Thou Shalt Not Overtake A Cop

I was told at Sunday School that “God is everywhere”, and though I stopped believing that at around the same time I stopped believing anything else I was told, I learnt on a short trip to the US South last week where the phrase came from. There’s just no escaping the entity down there. “They’re commandments, not suggestions!” a reproachful sign in Mount Airy, NC, informed us. This was a sign at a petrol station. “Fear of God is the only path to wisdom!” barked an apparently very angry preacher on the radio. GDS ARMY read a number plate on a pick-up truck in Roanoake, Virginia (Great Deity in the Sky?). In a restaurant in Asheville, Tiger Woods appeared on a TV screen, prompting a man at our neighbouring table to remark, “That man’s gotten lost on the way to heaven.” Though looking at some of the women he’s been involved with, you might argue that he’s been there and back already.

Christian morals don’t necessarily mean Christian behaviour. I was idling along the I-40 just before Hickory, NC, cruising in the fast lane on a perfectly clear day, driving in a perfectly safe manner, when I passed a state trooper. Yes, I overtook a cop. Yes, I am that stupid. Though I should add that I was going at about 65.1 miles per hour in a 65 mile per hour zone, and by the time I saw him hidden in the line of traffic, it seemed too obvious to slow down and pull in behind him. So I drove carefully past, moved in ahead of him after indicating, and at that point state trooper Christiansen of F Troop, District 5, North Carolina, excitedly activated his flashing lights and pulled me over. Then he kept me and the family waiting for 25 minutes while he returned to his vehicle to write me out a ticket (I have a long surname).

It wasn’t the $25 fine that bothered me, it was the $130 “court costs” that he slapped on top. Out of state number plates are an easy revenue-raiser, because state trooper Christiansen of F Troop, District 5, North Carolina, knows as well as I do that I’m not going to show up in court on March 19 in Newton District Court, six hours drive away from home, to contest the fact that I was speeding. We all know you shouldn’t get smart with cops, because while you are undoubtedly smarter than them (even idiots like me who overtake them), they have several ways of compensating for their stupidity, most of them involving guns, electronic stun-sticks, handcuffs, lies and cold cells with hard stone floors. So it was probably good that by the time I’d taken in the enormity of the fine, he was striding back to his car, and therefore I didn’t have the opportunity to congratulate him on his fabulous detective work and his incredible, crime-cracking acuity at hunting down a hardened felon like myself, accident-free in almost 30 years of driving but surely about to cause a multiple-car pile-up if not for state trooper Christiansen’s absolutely brilliant intervention.

Or to say to him, “Goodbye state trooper Christiansen, and as we like to say in Germany, Geh ficken, Du doughnutfressendes Arschloch!” (translation: drive safely, and I hope you enjoy your lunch).

Weather Event

We had three feet of snow at the weekend, and the power was knocked out for two days, but that didn’t stop me from having my ritual English breakfast with bacon, eggs and hand made Lincolnshire sausages. Not to be denied my weekly quota of artery-choking lard, I cleared a tunnel to the grill, liberated it from the snow, lit summer’s leftover coals, and sent the aroma of sage, garlic and slaughtered swine across the silent winter gardens (see picture). The bottle of genuine Worcestershire Sauce featured in last week’s exciting blog entry dribbled its stuff and added the final touch of low cuisine.

A gust of wind above three miles per hour is guaranteed to throttle the electricity in our infrastructurally challenged neighbourhood, so it was no surprise that we were thrust into darkness once the most widely publicised snow storm in meteorological history had set in on Friday evening. Our power company, Pepco, was brilliantly prepared, at least in linguistic terms. Callers to the firm were greeted with a message informing them that following the “winter storm event”, it was impossible to predict when power would be restored, but that this was likely to be a “multi-day event”. Sort of like those big weddings that well-to-do families in the south like to stage when they’ve placed their daughters with a chinless but appropriately loaded heir from the food processing industry. Here’s how Pepco’s “multi-day event” played out:

FRIDAY

Evening: Welcome to the winter storm event! No power

SATURDAY

Morning: No power. All guests to gather by the log fire for body temperature enhancement event

Afternoon: No power. Cold buffet event by the fire

Evening: No power. Guests to form huddles to prevent hypothermia event (will continue until morning!)

