READIN

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

🦋 The Old and the Young

I'll try my hand at translating another entry from Saramago's blog. (I am working from the Spanish translation.) Today he is writing about skepticism.

Some people say that skepticism is an infirmity of old age, an ailment of recent times, a sclerosis of the will. I don't dare to say this diagnosis is completely wrong, but I will say that it would be too comfortable to try to escape all difficulties through this door, as if the actual state of the world were a simple consequence of the old being old... The dreams of the young have never succeeded, at least until now, in making the world any better, and the rejuvenated bile of the old has never been enough to make it worse. Clearly the world -- poor world -- is not to blame for the evils afflicting it. That which we call the state of the world is the state of the unlucky humanity that we are, inevitably composed of old people who were young, young people who will be old, others who are not young and are not yet old. Whose fault? I hear it said that everyone bears the blame, that nobody can be presumed innocent, but I find that these sort of declarations, which appear to distribute justice evenly, are no more than spurious recurring mutations of the so-called original sin, which serve only to dilute and obscure, in an imaginary collective guilt, the responsibilities of the authentically culpable. The state, not of the world, but of life.

I write this on a day in which there have arrived in Spain and in Italy hundreds of men, women and children in the fragile vessels which are used to reach the imagined paradise of a wealthy Europe. On the island of Hierro, in the Canaries, for example, there arrived such a boat, carrying inside it a dead child, and some castaways who declared that during the journey, twenty shipmates died and were cast into the sea in martyrdom... So do not speak to me of skepticism, please.

Saramago links to Sara Prestianni's web site (in French) documenting migrants' stories, and to the NoBorders gallery on Flickr.

posted evening of November 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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Sunday, November second, 2008

🦋 Falsehood, Truth

Saramago posts today on the subject of politics.

On the eve of the presidential elections in the United States, this brief observation does not seem out of place. Some time back, a Portuguese politician*, who at that time bore the responsibilities of prime minister, declared for whomever would like to hear it that politics is, in the first place, the art of not speaking the truth. The problem is that since he said that, there has not been, to my knowledge, a single politician, from the left to the right, who would correct him, who would say no sir, the truth is going to be the sole and ultimate objective of politics. For the simple reason that only in this manner can the two be saved: truth by politics, politics by the truth.

* The politician in question is António Guterres, as near as I can tell (based on a reference in this editorial from Lusopresse). I am tentatively translating Saramago's "governo" as "prime minister", since that was Guterres' position.

** Update -- Never mind, now I looked at the Portuguese source of the post (which I had been reading in Spanish) -- the preposition translated as "con" is "pela", which is Portuguese for "by". This makes me more confident in my translation of the Spanish.

posted evening of November second, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, September 25th, 2008

🦋 Pure Appearance

Saramago says (apologies for the roughness of the translation):

I suppose that in the beginning of the beginnings, before we invented speech, which is as we know, the supreme creator of incertitude, no serious doubt tormented us about who we were, about our personal and collective relationship with the place where we found ourselves. The world, obviously, could only be that which our eyes see at each moment, and furthermore, as important complementary information, that which our remaining senses -- hearing, touch, smell, taste -- appreciate. At this initial hour the world was pure appearance and pure superficiality. Material was simply rough or smooth, bitter or sweet, sour or bland, sound or silent, smelly or odorless. All things were that which they appeared to be, for the simple reason that they had no motive for appearing some other way or for being some other thing. ... I imagine that the spirit of philosophy and the spirit of science were manifest on that day, when someone had the intuition that appearance, being the external image that consciousness could capture and use as a map of knowledge, might also be an illusion of the senses. It is more often used in reference to the moral world than to the physical, the popular expression that says: "Appearances can be deceiving." Or illusory, which is more or less the same thing...

