Surfing with the MOR alien

I can’t believe I almost missed the most hilarious music news of recent times. Apparently, Coldplay’s recent single Viva La Vida was ripped off from Joe Satriani’s If i Could Fly, and the matter has been settled out of court.

Firstly, if this is true, my zealous dislike of the MOR kings has eleviated somewhat, Coldplay listen to axe-god shocker!!! and secondly, if this is true, where did they go wrong.

At the tender age of eleven or twelve, having recently started to learn to play guitar (or perhaps having reached my first of many plateaus of disinterest – learning instruments has always been antithetical to my patience for learning manual skills), my father booked tickets to see the famous G3 tour – every guitar heros dream before Playstation 3 was invented – in which the fearsome trio of Yngwie J. Malmsteen, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani performed back to back, and then together a little bit… oodles of fretboard canoodling.

The spectacle was enlightening and one i’ve never quite forgotten. The noise was phenomenal. My first concent: still one to be rivalled with (but for my friend Mark’s enviable boast of Meatload). Seeing the mikly gleen of Satriani’s barren forehead nodding gently along as his fingers raced across the surface of his silver-surfer of a guitar was a spectacle indeed. So was the trip home, headache and tinitus in tow, where a brummie woman lay passed out across four seats of the train brandishing a half full glass of wine and a teddy bear inexplicably.

 

What’s more, the soft metal on offer was inspiring and exciting to a young indie/rock fan. I had never before met the beast that is the metal spectrum, at which point a thirst was awoken.

As such, to hear that the staid peddlers of soft radio-friendly singa longa pop ditties might have incorporated into thei stadium-aimed sounds (when did stadium ‘rock’ start being so wet?) something of their stadium ROCK forefathers seemed to complete the cycle, so to speak. Son embraces and repeats lesson of father!

My befuddlement, however, fell somewhere in line with what Coldplay’s lawyers originally presented as a defence based on Satch’s lack of “originality”.  The similarities lie surely in the chord progression and the chord progression alone, something one can hardly hardly lay claim to possessing any more than artist can of their tools: style, colour mixing, brushwork etc.

In art, such flagrant copying is kindly referred to as “reference”.

In hip hop, it’s called “sampling”.

Whatever the name, it reveals a sense of respect paid, and what’s more, can be no more curtailed than it can be called out.

Picasso devoted much of his career to flagrantly stealing the ideas and experiments of his artistic friends and forefathers. “Bad artists copy, good artists steal” he once said. “If there is something to steal, I steal it” was another. Except such a notion not only exonerates Coldplay (and every other band accused of theft), but also aggrandises them. Coldplay don’t need to be any bigger. God damn, let them go away!

The Chapman Brothers, too, have peddled a career in theft brazenly and arrogantly, annotating and re-selling Goyas, and painting gaudy rainbows in watercolours by none other than Herr Hitler.

 

Even a recent exhibition by Jasper Joffe seemed a continuation of the pattern whereby every ten years or so since Baldessari, an artist destroys/ gets rid of/ renounces his lifes work/ possessions in order to start again/ make some money. My father even did it c. 1973., after which he became the wonderful watercolourist he is today.

http://andrewmjsutton.com

The final nail in the coffin of all this is youtube’s lesson to me that it would appear Satriani much more closely ripped off the Argentinian band Enenitos Verdes than those little foppish twats ripped him off.

Call it pastiche and lighten up I say. Satriani should be glad of the coverage and that someone might still care, I hadn’t thought about that evening when I first embraced him for years, and since then I have returned to his classic album Surfing with the Alien with both amusement and delight; cheesy soft-cock-rock at its best, and a salutation to the axe.

Anselm Kiefer – Palmsonntag, 2006

At the weekend I made a final visit to the Futurism show at Tate Modern to see a few favourite pieces, Fernand Leger’s La Noce, David Bomberg’s In The Hold and Robert Delaunay’s L’equipe de Cardiff to name but a few. The exhibition, though neither fantastically received, nor fantastically curated, did harbour some incredible works. I am more than happy to look beyond the unexciting and largely unusable white walls of the Tate when the works on show are fantastic.