SUNDAY

Morning: No power. Element-defying English breakfast event. Guests/neighbours no longer exchanging cheery quips about the weather conditions

Afternoon: No power (apart from two-minute burst of electricity at 3pm to raise your hopes of imminent warmth). Extended snow shovelling event

Evening: Power returns! Event over. Enjoy the last half hour of Super Bowl

Pepco’s message also advised its customers to “take appropriate action” in the face of the power outages, though it didn’t offer specific suggestions. I hope that at least one customer responded to this by seeking out the home of the PR stooge who thought up the phrase “multi-day event”, torching it, and then warming their hands on the embers. Otherwise known as an arson event. It wasn't me.

More Saucy Stories

There are not a lot of things I’ve stuck at consistently down the years aside from drinking, swearing at other road-users, and maintaining a hardcore belief in the superiority of my musical taste. But I’ve been a proud user of Lea & Perrins’ Worcestershire Sauce ever since my Mum suggested over breakfast one morning a few decades back that I split a Lincolnshire sausage down the middle and sprinkle it with the dark, acidic condiment. Now I can’t make a soup or a stew without a vigorous shake of the brown bottle to add a touch of English flavour. Those of you who know English cuisine may argue that there’s no such thing. And if it wasn’t for Worcestershire Sauce And Marmite, you’d probably be right.

So anyway, I was on my customary trawl through Safeway this morning and found that the supermarket chain has dared to produce its own brand. Not only that, the Safeway Worcestershire Sauce was less than half the price of Lea & Perrins. How different can they be, I wondered? A checklist of the ingredients showed them to be more or less identical, although Safeway’s version had slightly less sodium. Lea & Perrins, on the other hand, does contain chili pepper extract. Would this mean the Safeway version was safer? It was excuse enough – brand loyalty trumped financial considerations, and I stayed true to the company of my native land that has consistently served my palate so well down the years.

In case you’re wondering why in the name of jumping Jesus I’m telling you all this, it’s because some people simply do not realise the daily dilemmas faced by stay-at-home-pops. It’s not all perusing the paper followed by morning coffee and six-way interactions with tag teams of willing housewives, rounded off with an afternoon nap in front of the Premier League or an Argentine soap opera. There are hard domestic decisions to be made, and you have to be on your toes if you’re not going to waste the entire morning hanging around the aisles, blocking the way for diligent but surly shelf-stackers, or getting sidetracked by old ladies’ demands for you to reach up to get them a can of pureed okra soup. Even now, I quake ahead of presenting the daily accounts to Mrs. Pop this evening after dinner, in which I stutteringly justify the extra outlay born of my steadfast adherence to the UK firm.

But as she docks two dollars from my pocket money and sends me to my room, I will tell her, “Darling, in these troubled, flavour-challenged times, a man must stick by his choice of sauce. Not every nation has produced a striking combination of vinegar, molasses, anchovies and tamarind concentrate. And it ill befits me to stoop so low as to purchase a cheap, counterfeit version made in a country that hypocritically chides the Chinese for breach of copyright laws. Tomorrow, presented with a hotpot of simmering Irish stew, you will thank me.” If I can get all that in before the bottle is cracked down upon my balding head.

But if this turns out to be my last post, be sure that I’ll have died a happy man, swooning on a snatched final mouthful of Lea & Perrins’ finest product, mixed with tiny shards of brown glass and honest red blood from a shopper of high principle.

Going Home Via Rome

“What were you doing in Italy?” the accusatory customs officer at Boston Logan International Airport asked me last night as I re-entered the United States. I could have given any one of three answers.

Answer one: “Ah, you know, I just thought I’d stop off there for a few hours to see the Colosseum, take in a Serie A game at the Stadio Olimpico, sip an espresso at the Piazza Venezia, flirt with a Francesca or two, stroll the Via Condotti and pick up my spring fashions, pop in on the Pope and put him right on a few ecclesiastical and socio-political issues, degust a plate of artichoke ravioli at La Pergola rooftop restaurant topping the Hilton on Monte Mario, and then retire to my five-star room with an Alberto Moravia novel. I mean, what else would an international man of leisure like myself get up to there?”

Answer two: “Thanks to the weather, massive airline incompetence, and the staggeringly pointless new security measures introduced by your government since a martyr-fixated half-wit sewed semtex into his breeks, I was diverted to the Italian capital for the privilege of sleeping for three hours at the airport hotel, three security checks, having my luggage vandalized with the lock and zip ripped off - though, strangely enough, no Fiumicino baggage handler was interested in pilfering my soiled shreddies, snotted hankies, bottle of Maggi sauce, Christoph Biermann’s ‘The Football Matrix: The Search For The Perfect Game’ (in German), a Serious Drinking vinyl LP, or a four-DVD set of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on the history of Jazz - and then standing for six hours in the airport terminal, watching pigeons fly around the cafeteria while security officers frisked assorted Category One risk passengers, such as wheezing pensioners, or soccer senoritas with their two-year-old kids. It was fun, I tell yer, though don’t let it stop you aggressively tossing out questions as I enter the fourth and final leg of this soul-sucking two-day trans-continental quest to lie down in my own bed.”