This scribe has always been preoccupied with what was behind mere appearances, and now I'm not talking about atoms or subatomic particles, which, as such, are always the appearance of something that is hidden. I speak, yes, of current issues, routine, everyday, for example, the political system we call democracy, one that Churchill called the least bad of all known systems. He did not say the best, he said the least bad. For that which we are seeing, which it seems that we consider more than sufficient, and that, I believe, is an error of perception, whether we recognize it or not, we will be paying every day of our lives. Let us return to the matter.

posted evening of September 25th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, September 22nd, 2008

🦋 Autobiography of Babel

Saramago says (approximately -- I am no Jull Costa; but with a little help from Google I can get something I think close to what he has written):

I believe that every word we pronounce, every movement and gesture,... each one and all of them together, can be understood as pieces of an unintentional autobiography, which although involuntary, or for that very reason, is no less sincere and truthful than the most thorough of stories of life written on paper. ...I propose a day, more earnestly than it might seem at first glance, when every human being would have to let his life story be written down, and that these thousands of millions of volumes, as they began to overflow the Earth, should be transported to the Moon. This would mean that the great, the enormous, the gigantic, the excessive, the vast library of human existence would have to be subdivided, at first into two parts, and then, with the passage of time, into three, into four, eventually into nine, always supposing that the eight remaining planets of the solar system would have environments hospitable enough to respect the fragility of paper. ...Like the greater portion of good ideas, this one too is unrealizable. Have patience.

posted evening of September 22nd, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, July 13th, 2008

🦋 If you really love someone you turn into them

That's what Robyn Hitchcock's grandma used to say, or so he told us this evening -- he said nobody ever turned into his grandma, so he dedicated "I'm Only You" to her. This was the second song, after "The Museum of Sex" -- I was happy to hear him open with this song after I had opened my mix tape with it.

"I'm Only You" was followed by a long digression on digestion, and whether and under what circumstances we would feel comfortable discussing our digestions, leading into "a digestion song", viz. "The Cheese Alarm", which made Ellen (and me) laugh out loud with its urgency. "Please! Somebody ring the cheese alarm!" Robyn conducted a dialogue with the audience after, asking if WALL-E is any good -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know... Can you all hear this?" -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know -- it's reassuring to think this is all not just going on in here..." and played, with much dancing during the solos, "I Got the Hots for You" and "Glass Hotel".

"Thank you --" and as he started playing "Idonia", "This is about someone who left a hole the shape of themselves in somebody else's life." As he was retuning to play his next song, people in the audience were calling out requests, and he said with just enough of an edge to get them to stop, "You know there's a thin line between a devoted admirer and a creep... To be a slave to love -- what a thing!" and sang "The Idea of You".

A long digression about the Victorians -- "It's possible that the Victorians were frightened by sex... Victorians wrote mostly in longhand, no e-mail. But biologically they were much the same as us..." reflecting on the possibilities of interbreeding between modern humans and Victorians, getting particularly interesting if the Victorians in question are your own ancestors; "Screw your great-grandparents! Whole empires have been founded on worse. But this song is not really about that:" and launched into the hilarious "Victorian Squid". "Thank you -- it's all true."

The next song, "Creeped Out", went out to "a friend of mine -- it's her birthday on Monday. Happy birthday, friend!" and while he tuned up for the next song, he said: "There's something insanely simple about watching somebody perform songs he's written -- it's like somebody sending you YouTube videos of cats..." and dedicated the song, which was "I Feel Beautiful", to "Michèle and our cat". Ellen thought this was a really smart lyric, and I agree.

"How many people find the idea of eternity relaxing?" Not many -- mostly we want finitude. Robyn played "Oceanside", which was maybe the only song of the evening that really had me wishing for a band behind him. "This isn't exactly about Arthur Lee -- it's just around him..." and sings "The Wreck of the Arthur Lee", which I guess I had not realized was about a person. "It's a funny thing about eulogies -- essentially it's sad -- ... what really makes people cry at a funeral is the jokes," by way of explaining why he had written "Underground Sun" so upbeat -- it's about a friend who died, who was "definitely not a dismal person." "When people are dead they don't have an age."