What’s more, I am more than happy to look beyond the usual lazy attacks on futurism for its fascistic dalliances, being as they are entirely removed from the true wonder of futurism. Art is supposed to talk of its zeitgeist, great art particularly so. Bring back the days when artists cared about something I say. I’d rather a great revolutionary/extremist artist than a feeble minded inbetweener cashing in on a fad.

And so we come back to that great meditator, Anselm Kiefer.

I had almost forgotten that the Tate had been fortunate enough to acquire his Palmsonntag as part of the d’Offay donation, and was overjoyed to stumble across it. What’s more, the experience of seeing out far outweighed that of seeing even some of my favourite works, mentioned above.

Kiefer is the sort of artist we desperately need in society right now. I look at his works, and I respond to them with awe, with interest, with hints of scepticism, but most of all, with excitement. Here is an artist making big comments, and yet giving us nothing in the process. Here is an artist who I feel we will be speaking about for generations to come, even after his works have rotted away or fallen apart, or crumbled, maybe, into something more closely approaching the destruction they embody.

This works speaks, fundamentally, of Christ’s return to Jerusalem, but also the biggie of life and death. Of course, Kiefer makes no comment on the Passion to come, and hints more closely at Christ’s reception than the man himself. Receptions of death and life. Receptions of the unknown.

It is impossible to speak about Kiefers work in soundbits, more impossible to describe it to a friend who has never encountered him, as I found shortly after my visit.

Suffice it to say that in a world of kitsch dross, day glo advertising boards and inane comments on the aforementioned, a man whose works emerge from the barron landscapes of his home in Provence, imbued with tangible recollections of the earth, the ground, base matter and decay, might we find something more transcendental than the refuse of society’s want.

In a felled tree might we see ourselves and our consumption.

In Kiefer might we find something more real than the reality we have adopted for ourselves.

Generation Corn on the Cob

In this week’s Douglas Coupland interview in the Guardian – a short and wanton piece which left me entirely unspent – a few points appeared from the rabble of words which appeared to merit further consideration. (I’m not attacking Coupland here, his thought process was almost shown to be illuminating, rather the decision to waste two of the four allocated pages on a headline and a head shot which contributed little to the study of the man in question).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/07/decca-aitkenhead-douglas-coupland

Hmmm. I remember the 70s really well, and the thing about the 70s was everything was just decaying, nothing worked, either politically or in any other way. And the only technological changes were that phones went from rotary to push-button. Then in the 80s there were a few more things, and in the 90s there was email, but even if you had it there weren’t many places to go with it.

And then, suddenly, collectively, since 2000, we’ve had Google, Ebay, Facebook, social media, the digitisation of the world’s economic system, the iPhone. My friend’s got an iPhone you can point at a sudoku puzzle in a news-paper, and it recognises the numbers and builds you a new electronic one, and then it solves it for you in about three seconds. It’s just voodoo, it’s totally spooky…

…Soon it won’t be the internet any more, it’ll just be like air, like somehow they’ll integrate the internet into the air. And God’s name will have ended up being Google, because that’s the way it worked out.

Scary stuff. Coupland’s attitude towards modernity and everything he has so long been heralded as the harbinger of as a result of 1991’s Generation X appears incomplete throughout this interview, ranging from pro- to anti- in a heartbeat. So it should be. The big questions which lie dormant, waiting to take the 2010s by force, oscillate emphatically between utopian and dictatorial. The internet’s levelling power in a globalised world versus the unaccountable and unelected few behind its biggest weapons stands to wreak havoc on democracy.

Moreover, the accessability of things makes for a world increasingly full of clutter, removing room for the enjoyment of the everyday. We need to ween ourselves away from the multitudes and enjoy simple existence. I smile every time I watch populist cookery programmes propulgating the wonders of home cooking and, indeed, home growing. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign to get Britain gardening brings a pang of joy to my heart, even if he is a pig-nosed Etonite toffee chewer.