Answer three: “I was diverted to Rome on my way back to Washington DC from Germany because of the bad weather in Europe. Sir.”

Answer three is the correct one, unless you want to be slapped to the floor for an intestinal scan, enforced contortion, and indefinite incarceration. Uniforms have a knack of curbing my sarcasm, so I made it through by resisting a descent into wit’s allegedly lowest manifestation. The rest of the family, sent via London and Toronto, straggled home too in the end, although my battered suitcase - held together with duct tape and shrinkwrap - is still missing, along with the precious contents described above.

Mind you, I’m still extremely miffed that no Italian was interested in nicking my Ben Sherman shirt.

Unnecessary Stuff

Do you ever worry that you might one day become fabulously rich, and then have no idea what to spend all your money on? If so, help is available. The Financial Times publishes a glossy supplement every month just in the time for the weekend with the no-holds barred title How To Spend It. Here are some of the highlights of last Friday’s issue.

A set of six Fortnum & Mason Royal Velvet crackers for £500 (“contain luxury accessories”). An Atelier winter coat, from £1,100 up to £2,880 for the rose-trimmed design (is it just me, or is that the most hideous fucking garment you’ve ever seen in your life?). A tube of anti-ageing cream called Pure Alchemy Cellular Radiance Serum for £19.99 (“really seems to work,” according to the FT, so if you meet one of their hacks who claims to be 40 but looks 18, that’ll be Lucia van der Post). A Jaeger-LeCoultre Hybris Mechanica à Grande Sonnerie, part of the Coffret 55 set (otherwise known to you and me as ‘a wristwatch’), starting from £1.6 million. Tsk, like it's too much trouble to ask a passer-by what time it is.

Also available, should you be feeling flush, is a Salvatore Ferragamo python bag for £2,009 (not just the python getting gouged there). An 18ct Jackie O gold cuff for £15,000 that looks like a gaudy kids’ fancy dress item. Or you can follow in the tyre-tracks of a bloke called Tarquin (even within the context of this magazine, you have to feel sorry for any poor bastard called Tarquin), who goes ice driving in Finland for £900, plus £433 per night in a luxury log cabin for six. Thirteen quid for a Romeo Short Churchill cigar seems like a relatively bargain way to watch your cash go up in smoke.

Best of all is a six-month course of counselling for male business executives who are going through a mid-life crisis. It costs between £6-12k from a company called Overton Smith, run by two sympathetic women who “have no formal therapeutic qualifications” (hey, who needs them?). The magazine interviews one of the company’s clients, a 54-year-old named “Dennis”, who went for help when he realised that he was unhappy being “surrounded by unnecessary stuff. I started questioning the purpose of my life. I realised materialism isn’t as important as relationships and quality of life.”

What, you mean the answer doesn’t lie in owning a pair of 8 grand cufflinks from Wartski? I’m going to have to use up my 10-week Alpine ski lodge timeshare slot all in one go to recover from that monstrous revelation. Note to self: don’t forget to take off your £1.6 million watch before you climb into the mountain-view hot tub.

Top 30 Albums, 2009

It’s already that time of year when music executives gather restlessly around a wireless, clutching semi-unplugged bottles of chilled Bollinger and waiting for the BBC World Service to announce this blog’s top 30 albums of the year. Setting the benchmark for middle-ageing indie-farts since 2004, my carefully researched list - a more or less arbitrary ranking of most of the albums that one individual just happens to have bought this year - is seen by music lovers across the globe as the industry standard pointer towards buying seasonal gifts for people they intensely dislike, usually the family’s aloof musical snob with an inflated sense of his own importance, especially where it concerns musical taste. You’re welcome.

30. The Avett Brothers – I And Love And You

There seem to be less albums like this around these days, filled with muscular, emotional, country-influenced music. As serious and as musically deep as you’d expect with Rick Rubin producing, the fundamentals here are fiddles, philosophy and a vocal finesse that underpin a solid, if sometimes overly safe set.

29. Monsters Of Folk – Monsters of Folk

Indie super group featuring M Ward, Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis and Jim James, with each contributing a handful of songs, all too easily recognisable in Oberst’s case. It’s a broadly successful collaboration, though, which thankfully has as much relation to R&B (on the superb opener ‘Dear God’), rock, pop and country as it does to folk.

