Normal posting will resume shortly. In the meantime, I’ve started another daily photo project for 2010. Let’s see how long this one lasts for!
Tag Archive for 'projects'
So, this? If there’s a better way to wake up at 7am on a Sunday morning, I want to know about it.
I bought a new notebook to take to the beach on Saturday; a gorgeous, heavy thing with a fabric cover and a butterfly print. I hope to use it more often than many of its predecessors – it can be a twin, of sorts, for my travel journal. As the train headed back to Glasgow, I started to sketch out a new project: an “autobiographical” mix of sorts, in however many volumes, of the songs that mean and have meant the most to me.
It’s turning into quite a sprawling, ambitious project, not least because the normal rules of mix-making don’t really apply. One song, one artist is a perfectly acceptable rule if it’s an ordinary mix CD, for example, but there are certain artists who have influenced and guided me so closely that I’d feel as if I’d be cheating myself if I left repeaters off. There will be several CDs anyway – at least four, although we seem to be heading rapidly for five – each encapsulating different facets or periods of my life. There will be cover art. There are certainly plenty of selfies to choose from.
I don’t know what I’ll do with the collection in the end. I don’t think I’ll post the results, although the tracklistings will certainly end up on the newly-functioning Art of the Mix. If you’ve been following me long enough you’ll probably have half the tracks already, and the alternative is I get sued by Bob Dylan. I might make copies for the people who I think should know me best, and keep one for myself. I might not get around to it. The idea came about on one particularly tedious afternoon at work, when I was listening to… oh, I can’t even remember, but it pulled me out of my mood and when I posted to Twitter with the quote from Almost Famous and somebody asked me what song it was I realised there were really several.
But that’s all in the future: for now, there’s your regular monthly mix.
Dylan Is A Sentiment That You Don’t Want To Share: last month’s mix, February 2009
1. Illinois: “Missing Piece”
2. Elvis Perkins in Dearland: “Shampoo”
3. Aidan Moffat and the Best-Ofs: “Big Blonde”
4. Kill It Kid: “Send Me An Angel Down”
5. The Rosebuds: “Life Like”
6. The Secondhand Marching Band: “Don’t!”
7. Red House Painters: “Byrd Joel”
8. The Steeldrivers: “If It Hadn’t Been For Love”
9. The Gaslight Anthem: “I’da Called You Woody, Joe”
10. David Vandervelde: “California Breezes”
11. Feist and Ben Gibbard: “Train Song”
12. Emmy the Great: “Dylan”
13. J. Tillman: “No Occasion”
14. Abbie Gardner and Anthony de Costa: “Nothing Left To Hide”
15. Tom Waits: “Downtown Train”
And monthly most played after the jump. Oh my god. There are new entries!
My “big brother” Stevie, who as you may know is off to New Zealand for a year at the end of the week, sent me a link to the online campaign for an official rock song for Oklahoma. And, also, an idea.
So which song would you have for the city you live in? Would it be a Mogwai song for Glasgow, The Clash for London, The View for Dundee (dear god no), you choose… Would this not be the coolest mix CD, getting 15 of your friends to choose songs that represent their city and making a mix from it?
What would the rules be? Either the band has to be from that city, or the song has to be specifically about that place. So for instance Weegies could cheat and use a Ted Leo song.
I don’t actually live in a city anymore, and I can’t even think of a band who would come from anywhere near the place I am staying in just now, so could I cheat and still do London? It would be the Kinks “Waterloo Sunset”, unoriginal I know but such a beautiful song.
For Dundee, the choices aren’t great either. Snow Patrol? Could choose Placebo as Brian Molko’s mum lives here? Laeto were good, and Billy McKenzie had a great voice even if I wasn’t really a fan of the music. Edwyn Collins grew up there, Belle & Sebastian mention Dundee in one of their songs. But the winner has to be “The Beautiful Barmaids Of Dundee” by Arab Strap.
I’ve been given permission to post this, and I would love to take charge of making such a mix if there is enough interest to let such a thing fly. It would take a bit of the pressure off me to come up with a monthly mix for September too, since I have a magazine to get out before I jet off Down Under in a mere three weeks.
Leave your suggestions (the song name, your city and a brief explanatory paragraph) in the comments, and in a couple of weeks time I’ll pick the best fifteen and put a mix together. Ideally I’d only like to feature each city once, so get your thinking caps on!
PS Chuck Klosterman (have I mentioned lately how much I love Chuck Klosterman?) answers some questions for PopMatters, including that “album for every year you’ve been alive” meme. Spoiler: we have one in common. He’s got a new book out, fiction this time, but I’m not sure if it’s out over here.