"I'll leave you with a blast of folk-rock sound," Robyn tells us as he dons his harmonica, and plays "Only the Stones Remain" with a downright amazing harmonica part. But we clapped and clapped, and he came back out to perform a long encore -- wearing his purple shirt with iguanas rather than his orange shirt with dingbats. "You've Got Heaven"* was the first song in the encore, and Ellen's favorite song of the evening. Then a song I don't know (and can't find at The Asking Tree), with the chorus "I'm gonna see you in the afterlife." And finally, after a long digression about cones (during which he wished us all "an incredibly long rest of your lives"), Olé Tarantula.

Nice -- a totally satisfying evening. The level of energy he projects from the stage just takes my breath away.

*Wow! "Heaven" is from the early eighties -- somehow I had got fixed in my head that it was from a recent record. I think it sounds much more like late-nineties Hitchcock than do any of the other songs on "Gotta Let This Hen Out".

posted morning of July 13th, 2008: 7 responses
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Monday, May 19th, 2008

🦋 Story Idea: "Never Forget"

All I have at this point is the background; I think a good, science-fictiony story could be written with this background but I don't have characters or events yet. A method of memory-enhancement has been developed, I think a genetic-modification method, that leads to a world in which people do not forget anything. However people want to forget a lot of their painful and traumatic memories. So: a method of memory transfer has been developed (note the passive voice: this story is not about these developments, they have already happened in the past), which can move memories between hosts. The memories cannot be deleted -- what is a memory without a host?

A new profession springs up of "bearer of unwanted memories". Practitioners are reviled, kind of similar to how our society looks at prostitutes. People with no other way of making money sell their services at memory-transfer labs. The affluent visit these dens of ill repute to rid themselves of memories of rape, shame, abuse, criminality. The story is about one of these memory hosts and how he gets through the day with all the ghosts in his head.

posted morning of May 19th, 2008: 2 responses
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Thursday, April 10th, 2008

🦋 I had no idea they were brothers

I got into the theater and discovered it's a lovely room. Who knew there was a beautiful ballroom on the top floor of Manhattan Center? I did not. My seat was in the front row -- the dance floor had been covered with rows of seats -- about 15 feet away from the performers. The crowd was mostly white, but exhibited a wide diversity of age and of fashion sense.

Robyn walked out onto the stage and informed us the building was originally an airship, until it was taken out of comission in the thirties, "around when many people believe the Marx Brothers peaked." -- From there he segued into a story about Groucho Marx traveling cross-country on ducks, "very long ducks that moved on rails and belched coal;" this was by way of introducing his first song, "Heaven," which I did not recognize though I believe I've heard it before -- it is a sweet love song. Next was "Daisy Bomb," which I'm sure I've never heard. It is startling and catchy, and I thought, Awesome, this is going to be a night of new songs for me.

Sometimes a bomb is not enough
To express the way I feel

Robyn spent a minute tuning his guitar and explained how tuning as part of the show is very important, "tuning up a guitar is the sex part of" sex, drugs, rock n' roll. You see, if you as the audience absorb the tuning-up vibes through your coccyx, you will be able to radiate them outwards later on, when you go up to the tower to feed your pet hamster, or gerbil, or rodent. Be careful, you don't fall over and set fire to his straw! And he played "I Got the Hots," beautiful and funny. He seems to play this very frequently and that is alright by me. A lovely pantomime with his guitar at the beginning of it.

Robyn talked about his being "Nick Lowe's psychedelic younger brother," and how that was reflected in the shirts they buy and wear. Then he played "Wax Doll" and "The Cheese Alarm," two more songs I was not familiar with. I guess a large area of his catalog remains for me to explore!