28. Dead Man’s Bones – Dead Man’s Bones

Why didn’t I think of this? Indie-mood, electro sounds composed by a pair of actors backed sparingly by a children’s choir. Could be a disaster, but it’s quite the opposite, despite the juvenile band name.

27. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Beware

Another year, and another immaculate slow-burner of a record from one of America’s most prolific, consistent songwriters. As ever, it’s not exactly packed with laughs and party tunes, just the usual low key musical musing on love, loss and death. So, something for everyone.

26. The Pastels/Tenniscoats – Two Sunsets

Fancy a nice cup of twee? Check out this Scottish/Japanese indie-pop collaboration. Glasgow fey may have had its day (give Stuart Murdoch’s tame God Help the Girl project a miss), but the two groups here work off each other to produce a neat little box of spangly gems, if you’ve got a quiet half hour to spare.

25. Alela Diane – To Be Still

I’m still a sucker for a Joni-influenced girl with an acoustic guitar if the voice, the songs and the string-picking can endure over the course of a whole disc (although this voice may not to be to everyone’s taste). Catch a thousand copyists in a coffee house near you, but none as good as this.

24. Califone – All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

If you’ve ever wondered what an album recorded in an old barn by possibly drunk musicians messing around with dusty equipment would sound like, then welcome to Califone. From the lo-fi doodlings there eventually emerges some half-realised, rough-cut jewels. Perhaps there’s more scheme to this than seems apparent from the end result, but I prefer to believe they just put it out the way they recorded it. Categorise under ‘experimental country/broken folk.’

23. Manchester Orchestra – Mean Everything To Nothing

I think it was on the letters page of Paste magazine that someone described Manchester Orchestra as “ridiculously derivative”, but that’s probably just because they’re from the grunge states. True, they still channel that 90s sound through big guitars and interludes of introspection that sometimes verge on the timeworn, but they have the songs, as well as an overt flair and bite to their delivery, that allows them to carry it off.

22. Eels – Hombre Lobo

Nothing much unexpected here from Mr E, but he’s one of the elite who can pull off delivering stylistically similar sets, thanks to the inherent strength of his compositions, fuelled by the throaty, soulful suffering of a lead voice that mixes the sour with the sardonic, while never forgetting the importance of delivering a tune.

21. Jah Wobble – Chinese Dub

Best Chinese folk-influenced dub album of the year. Oh heck, ever.

20. Royksopp – Junior

I love the simple things in life, like thoughtfully manufactured electronic pop. It’s easy to digest, and if taken in limited doses you never lose your taste for it, even if you would never throw yourself upon its practitioners and passionately proclaim them harbingers of the world’s most indispensable art. More likely you’d say, “Nice work, keep pressing those buttons.”

19. Maria Taylor – Lady Luck

We all love Maria in the Indie-Pop household, reliably recording a fine album every couple of years, and half-packing them in at the Rock and Roll Hotel, where we all get lost to ‘Song Beneath The Song’ at the end of a beer-travelled night.Lady Luck is another very decent collection, although slightly patchier than her first two superb efforts. 11:11 and Lynn Teeter Flower.

18. Metric – Fantasies

This band remind me of Blondie, in that they write nakedly commercial pop songs boasting enough punch and power to keep them bouncing around your sub-conscience, but in a rewarding rather than an irritating way. And yes, I still love Parallel Lines.

17. Sufjan Stevens – The BQE

Stevens recently told Paste that since this classically-oriented project, presented here with a mesmerising film fixed on and around the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he’s lost the ability to write ‘normal’ songs. So the 50-album project, with each record focused on an individual US state, is on hold for now, 48 states short of its target. In the meantime, lose yourself in this astonishing journey, where he uses alternately manic and reflective composition to transform an unwieldy, traffic-clogged concrete artery through New York into an absorbing mirror of the urban human condition. Brave, fascinating, disconcerting and musically moving, all in one culturally packed package.

16. Magnolia Electric Company – Josephine

MEC’s mournful latest is a stripped down song cycle that apparently laments the titular subject, but on the band’s admittance is more of a loose tribute to its late bassist, Evan Farrell. It avoids the descent into dirge that has occasionally blighted Jason Molina’s voluminous and mostly magnificent past register of grey cloud, country-blues. It’s hard to imagine Molina as a London resident now - every note of this record is steeped in the feel of a vast and lonely America.

