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Thursday 21 March 2013

Musica Elletronica Viva Meet Norman Mailer & Quatermass

Just ate too much chocolate washed down with coffee now I feel a little sick and very high...

...Musica Elletronica Viva's 'Spacecraft' had the same effect on me first thing this morning, which is probably no time to be listening to such a monstrous cosmic sonic voyage, but what the hell, it blew away the fog of sleep real quick and scared away the woodpecker that was on the feeder, so I like to imagine, although he couldn't hear it and it was just me doing that...

...here are just 6mins of the 30min journey and I bet you don't even last that long...



...more spacecraft last night watching Quatermass And The Pit, with Quatermass disgusted that the military have muscled in on his project with a view to using the moon as a missile base. The prof makes an
impassioned speech against the idea of us taking our mass murdering attitude into space, but loses the battle...

...opened Norman Mailer's Advertisements For Myself (good Jonathan Lethem article here) at a random page half an hour ago and read this: '...the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war...'. That's from his 1957 essay, The White Negro, which I first discovered in the 1959 collection, Protest: The Beat Generation And The Angry Young Men....


...'One is Hip or one is Square' said Mailer, and I believed him back in the early 80s when I got my copy - yes, it was that simple. It still would be if 'hipster' didn't mean something else, these days. Actually, it wouldn't, because what constitutes Hip or Square is no longer certain, whereas in the late-50s it was: you dug Jazz, Beat literature and didn't want any part of the post-war consumer society...and you would give birth to the Hippy movement, eventually, and all the sins that followed, such as awful clothes, dippy idealism and mostly awful music inspired by LSD...

...someone once said to me 'You need to be on drugs to appreciate that stuff' in relation to Dub - well, he was stupid, musically, and I never smoked weed whilst listening to King Tubby - perhaps that's my loss. I can't imagine what M.E.V. sound like on LSD, they're trippy enough without mind-altering chemicals...

2 comments:

  1. No, I didn't last that long!

    But your references to the woodpecker on the feeder and King Tubby have made my day anyway.

    And I was told a couple of hipster jokes only yesterday, must be something in the air...

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    Replies
    1. Hipster jokes? I didn't know there were such things. I wouldn't know a 'hipster' if I saw one anyway.

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