A little more tuning -- Robyn talked about how he was "tuning by consensus -- you see if two strings agree, I will tune the third to match them, even though the third might have been the one that was correct all along... like the people who thought we should not invade Iraq. The majority rules." He played "Full Moon in my Soul," which I love, love, love, and "One Long Pair of Eyes," and then talked about how Gandhi kept a Stratocaster and a Marshall stack next to his bed, but never played -- it was an exercise in resisting temptation -- "He never even touched the strings..." and played "Glass Hotel," which I think he plays nearly as often as "I Got the Hots," and which I like, but not quite as well as the other.

The last song of this all-too-short set was a new song, possibly called "I declare that we are free," written for the 60^th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. Robyn said he had been asked to write it on short notice "because David Crosby was not available," and that it is going to be performed in a stadium in Holland, so we should imagine that it is "produced and in tune".

And he left the stage! But, came back out for encores after Nick Lowe did his set. The final two encores were just tremendous, the best thing in the whole show: Robyn and Nick and surprise guest Elvis Costello playing "If I Fell in Love with You" and "Mystery Train", the whole audience was a single body. Robyn took lead vocal on both, totally appropriate given that he has the best voice of the three.

Lowe's set was, well, a little corny it must be said. He is a handsome man and an excellent, charismatic showman; but his songs are lacking in the spark of genius. He played "Cruel to be Kind," "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding," "All Men are Liars" and some other tunes I thought I recognized, plus some new stuff. Some lovely tunes but just a bit corny.

Update: Here are some pix from SketchGuy... who blogs about the show here.

posted morning of April 10th, 2008: 5 responses
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Saturday, March 8th, 2008

🦋 The Street

Listening in the car to Robyn Hitchcock's April '96 concert in Bilbao, and Sylvia says "I want to hear the one about the street." Cool -- I fast-forwarded to "De Chirico Street". Listened for a minute and then Sylvia says, "There's too much stuff happening on that street."

posted evening of March 8th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, February first, 2008

🦋 In concert

The two shows I downloaded last night are indeed great music; I am tentatively liking the 1996 show better than the 2008 show, which I have however not yet listened to all of.** If anyone would like a link to the 96* show files, drop me a line.

Here is the setlist:

1. DeChirico Street (from Moss Elixir)
2. Lysander (from Perspex Island)
3. Balloon Man (from Globe of Frogs)
4. Devil's Radio (from Moss Elixir)
5. Chinese Bones (from Globe of Frogs)
6. My Wife & My Dead Wife (from fegMania!)
7. Beautiful Girl (from Eye)
8. Glass Hotel (from Eye)
9. I Something You (from Storefront Hitchcock)
10. You & Oblivion (from Moss Elixir)
11. Queen Of Eyes (from Underwater Moonlight)
12. Man With A Woman's Shadow (from Moss Elixir)
13. Kingdom Of Love (from Underwater Moonlight)
14. Serpent At The Gates of Wisdom (from Respect)
15. Heliotrope (from Moss Elixir)
16. I Am Not Me (from Moss Elixir)
17. Only The Stones Remain (by the Soft Boys, I think only released as a single)

*Not that there are 96 of them, I mean they're from that year.
**After listening to more: Yes, the 96 gig is the better -- It actually adds something to the music over what is published on the albums, where the 2008 show is beautiful but not in a much different or superior way from I Often Dream of Trains.

posted evening of February first, 2008: Respond

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

🦋 A new show and an old

Haven't downloaded any Robyn concerts for a while now; but two new tapes became available today. One is of his gig the day before yesterday at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; as soon as I read about it this morning I started fervently wishing for a tape of the show. And whaddaya know, half an hour later or so I get e-mail informing me of its availability. Quick on the heels of that message came another one, about a show from April '96 in Bilbao. Looking forward to listening to both.

Another opportunity for listening to Hitchcock: He'll be on Jools Holland's BBC show tomorrow night. Apparently I will be able to watch it on Fuse, though I'm not completely sure how that works yet.

posted evening of January 31st, 2008: Respond

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