Guess what, faithful readers? NEW PROJECT! But first, some links of no interest to anybody but myself: like what the HELL? Franz is BALD NOW?? And why doesn’t Esquire magazine have author specific RSS feeds? I don’t have time to read everything they publish, which means I always forget to check for their regular column by Chuck Klosterman (have I mentioned lately how much I love Chuck Klosterman?) So if it wasn’t for GloNo, I would have missed this little gem (from an article on the contemporary Americans his German students found fascinating):
Someone selected Ryan Adams. This made me happy for two reasons. The first is that I suspect Adams is something of an underrated semi-genius, and I like the fact that he’s more appreciated in places where nobody cares whether or not Paul Westerberg hates him. The other reason is that I think there’s probably a 98 percent likelihood that Ryan Adams will read this sentence, put down the magazine, walk over to his four-track, and immediately write a psychedelic country song titled “Hey Little Leipzig Girl (I’m Glad You Dug Those Whiskeytown Bootlegs),” which I will be able to listen to on the Internet forty minutes from right now.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the announcement of my next creative project. As most of you will hopefully be aware, over the past year I’ve been participating in the 365Days project – taking a self-portrait every day for a year. And what those of you who have been paying special attention might have realised is that this project is now a mere 22 days from completion.
And what am I going to do to celebrate an entire year in which I actually stuck with something? Well, dear reader: I’m going to make a ‘zine. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, inspired by my good friend Nine (issue #4 of If Destroyed Still True out NOW folks, and it’s a good’un!) but I had no idea where to start or what to write about. A Year In The Life, to quote its working title in the absence of finding any suitable song lyrics to name it after in the meantime, will hopefully be available on Day 365* and will be the story of what has been, on the face of it, a pretty unremarkable year.
Which isn’t to put you off: there were no life-changing events during 2007-08, it’s true. I didn’t move house or change job; I’m still in the same relationship (two years today, actually! Or possibly tomorrow, I don’t think we ever really decided…). I didn’t even travel as much as I had done in the previous twelve months. But that’s not to say that nothing happened – that I’m not a different person, that I’ve learned nothing, that all the little things I might have written off at the time didn’t have an effect. It’ll be about death, drugs, religious identity and a certain little band from Minneapolis – which these days, is much the same thing.
I don’t expect to make any money from it, but it’s something I’ve decided I want to do. I’ve been fannying aboot pretending to be a photographer for far too long – it’s time to bring this project full circle. And now the idea is out there, I have to! If you’ve got any tips, be they to do with production or distribution, gi’es a shout. Cheers.
*Yep, ten days after I’m meant to get the magazine signed off. Eep.
JEEEEEEEESUS. I get a scout hut in a field with man-eating cows. You get Buckingham Palace.
(Stringer on our relative work-related accomodation this week.)
We’ve had an idea. Well, Stringer had an idea, but then I started jumping up and down and going “me! me! me!”. We’re going to write a book of short stories based on the songs from Lou Reed’s New York album. Stringer says I have to mention it here to commit myself to the project, since I have such a great track record for committing to plans I post about here.
I’m quite excited about it actually, because it’s been so long since I’ve written anything for me I’m not sure if I can anymore.
Poor Stringer. He had to put up with all kinds of moodswings yesterday, from my inadvertent dancing at the news that FUCKING WILCO ARE PLAYING INDIAN SUMMER (yeah, Son Volt are better but it’s not as if either are a patch on Uncle Tupelo) to a fangirl’s rage while rewatching the finale episode of The X-Files.
Last week my dad called me on my direct line for the important work-related reason that a colleague of his wanted to know how The X-Files (which, as many of you will remember, was the first love of my life) ended. It upset me that, although I could remember certain details from the feature-length show – such as the crushing sense of disappointment I experienced when it was over – I could provide only the briefest summary of plot. To be fair, by the end of The X-Files’ somewhat convoluted mythology, being able to provide a brief explanation of anything is a skill in itself. Chris Carter himself used the trial of Mulder as a plot device to tell the viwers just what exactly was going on: most of us lost all clue by the time the “super soldiers” (cringe) showed up in Season Eight.
So I settled down to watch it again last night, and there was shouting. There was swearing. There were cushions thrown towards the DVD. There were tears for Scully, who at the time of her creation was the greatest and sassiest female character on TV but by the end of the show had been reduced to a quiverring wreck obsessed with babies who, if Mulder jumped, would say “how high”?
Doggett too, Robert Patrick’s ex-cop FBI agent brought in to “replace” Mulder at the beginning of the show’s penultimate year, was another one who had changed for the worse by the end of the show. Many hardcore fans, myself included, hated him at first but as Scully grew increasingly whiny I came to love his no-nonsense approach. By the finale he was reduced to a mere cartoon character of himself, running around shouting “bullshit!” a lot. About the only thing worth watching the last hour and a half of my little show is Matthew Glave’s turn as Agent Kallenbrunner, the prosecutor at Mulder’s trial. (“Agent Scully, is it true that you and Agent Mulder were lovers, and that you got pregnant and had his love child? No more questions.”)
Oh, alright, the final scene was pretty touching as well.
Suppose I should really shut up and get on with some work now, although there are other stories to be told from the weekend. It’ll need to wait though, as I am off to London for the next couple of days with my boss. Not something I’m making a big deal out of, as time constraints mean I only want to make plans to see my best girls, but I’ll be back again for my birthday weekend.