15. Modest Mouse – No One’s First, And You’re Next

There’s no group in the world that sounds remotely like Modest Mouse. Their nonsensical name underlies a twisted creativity that can be initially off-putting, but which ultimately draws you into a musical universe where so much is going on that there’s barely enough space in every song for all the weird ideas and tortured riffs that are kicking around. Persevere, and the rewards are durable.

14. Andrew Bird – Noble Beast

It takes some kind of peculiar genius to finger-pluck a violin, whistle, and not just desist from spoiling but actually improve already excellent songs. Even though this is not Bird’s best album, that only speaks for the extraordinary quality of his back catalogue. Added award: best live act of 2009, on a dream ticket with Loney, Dear at the 9:30 Club.

13. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

Stunning, smart, shockingly gifted, Neko Case gets better with every album. Bold as a banker grasping for a bonus, every song demands your attention and, in the end, your appreciation. Case’s New Pornographers band mate AC Newman put out a good enough album with Guilty, but he must have listened to this with some measure of envy and conceded, “She’s the best.”

12. Vieux Farka Toure – Fondo

Imagine a record by Vieux’s father, the late Ali Farka Toure, played on electric guitar, and you have an idea of the extra sonic dimension added to what Vieux has happily inherited – a gift for vocal palliatives, understated rhythm, controlled improvisation (if that’s not an oxymoron), and overwhelming beauty.

11. Brandi Carlile – Give Up The Ghost

Anthemic, brash, cool… the abc of Brandi, and I could go on to devilish, euphoric, fresh but fragile, and beyond (to gargantuan, hoarse-heavenly, incandescent), but all I want to really do is pathetically declare my love. Mindy Smith and Tift Merritt were just one-off flings, Brandi. This is your third album, and you’ve still got me.

10. Iron & Wine – Around The Well

It says something for the depth of Sam Beam’s exhaustive library that a double CD collection of b-sides, outtakes and cover versions can compete with the year’s best recordings. Maybe it’s because this mostly takes us back to the sparse format of his wonderful early records, with just a voice and an acoustic guitar. Two whole sides of bliss.

9. Jason Lytle – Yours Truly, The Commuter

No longer Grandaddy in name, but very much a continuation of the older generation’s genre. If that group’s thick, creamy pop sound was your favourite indulgence, then a dollop of this will sweeten your ears too.

8. Au Revoir Simone - Still Night, Still Light

Pop angels sent to soothe you with synthesisers and sisterly singing along the lines of, “I’m moving on/I hope you’re coming with me…” Definitely.

7. Kings of Convenience – Declaration of Dependence

Maestros of melody produce a third irresistible album of wistful, guitar-led singalongs. Impossible not to love.

6. Marc Almond – Orpheus In Exile: The Songs of Vadim Kozin

Almond’s albums veer between seductive twilight dance electronica and collections of atavistic, cabaret-style, Brecht-Weillian numbers, but either way he’s a genius who deserves a ton of recognition for his lifetime achievements. This album is in the latter camp, featuring the folk songs of a little-known Russian folk singer of the early 20^th century, and perfectly suited to Almond’s strong but sensitive vocals on top of perfectly realised arrangements that speckle the songs’ traditional timbre with minimalist technological touches.

5. Wilco – Wilco (The Album)

A cogent piece on the excellent Quietus music site posited the theory that Wilco are, quite simply, boring. It was a well-constructed argument, and I could see where the writer was coming from, but unfortunately the theory is wrong. This album - Wilco’s seventh or eighth, probably - should by rights be boring. Just look at the disingenuously dull title. And most bands are churning it out long before this point. Except that it isn’t - it’s brief, and it’s brilliant, their most accessible, least indulgent ever slice of whatever we’re calling ‘Americana’ these days.

4. Loney, Dear – Dear John

The subtle crescendos of Loney, Dear take you on a most relaxing rollercoaster ride, with enough warmly crafted songs to make this one of the year’s most endlessly repeatable releases.

3. Baaba Maal – Television

“Africa is the future” declares a sleeve note slogan, and if it sounds this good, the future will be shaped by hope and harmony. The record stacks a fuller sound on top of Maal’s trademark intricate acoustic work, fusing traditional rhythms with plangent bass lines and vocals that straddle a range from didactic urgency to tender crooning.

2. Anna Ternheim – Leaving On A Mayday

The darkness and the rain drive this Swedish nightingale, whose Nordic litost is matched only by her peerless delivery and immaculate songwriting. An almost perfect record.

1. Malcolm Middleton – Waxing Gibbous
Melancholy, bitter and thoroughly Celtic may not seem a high enough recommendation until you throw in Middleton’s extreme gift of being able to shroud his misery - darkly awash with the smile-shy humour at which Scotland excels - in consistently addictive, even invigorating tunes. Life is grim, but you can turn it into something dark, funny and beautiful, even as the rain keeps coming down.

