunge era - I was just starting college doing a CS degree, started reading Wired and the web was taking off. It kind of felt ok to be nerd who rocked out and Ben Folds Five felt like a soundtrack to that - well that and the Prodigy. But that's another story.
It was clever, witty lyrics, distorted pianos and self deprecation and I lapped up the two first albums.
After that, not so much though - there are still some gems but either I got older, or he did. I went to a gig last night and maybe it was the fact that a weekend of camping in 100°F or the fact that it was a Sunday night in Oakland or the fact that the sound quality was pretty awful but I just didn't get the same buzz as I had at previous gigs.
It's like the saying goes - you can never go home again. But you can shop there. Or listen to tracks from the first two albums all day.
A short one today since I'm running achingly later in the day which means it's time to delve deep into the box of techno and pull out the only song to my knowledge which contains samples from both Arnie starring dystopia-fest "The Running Man" and perennially controversial but emminently quotable Python vehicle "The Life of Brian"
As a particularly obnoxious child, I was always desperate to show off how much more I knew about music than everyone else*. Knowing that extra song gives you the edge on your peers: a throwaway playground remark along the lines of “have you heard Messiah’s version of I Feel Love?” can be instantly trumped with a retort of “actually Temple Of Dreams is far superior”, stunning your classmate into awestruck silence for the rest of double Maths. Technically this could also be achieved by referencing an obscure song by a different artist, but then you run the risk of your opponent thinking you haven’t actually heard of Messiah at all and are BLUFFING.
* Amazingly enough, knowing obscure music trivia is actually more useful in my current job than my degree. Suck on that, academia!
In fact you should go read the whole of Blog'92, right from the very start, since it's awesome. I mean how can you not love something which starts:
On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ‘92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix of grebo, soul, indie and ‘Love Shack’ by the B52s) and the 4th tape I owned in total - tapes 2 and 3 being the Best Of The Seekers and Roxette’s Joyride.
The inlay sleeve for my new tape had the tracklisting neatly written out in capital letters: black biro for the track title and red for the artist name all the way up until track 2, when the track titles were black and the artist names were red. On the inside of the inlay was written:
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY KATHERINE!!
p.s. Mum & Dad will really hate this! So PLAY IT LOUD“
... and which then goes on to review all 24 tracks with a mix of enviable enthusiams, well tempered nostalgia, solid music geekery and more than a sprinkle of humour. In fact it's everything I basically aspire to, but fall short of, in these here Music Monday posts.
Since I'm going through some of my books on photography (of which I have a surprising number despite having absolutely no photographic skills whatsoever, or indeed any hint of artistic or aesthetic skills in general) I thought I might as well share one of my favourites from Tim Page's autobiography "Page After Page"
Page and his colleagues were the first of a new breed of journalists, going beyond even what the journalists during the Spanish Civil War, or what we now call embedded journalists, did.
Page took a piece of shrapnel to the head in April 1969 after jumping out of a helicopter to help load wounded soldiers. He was severely injured and spent the next year in the US undergoing extensive neurosurgery before becoming heavily involved in the Vietnam Veterans peace movement and working with amputees and trauma victims, including Ron Kovic.
Throughout the 70s and 80s Page attempted to uncover to discover the fate and final resting place of his best friend and fellow photojournalist, Sean Flynn who had been captured in 1970. His search ended in 1990, following the discovery of what appeared to be the grave of Flynn and his colleague Dana Stone in the Cambodian village of Bei Met. Forensic examination suggested both had met a violent death.
Wanting to erect a memorial to all those in the media that were either killed or went missing in the war, Page founded the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation and published the book "Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina" which is also a stunning book.
First off, if you haven't already seen this video (it's being doing the rounds for a couple of weeks) go do so now - it's pretty damn mindblowing in a jaw dropping "Holy Motherfucking Shit How Did He Do That?" kind of way (particularly 3:08)
During the mid 90s Sony were pushing the MiniDisc format pretty hard and cross-utilising their vertical paradigm using synergistic intracorporate mind thinks.
By which I mean they used artists signed to Sony Records to shill other Sony products.
Case in point - last week's 90s Music Monday with the Bomfunk MCs.
