Manafonistas

Another snowstorm full of plutonium snowflakes. Rubber Band is (of course) a play on words – it means Gummiband, as well as something less well defined: a band who aren’t very good, presumably they sound so bad it’s as if they are playing with makeshift strings.

The band aren’t recording artistes (it’s 1910) and the only individual who critiques them is their (perhaps only) audience, the song’s singer.

A Gummiband is of course infinite – it’s a loop. Travel round it and you will never stop. And resilient. And possibly even has a memory (…sort of…) given that it displays hysteresis: stretch a rubber band and it doesn’t immediately return to its original state, instead undergoing irreversible thermodynamic change. They also expand in cold and contract in heat.

All of which forms an odd metaphor that is unclear – out of tune though the band may be, on his return from overseas about 4 years later, the singer finds out that the band leader stole his girl. The elastic of love and longing has been stretched too far, and his parting shot is a comedic wish that the band leader ‚breaks his baton‘ – a sharp return to reality, and a slightly more prosaic example of thermodynamic change.

In a very strange way, Rubber Band is a eulogy to the transformative power of performance. A yet-to-be world famous artist sketching out a scene that takes place 50 years or more in the past, with (you’d imagine) no idea just how powerful the act of performance would be in his own life in time to come.

While Rubber Band doesn’t quite achieve the pathos of the two preceding songs on the album, it does address some very interesting ideas – the limited projection of the Rubber Band versus the stadia and satellite world of the 1960s, as well as themes of attraction, orbit: perigee/apogee and of course tea and scones.

A winter’s day, a bitter snowflake on my face …

‚Sell Me A Coat‘ has long been one of my favourite Bowie songs.
Like a lot of Bowie’s coolest stuff, it’s just a pop song.
But then you look at it more closely and it’s a Schneekugel.
(Which I guess is an appropriate seasonal comparison.)

It’s a winter scene, a solitary individual in a winter landscape.
My mind’s eye sees it as a kind of grey urban space like in a Lowry painting.
The song immediately works its magic by fixing itself in time – the bitter snowflake is ultratransience, it will melt or disintegrate in seconds.
And so the song takes place in this most brief sliver of time.

What I like about this is its forlornness – love lost but no anger or reproach, or even much self pity – it’s more just baleful self-analysis.
The language here is just fantastically effective – I really love it, it does what the best lyrics should do.
What should they do, the best lyrics?
Perform benign, cosmos-changing magic, that’s what.

Sell me a coat is an a commercial ‚call to action‘ in reverse.
(Call To Action examples – ‚BUVEZ Coca-Cola‘, ‚Buy Today 10% off‘ etc.)
It’s unclear as to whom is being asked to do the actual selling.
This lack of obvious addressee gives the song’s main refrain a prayerful tinge.
So what we have is a world where polarities have changed.
Warmth has become unwarmth, time has become untime.
It’s almost like something out of the i-Ching.
Fire from the mountain, the eagle circles the summit.
Summer will give way to winter soon and your prize will fly into the blue.
Everything you touch, you change – everything you change, changes you.
The universe is change, our life is what our thoughts make it.
Supreme success if you hold your course.

And of course he has no coat – and therefore is no Joseph.
Asking to be sold a coat.
With patch pockets.
Somewhere to keep your hands warm!
In a jingly song.
A jingly song sounds that like it was recorded in a small room that was virtually opaque with the smoke from Players No 6 cigarettes.

Is this the same guy who ten years later would sing the weird pseudo-Romanian incantations on Warszawa?

Wow.
 
 
 

 

Uncle Arthur is a nano-epic, packing a lot into its all-too-brief 2 minute 13 seconds running time. It’s a nano-epic from the outside, but from the inside, from Arthur’s viewpoint, it’s a big story, the story of a psychic perihelion he’d probably rather forget. Arthur is in his 30s, a socially ‚other‘ character probably broadly not dissimilar to Tim Roth’s character in the film ‚Meantime‘ or Craig Cash’s character Malcolm from the sitcom ‚Mrs Merton and Malcolm‘. Or maybe even Ronnie Corbett’s character from the sitcom ‚Sorry‘.