The next 20:

31. Aidan Moffat and the Best-Ofs – How To Get To Heaven From Scotland

32. Twinkle 3 – Let’s Make A Solar System

33. Wye Oak – The Knot

34. Elvis Costello – Secret, Profane and Sugarcane

35. The Handsome Family – Honey Moon

36. Heartless Bastards – The Mountain

37. Beirut – March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland

38. Dan Deacon – Bromst

39. Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career

40. Mindy Smith – Stupid Love

41. M Ward – Hold Time

42. Hope Sandoval and the Warm Invention – Through The Devil Softly

43. AC Newman – Get Guilty

44. Osso & Sufjan Stevens – Run Rabbit Run

45. Lisa Hannigan – Sea Sew

46. The Nightingales – Insult To Injury

47. Steve Earle – Townes

48. Atlas Sound – Logos

49. Air – Love 2

50. Regina Spektor – Far

Previous years:

2008, 2007, 2006, 2004

Do Little, Earn Lots

Last night I went to my first $50 concert. I went of my own free will, so I only have myself to blame. I knew in advance that the venue was the DAR Constitution Hall, a seats-only theatre that would be better suited to basketball games. I also knew that The Pixies would be playing their 1989 album ‘Doolittle,’ from start to finish in correct running order. And I could probably have guessed that as I looked down at the audience from my seat at the back, I’d see more barren pates bobbing around than at the Slaughter of the Slapheads, the brutal, climactic face-off in Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic movie, The Battle of the Bald, where two clans of ageing, wild, shiny-headed warriors fight it out for the world’s last remaining hairpiece.

For years The Pixies were shy about reuniting, but the commercial pickings as they approached retirement age became irresistible. You can’t blame them for tapping the surplus income of the generation whose indie attitude has been turned into loose cash. Buy a ‘Doolittle’ hoodie for $60 (and hide your lack of hair). You can pay another 25 bucks upfront for a copy of the concert on double CD, to be picked up on your way out back to suburbia. There’s probably a deluxe version of ‘Doolittle’ available by now too, and a vinyl reissue, and a remastered boxed set with added b-sides. The b-sides, by the way, are what we kick off with, because the album’s not very long. Fans love b-sides. Well, real fans love b-sides. But that’s okay, because the hall is apparently full of real fans, all supplying a wave of adulation.

This is payback time, because I used to tape all the Pixies albums off my girlfriend back then, so this is the first time in my life I’ve ever paid them a cent. It’s their due, because I did get a lot out of ‘Surfer Rosa’ and ‘Doolittle’ especially. More than I got last night, where they rushed through side one of the album, scratching out brash, sub-standard versions of great songs. I wouldn’t have minded at all if they’d stretched out ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’ to 15 minutes, but there was no re-imagining of the work. Perhaps they know their audience wants it served up pretty much as it was in 1989. Only not as good.

Although the performance of side two, and the inevitable encores, were a huge improvement on side one, there was no escaping the fact that you were getting a package, and that the gig was a mere step above puppetry - I was so far from the stage, it could have been a tribute band for all I knew. I tried not to think about the spitting, righteous contempt I had for people of my parents’ generation who used to go and watch the Rolling Stones at huge outdoor concerts in the early 80s. And now post-punk is posting it in too. Noise and posturing turned into a steady career, and what’s wrong with that? At our age we all know the cost of health insurance. If 3,700 people are happy (and they are happy - a lot happier than me) to be packed in to a venue where you can only get Heineken in plastic cups that you can’t even take to your crummy, cramped seat, then who am I to go bellyaching on for five paragraphs?

Looked at from an artistic point of view, however, this trend of touring classic albums is gutless. It’s like getting the players from Italy and Brazil’s classic encounter at the 1982 World Cup to replay the game with the same skill and speed they did almost three decades ago. And asking me as a fan to feel the same excitement. ‘Doolittle’ was 1989, and always will be. Perhaps my generation will be listening to it in twenty years time and saying, “Ah, this reminds me of the 2009 reunion tour. Just after my second divorce and before the back operation.” By then I might have enough disposable income to bin my cassette for the fortieth anniversary reissue edition.