It's much more common these days - after teen programs like "The OC" and "One Tree Hill" managed to showcase up and coming bands its starting to become the done thing to add the name of the band and song discretely on your advert for spandex support hose or gas powered lawn mulchers or whatever.
Glastonbury rockers Reef, fronted by "long haired slab of man candy" (or so I was told at the time) Gary Stringer - who, incidentally, has name more suited to being a brickie in Chelmsford than an international rock artiste about town - rose to prominince in a British MiniDisc advert in which a callous record exec throws their demo MD out the window wherein, despite bouncing from 20 storeys up (thus showing durability, doncha see), it is picked up by an achingly cool skateboarding type dude who promptly slips it into his MD player and proceeds to rock out to it whilst skating off into the distance, presumably to indulge in a spot of impromptu viral marketing thus ensuring our heroes' get catapulted to fame, fortune and a life of artistic credibility away from grabbing and vision-lacking corporate music overlords e.g Sony Music.
Of course the Reefsters benefit from not one but two startling pieces of outrageous good fortune, viz.-
- The offending disc was picked up by their
exhaustively focus group determined target demographica young skater dude - He was one of the other 4 people in the UK with a MD player
I'd show you the video but it is inexplicably not available on the internets - a fact that has shaken my self believe to the very core of my being and left me confused and disorientated. Instead you'll just have to get the song itself
For those of you blundering into the middle of this post in some manner to which I'm not accustomed - no, that isn't infact the Black Crowes you're hearing.
All joking aside I did actually like "Naked" quite a lot - not surprising given my penchant for Die Schwartze Rabenkrahe. And, whilst I though their next single veered somewhat close to Poppy Rocksville it was amusingly catchy in a toe tapping way
I think I even bought a copy of the album "Glow" somewhere along the way although I'm buggered if I can find it anywhere and I have no recollection of ever actually listening to it.
Which actually I suppose sort of somes Reef up - they weren't in any way bad. Hell they were actually pretty good and by all accounts a damn fine live act and "Glow" came in at number 26 in Kerrang!'s "100 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die " list.
But they just sort of faded away without any one noticing. Which would make me sad if it wasn't for the fact that both Charlie Brooker and Ben Goldacre who, between them act as a some sort of combination of arch-debunkers, anchors of sanity and satrically skewering arbiters of reassuringly hilarious fact that keep me moralling and emotionally grounded and whom I thoroughly expected to calmly explain this week in their respective columns why we shouldn't be worried about H1N1 aka Swine Flu. Instead they've both sort of collectively shrugged and said "Actually, you should maybe be a little worried".
It's enough to turn a boy to drink.
I was reading this morning that they're making a film about The Bang Bang Club.
In the likely event that you've never heard the term before The Bang Bang Club refers to a group of 4 photographers who documented the townships in South Africa during the Apartheid years. Two of the members got the the Pulitzer Prize - Greg Marinovich for his coverage of the killing of Lindsaye Tshabalala in 1990 and Kevin Carter for his stunning photograph of a vulture stalking a starving child during the famine southern Sudan in 1994.
"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
despite the fact that not only were scenes like this were common place but that Carter, having taken the photo, did shoo it off. More importantly the image was used by several aid agencies and prompted a large spike in donations.
Ultimately only two of the four are still alive - Ken Oosterbroek was killed in the same firefight that injured Greg Marinovich and Carter, later to be immortalised in a song by the Manic Street Preachers, took his own life, prompted in no small part because of the controversy surrounding the photo. Ironically shortly after his death a package arrived with messages from Japanese school children telling him how much the photo had affected them and that it had caused them to see the world in a different light.
Marinovich and the other surviving member, Joao Silva wrote a book together in 2000 which is a fascinating read and well worth tracking down. I'm looking forward to the film too - Marinovich is involved and I think it's important that stuff like this, and to examine the role of photographers and documenters in modern life, especially with the rise of blogging, Twitter and the whole citzen journalist ouevre.
On a similar note I'm also excited for the release of "District 9" by Neill Blomkamp - an ambitious science fiction film "presented" by Peter "Lord of the Rings" Jackson which is set in South Africa and has clear allegories to apartheid.