Guys, I’d like to call a state of international emergency. My wee iPod is sickly – it’s refusing to fully charge itself. I haven’t been in a situation where I’ve had to listen to it for longer than a train journey as yet, but I am very much aware I have a transatlantic flight coming up next week. Now I’ve had Blanche for about a year, which if memory serves is round about the time the battery goes, but… meh!!
Jay is a little traumatised today. We did have to leave last night’s New Rhodes/Veils show early so that we could have the flat looking presentable prior to the arrival of Rachelle Renee later this afternoon, but as luck would have it we left on a bit of a low note: Finn Andrews gurning his way through a cover of Springsteen’s “State Trooper”. Jay tells me that Nebraska is Springsteen’s most intimate album, and that covering tracks from it would be tantamount to covering something off Heartbreaker.
All this current Springsteen-love is a little unnerving: he was never particularly “cool” to like, yet he seems to have become this year’s Johnny Cash with Brandon “Wanker” Flowers proclaiming his love in giant HMV-branded posters at a bar near you. I haven’t listened to anything like enough of his back catalogue to say anything really (probably more than Brandon Flowers, right enough), but it’s something that I plan to rectify in the near future.
Recently Jay wrote a four part epic blog on his love of Springsteen, something I think he should redraft and submit to various music magazines considering its topicality. I can imagine it being quite unsettling seeing a band or artist you’ve always loved suddenly seized upon by the media: on the one hand it’s true that you’ve always wanted everybody else to appreciate their genius, but on the other you can’t help but feel as if all of these “new” fans are somehow unworthy. It’s not something I’ve ever really had to deal with because Bob Dylan – my own personal iconic figure – has always had that level of adulation, of acclaim both popular and critical, attached. My two favourite (now defunct) bands – Whiskeytown and the Replacements – regularly show up on artists’ “influence” lists but are only really rhapsodied over by the hardcore few; one frontman occasionally releases something of brilliance (and the occasional cartoon movie soundtrack) from his basement while the other is just a bit too loony to ever be properly embraced by the mainstream media. I try to wind Jay up by telling him that next year that everybody and their auntie will be lauding Paul Westerberg, but he’s convinced that 2007 will be the year of Kris Kristopherson. You heard it here first, kiddies.
Anyway, back to yesterday. My little radio appearance went well enough I suppose, although all the interesting things I’d gone in ready to say seemed to disappear as soon as I was sitting with that big microphone in front of me. I go to pieces when I know that there could be somebody listening to me, if that makes sense – I’m so much better written down. It’s always cracked me up that those friends of mine who know me a little less well think I’m supremely confident, when that only holds true if I’m perfectly at ease with the crowd I’m in. That’s why I’ll probably never get anywhere in the media – I can’t network to save my life. I doubt I’ll be leaving print for broadcast any time soon, but I’d love to help out again whenever I can. I got a chance to play the Long Blondes and New Rhodes, and give my Myspace darling Jeff Zentner his first radio airplay in Scotland.
I think I’ve worked out my problem with Myspace Music – while it makes it easy for independent artists to network and build up a following, there’s no quality control. I read about the Replacements’ early gigs, playing to two people (one of whom was behind the bar) and a mangy dog and wish I could have been there for the start of something wonderful – the thing is, every band on Myspace thinks they’re that something wonderful. Think:Fire played to ten people at the ABC2 last night, none of whom were paying any attention. It’s probably a little unfair to hold them up for comparison right enough, considering that yet another troupe of Panic! at the Drive-By Dashboard Romance types were never going to get that wild a reception opening for two indie rock bands, and that the venue didn’t really fill up for the wonderful New Rhodes or the Veils either. By all accounts everybody was upstairs listening to Rodrigo Y Gabriela – I have no idea who said people are, but I hope you had a nice time.
You’ve heard me witter about New Rhodes before so I won’t go on, but I was quite disappointed by the Veils. 2005′s The Runaway Found was a gorgeous, almost otherworldly album but the new material (the five songs I managed to stay for) is pretty tedious. The singer – “the band” really, as he disbanded the Veils after their debut and formed a new band of the same name for their follow-up – yowls through gritted teeth; one wonders whether he keeps a pin in his pocket with which to continually render himself in agony. The bass player was heartbreakingly beautiful, particularly as it would take a heroin addiction and a non-comical scowl for me to ever adopt her style.
Anyone see that steam train pulling out of Central Station last night? It looked like a trainspotters’ wet dream and there were certainly plenty of cameras in attendance. I can only assume it was for an anniversary or something, but BBC News is coming up a blank. And, like James McAvoy’s character in Starter For Ten (which David and I went to see during the week), I hate to not know things: although as I am not stuck in the 80s I am minus one The Cure’s Greatest Hits CD and plus a mobile phone with permanent access to Google.
If you are in the Ayrshire area this afternoon, then tune in to ‘Lalita Live’ on UCA Radio 87.7fm at 4pm – where I’ll be special guest. My first DJ set! WELL excited.
I really think all offices should shut down for a week at the first sign of winter to give us all time to adjust. Everybody seems to be hit really badly by stress or exhaustion right now, and the change in weather can’t be coincidental. Oh, when I am Queen…
Recent Comments