Faith And Filth In Fiction

The Lord keeps working in mysterious ways, meaning that despite my review of Shelley Shepard Gray’s Christian-inspirational novel ‘Hidden’ last year, Avon Inspire, an imprint of Harper Collins, continues to dubiously honour me with its publications. The latest two arrivals are by Lori Copeland, who in 1995 “sensed that God was calling her to use her gift of writing to honour Him”. This is how I came to own a promotional copy of ‘Twice Loved’, whose front cover posits the question: Will Willow sacrifice her future security for a chance at true love?

In ‘Hidden’, I did indeed find much that was hidden – namely, sex, dressed up as inspirational fiction. I opened a random page of ‘Twice Loved’ (page 119, for those of you who want to jump to the saucy bits) and discovered much the same. “I believe the Gray boys sing well enough, the judge said. But when the new organ arrives, the service will improve enormously.” I say! And further down the same page, a character called Silas announces, “Best beef I’ve had in months.” Uncle Wallace responds, “Wait until you taste the fudge cake.” You can feel the homo-sensuality oozing off the page as these nineteenth century ‘gentlemen’ discuss supposedly mundane matters.

Thinly veiled eroticism aside, let’s cut to the plot. The Civil War’s just finished, and Silas, the bloke who likes a portion of good beef, is beyond middle age, well off, and wooing Willow, the new 19-year-old school teacher at Thunder Ridge, Texas, who’s rolled into town after being advised of his availability, accidentally setting fire to the town saw mill on the day of her arrival. (It happens. And according to the narrative, the fire would “later be compared to the Second Coming” – how much later I’m not sure, given that according to a quick search on Google News, the Second Coming still hasn’t come).

So anyway, Willow thinks that hooking up with beefy Silas would be okay, because she’d have no money worries, and her mates Copper and Audrey, who’ve come along too, would be provided for. End of story, materially happy ever after. But wait, inspirational fiction fans, there’s another character who’s not middle-aged and wealthy, he’s young and dashing and called Tucker (yes, he really is). He owns the saw mill that the heroine reduced to ashes, and he makes Willow weep with his “impossibly good looks and headstrong manner”.

I won’t keep you in suspense any more than I kept myself in suspense (spoiler alert here for all you Lori Copeland addicts), so let’s once again make a beeline for the book’s final page. “Lunging, Tucker seized Willow by the waist and took her with him into the ditch.” You dirty Tucker! “For the first time in a long time, Thunder Ridge was wet.” And the final paragraph begins, “A grin split Willow’s features.” Silas, in case you’re worried about the old fella, cops off with Copper instead.

Having merely perused the text, it seems only fair to tackle some of the 12 questions that the author asks at the end of the book, as though conducting a Sunday school class for a particularly backward group of under-5s. “It seldom rains in Thunder Ridge – just thunder and lightning. Still, the townspeople won’t move away. They prefer to stay and trust in God to send rain. Have you ever been in a position where all you could do was pray and trust? Did God come through for you?”

I wonder what Ms Copeland’s answer is for those who prayed and trusted, but ended up drowning, or shot, or crashing, or uncured anyway. That they didn’t trust and pray hard enough? It’s nice in fiction when God comes through for the characters, but what’s the explanation when prayer doesn’t work in real life? That God likes some of us better than others? Is the entity that created our world and our universe and, I suppose, all the elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies and irregular galaxies too, is he answering prayers based on some arbitrary code of judgment we have to guess at according to those he chooses to “come through” for? Blimey, it’s enough to make you keep your hands off the fudge cake just in case God disapproves and holds it against you when your plane’s going down and you’re praying and trusting that he’s going to step in and fix the engines.

Great Suburban Traditions No.8: Going To The Mall

If you wanted to put a positive spin on a trip to the mall, you could point out that it’s full of lovely young women flashing you friendly smiles. But don’t delude yourself that they’re up for the kind of water closet cubicle fun that the seasonally employed, nihilistic main character of ‘Bad Santa’ indulged in with middle-aged housewives during his lunch break. These are commercial smiles aimed at dislodging only hard cash from your trousers, and presumably it still works. For a tight-fisted misanthrope, though, the real fun part of going to the mall is to talk to a Young Flashing Smile for five minutes, buy nothing, and then watch the tortured way she will try but fail to bid you a friendly goodbye.

I was at the mall yesterday, and even though the Financial Times is claiming on today’s front page that the US economy is now in recovery, that news has yet to manifest itself in the nation’s sanitised kirks of commerce. Customers were scarce, but there was an abundance of sales people, and those on the open concourse with their market-style stands were the most desperate of all. Years of looking away from hard men’s stares in English pubs hasn’t quite trained me well enough to avoid the lurking eye of the commission-hungry, artificially fragrant, high-heeled harpie who insists on telling you that Mrs. Pop would love this revolutionary new nail varnish.