In one second, I consider modernity as too big and unimaginable. Yet the grandiose conflab in the above interview also made me think of a work by James Rosenquist featuring a huge telephone cable, like a celebration of technology’s infantesimal details on a scale suitable to those unable to process such complexities. Like a reader’s digest or something. Power is big. In the 60s and seventies, things became big. Increasingly, things, ideas and reality are almost tooo big.

I saw this work by Rosenquist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art years back, Leakey Ride for Dr Leakey. The idea inherent pervades Rosenquist’s career, even now thirty/forty years on. Similarly, Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures, such as those exhibited in New York’s Green Gallery in ’62 (below) propose something similar.

What was once a celebration of, and hyperbolation of commerce and consumerism now appears almost homely. A pompous uprising for the things in your cupboards, not the ethereal beams of stuff which enable the internet to run amok.

All of these things were on my mind after reading the above interview, sitting down to a tasty corn on the cob, and BOY was it tasty.

Here is something worth celebrating, worth idolising, pure flavour, unidirectional synapse response, its just you and the sweetcorn. REALITY.

I heard nothing. People were speaking, I heard nothing. Just the sound of my on chewing, the slap of saliva on corn, and the gracious sound of mmmmmmmmmm from my lips, like Bill Murray in What About Bob?

Lovely Chicken, Lovely Potato Salad. Mm mm mm mm mm mm mmmmmmm. ummmhhhhhhh!

And God’s name, for those few seconds, had ended up being sweetcorn. And second by second reality existed, and wireless connections failed to interfere.

the inspiration…

BLMF - a literary saloon

BLMF – a literary saloon in Pike Place Market, Seattle WA

Diar-retic responses to cultural stimuli

Diary etiquette

Keeping a diary can be a simple pleasure. However, the personal importance of a diary far outweighs its quality as literature. Indeed, the two seem at times diametrically opposed. The scribbling of thoughts might, and perhaps should, lean heavily on one’s prose skills.

What’s more, a diary might be used to record facts, not poetic responses to one’s experiences… they might be called poems.

My granddad Artie, a man of words, fascinated by words, and found regularly deep in a book, wrote in his diary on the day of my birth something akin to “Robert is Born.” That was all; that was all that needed saying. (I also remember my dad telling me that, looking back through his father’s diaries as a young man, he frequently found shorthand, my granddad being a journalist, and realised it was probably best to leave this untranslated… let’s not go there)

I’ve been thinking increasingly about the pomposity of keeping a blog, as well as the increasingly real possibility that

a) no one cares what I write, and
b) no one even reads it, let alone cares…

and for what?

Dire rhetoric

Shouting into the void feels like an appropriately 21st century pass time, and one I enjoy immensely. It provides me with an opportunity to vex my insistent thought processes – to empty my culturally cluttered bowels, with the possibility of someone stumbling upon my words and, godforbid, finding something of worth or entertainment there.

Humbly, and bumblingly, my intent is to address and excuse the stream-of-consciousness/nonsensiousness that I spout in my blog, outpourings of geekiness, ill-informed personal manifestoes and what Kevin Smith once perfectly encapsulated thus:

“The Internet has given everybody in America a voice. For some reason, everybody decides to use that voice to bitch about movies”

I choose to extend my scope a little further… (Sandwich fillings and exhibitions, it would seem!).

Diuretic

Some people’s feeble attempts at writing are vom-inducing at best. I’m not necessarily excusing my own. The civilized vexing of cultural vendettas alone is enough for me: so I’ve changed the subtitle of my blog to reflect the true purpose – and increasingly the content – of my writing. Diar-retic responses to cultural stimuli through varying degrees of brow.

In the interval between diaries, terrible writing, and that which increases the frequency of one’s bowel movements, I am thus situating my musings, somewhat facetiously (or is that faecestiously?), happy to acknowledge the weightlessness of my opinion in the rivers of shit that are web logs.

I roll on, like a little dung beetle, happy with, and content in my work.