The backdrop is a small town, rendered in almost cartoon-like motion, with Uncle Arthur making his way past the gasworks, past the river, down the high street on his bicycle. Back to mother. Until one day love finds him. Mother disapproves but he absconds anyway. Then he returns because his love, Sally, can’t cook.

Narratologically this nano-epic is fascinating. The tragedy in it is that at the end, nothing – nothing at all – has changed for Arthur. He’s back working at the family shop, still going past the gasworks and the river down the high street. His decision is made. He’s back with mum. But things will change eventually – entropy will see to that.

The story changes between past and present tenses, the latter giving it uncomfortable focus, the former making it seem like it’s some family legend. The handclaps and jaunty singalong feel add a sense of jovial unreality – as if its story is intended as a mix of twisted didacticism and mild Schadenfreude. A psychedelic Strewwelepeter singalong.

The song is also clearly about subatomic particles – its three characters representing subatomic elementary particles whose substructure is unknown. They are quarks: Mother is ‚down‘ Sally is ‚charm‘ and Arthur is ’strange‘.

If you are to fall in love
Then where should you stand to begin with?
And when the falling’s done
How bad should you plan to get injured?
And if you land on your feet
Do it count as a fall or a jump?
And do it feel like a fall
When the hands that pushed you were holding you up?
 
 
 

 

Here is an important letter from Transylvania. The Count wishes to buy a house in our city.
It’s a good opportunity for you. The Count is rich, and free with his money.
You will have a marvelous journey.
 
And, young as you are, what matter if it costs you some pain – or even a little blood?
 
The house facing yours … that should suit him. Leave at once, my young friend. And don’t be frightened if people speak of Transylvania as the land of
 
 
 
phantoms.

What does this partial book selfie say about the literary tastes of the shelfie-taker?
 
 
 

Next to nothing: that’s what. I’ll tell you what though: The Wrecking Yard is an American classic. I think music shelfies probably say more. But what if you sold or threw/gave away 90% of your vinyl and CD collection and rely instead on 4 apps? What you have is mostly partial virtual shelfies, like this:
 
 
 

„Loftus and Bone headed over to the Bowl*O*Drome to take in the women’s leagues and see if they could get Loftus’s mind off of Arnette. Arnette was the readheaded woman that had run off with some college puke a couple of days before and had broken Loftus’s heart and shattered his life.“

Pinckney Benedict, Getting Over Arnette from The Wrecking Yard.
 
„Red rain coming down over me in the red red sea, over me, over me, red rain“

Peter Gabriel, Red Rain from So.
 
 

Yeah, so fuck shelfies.

And long live shelfies.

At 168.8 metres, the Beetham Tower is the 12th tallest building in the UK. Here’s how it looked on 3rd January 2016 from a street in Salford. From this angle, The Beetham Tower looks a bit like a USB memory stick. And shorter than a traffic light that is throwing psychedelic spangles into the mystical, invincible Lancashire grey. It was so grey in the north of England today, they had to cancel the trains in Cumbria. In the Sellafield Hauptbahnhof, there were only steampunk nuclear buses. Low on km/h but high on Geiger fizz.

Silk Flowers may or may not have been the 12th tallest rock group* from Manhattan. These things are difficult to ascertain. Not as tall as a traffic light anyhow. Here is how they sounded, 5 or 6 years ago. I wish I could sing like that, I tell ya!
 
*Rock group is a misnomer.

 
„Time travel, the avant-garde, sex and ancient Rome
I was walking down a road towards a lighthouse in Japan
When I passed a man wearing the mask of a black horse
And followed him astonished to an old abandoned fort
A group of alien immigrants had pitched their camp up there
Playing wild guitars and making images with fire
Hiding their identities with fur and wood and glue
Each wore a mask of Bebko and now I wear one too …“