“Why is it revolutionary? Does it make you take to the hills with an armed militia and plot the overthrow of the military-industrial complex?”

“Hey, what’s the accent? Are you from Australia?” is usually the response to that kind of comment. Training taught them to keep the smile big, but the talk must always be nice and small. It’s around this point, as they guess that you might be mildly insane, that the veneer of civil discourse starts to betray its first cracks in the sales assistant’s voice. At the same time, your presumed madness might be their best chance of a sale today, so they’ll make one last effort by halving the price.
This happened yesterday when I walked into a posh chocolate shop. Following the statutory agreement that we were both doing fine, I didn’t make an immediate grab for the shop’s most expensive items, so the saleswoman told me that Halloween goodies were two for the price of one. I bought some stuff as a salve for my girls’ football team, because they’re all mewling that they have to play on Halloween. Then the saleswoman charged me full price. “Er, didn’t you just tell me they’re two for price of one?” I asked. “Ha ha, so I did,” she laughed, almost hysterically, like she’d been saying it was just a generous offer on the spur of the moment, but she didn’t really mean it. So could you pay the full price? Pleeeease?

It wasn’t so hectic in the bigger shops, where staff are possibly less concerned about the faceless parent company going bust. The reason I actually went to the mall was to buy a roasting dish on offer in one of the department stores. I couldn’t find the one I wanted, and the only person visible was a teenage sales assistant, who ignored me because she was too busy texting. One day it will occur to American retailers to train their staff to help people, but without all the oily pushiness and naked insincerity. That day will be when we’re all up in the hills having a hell of a nice day with our armed militias.

Bigotry's Bad For Business

Extreme right US radio host Rush Limbaugh was last week pushed out of a prospective ownership group aiming to buy National Football League team the St. Louis Rams. Several black players, recalling Limbaugh’s hateful on-air race-related outbursts, said they’d never sign for a team that counted him as a part-owner. Other team owners, none of them exactly renowned for their social radicalism, balked at the idea. The league itself distanced itself from the bid, citing Limbaugh’s “controversial” remarks. And finally the bidding group’s lead investor, Dave Checketts, dropped Limbaugh, euphemistically calling him “a complication and a distraction.”

Limbaugh knew exactly where to lay the blame for all this. “This is about the ongoing effort by the left in this country,” he said, “wherever you find them, in the media, in the Democratic Party, or wherever, to destroy conservatism, to prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a conservative. Therefore, this is about the future of the United States of America and what kind of country we’re going to have.”

I’d have nothing against a future where conservatism is destroyed. It will be a truly wonderful thing for the vast majority of the world. However, the idea that the Democratic Party or the media in their current forms could directly bring this about is as delusional as most of Limbaugh’s twisted caterwauling. The ironic thing for raving Rush is that conservatism is far more capable than either of the above two institutions at destroying itself. The NFL probably does not care about civil rights, as such. But it does care about protecting its image, and it really, really does care about losing money. The threat of a sponsors’ or a consumer boycott is easily enough to slap the league into a decent stance on facing down bigotry.

There was a similar case in the UK last week, when Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote that the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately in Mallorca should not have been classified as down to “natural” causes, as stated in the coroner’s verdict (he died of heart failure), because his death followed a night on the town with his husband, they may have been smoking cannabis, and they had invited a third man back home with them. The outraged reader reaction to this unfounded, bilious, and entirely unnecessary opinionating caused several companies to pull their advertising from the Mail’s website.

In years past, the Mail would have taken pride and delight in provoking and offending so many people. Nowadays, immediate commercial pressure can force them into thinking again when they run such naked bilge. So even if odious, poison-pushing wasters like Moir and Limbaugh don’t change their views, and bleat in their next six columns or broadcasts that they’ve been deprived of their freedom to stoke the fears and prejudices of little-minded morons, at least the world won’t have to bear the publicised contents of their sickened minds.

It’s not exactly change wrung through storming the corridors of power, as visualised by generations of fist-clenching idealists. Rather it’s a lesser radicalism achieved through the exploitation of capitalism’s sensitive side, born of the belated realisation among corporations that (big surprise here), black people, gay people and left-leaning people all have money too, and they can all choose where to spend it. But before business realised that bigotry’s bad, it took years of lobbying by those heinous forces of idealism – the ones Rush probably thinks are out to destroy him - to illustrate why unfounded hatred on the grounds of gender, race or sexuality is nowadays unacceptable to those of us in the quiet majority too old and comfortable to storm the barricades, but with a molecule of power in our pockets.