Rough Trade Top 50 Favourite Albums 2009

Unashamedly plagiarising yesterday’s totally novel idea of coming up with a list of the year’s best things weeks before the end of the year that you’re writing a list of things to represent the best things of that year for, Rough Trade just sent me an e-mail entitled ‘Albums of the Year 2009’.

This seems like an unnecessarily passive-aggressive act if you ask me, particularly from a record label that I’ve always had a relationship of, if not mutual respect, then unspoken tolerance. I put up a post yesterday listing what I think are my own favourite albums of 2009. In this post I was at pains to make clear the subjective nature of my list: the title referred to ‘favourite things’, with the ‘favourite things’ being implicitly things that were the ‘favourites’ of the author (i.e. me).

In short, it was clear that this was opinion, in no way based on the objective scientific calculations of intense laboratory experimentation. It was a lazy idea, just a bit of fun to maybe start a conversation, albeit not a very interesting one where your mind quickly flits to thoughts of defenestration or ways to fake a stroke. But Rough Trade responded almost immediately without so much as an acknowledgement of my original post. No, “oh, that’s interesting” or “hmm, yes, but you’ve forgotten to include the Animal Collective album”. No “well, here’s what we think”. Just a long list of “50 Albums of the Year”, arrogantly dismissing my list by refusing to acknowledge its existence, and then having the audacity to present their own list as some kind of divinely selected musical canon (like RT are a kind of indie Moses). It’s like casually mentioning to an acquaintance that you quite like Newsnight, them staring at you with a look of disdain for a few seconds, then turning round and shouting the names of National Television Award winners into your face.

 To add insult to injury, they’ve even included a list of links so I can buy the albums on their list from them. Presumably, they think I could do with a bit of brushing up, like I’m not hip to what’s cool or something. Anyone would think that my inclusion of an album from 1974 and 2 reissues suggested I’d run out of ideas.

 I mean, I haven’t actually listened to a lot of what’s on their list, or even heard of it to be honest. At least now I don’t need to: I can just assume it will all be over-hyped nonsense…

 Rough Trade’s Ten Favourite Albums, 2009:

 The XX – XX

The Low Anthem – Oh My God, Charlie Darwin

The Horrors (yes, the fucking Horrors!) – Primary Colours

Fever Ray – Fever Ray

The Pain of Being Pure at Heart – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

The Leisure Society – The Sleeper and the Product of the Ego Drain

Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

Forest Fire – Survival

The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa

The only overlap between our lists comes at number 21 with Wild Beasts, thus intensifying speculation that they’re set to scoop  this year’s Vampire Weekend Award for Rousing Acceptance Rapidly Followed by Indifference and, Eventually, Hostility

Another quick, lazy and self-indulgent post: favourite things 2009 (pt 1)

Albums/Potential candidates for the Vampire Weekend Award for Rousing Acceptance Rapidly Followed by Indifference and, Eventually, Hostility

Zu – Carboniferous

Listening to this makes me want to punch things. I’m a pacifist, so I’m immobilised with the conflicting impulses of peace and violence.

Nadja – When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV

Dirgy wall-of-sound type sound, like a herd of elephants pissing on some stalagmites. These are some gooooood stalagmites though: covers of MBV, A-Ha, The Cure etc.

Yacht – See Mystery Lights 

I really liked this when I first heard it, then they had it on in TopMan the other week. What the asymmetrics were listening to for about 5 seconds, I imagine. Sounds a bit like LCD Soundsystem, but with CSS jaunty fun-ness. Good for frolicking.

Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue

WARP-y folk electronica. There’s probably a proper genre name for this kind of thing, but I don’t want to know what it is.

The Raincoats – The Raincoats (reissue)

1) Hate all musicianship 2) Love all shouty feminist post-punk.

 Tartufi – Nests of Waves and Wire

 Ok, it’s a bit like Animal Collective. But it’s better, so there.

 Sunn 0))) – Monoliths and Dimensions

Hmmmmmmmfffffffffpppppppphhhhh yyyyyrrrrrrrggggggrrrrrrrr brrrrrttttttt

Wild Beasts – Two Dancers

To be honest, I think this will win the Vampire Weekend award thing. Has its moments.

Michael Hurley – Armchair Boogie, Have Moicy etc

I know these albums are old, but I only started listening to them this year and they’re better than anything else. Hilarious and sad and lovely.

Loop – Reissues (Heaven’s End, Fade Out, The World in Your Eyes)

Shoegaze like it’s on sale for £19.99.

The Patio Set – EP thing (don’t remember what it’s called)

This is great. You should listen to it and then wonder why you hadn’t heard of them a year ago.

http://www.myspace.com/patioset

Stewart Lee preps for Celebrity Mastermind, writes book, continues big tour, takes over world

It seems that Stewart Lee, off of BBC TV’s Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, is going to appear on a future edition of Celebrity Mastermind.

 According to a Q&A on his website, SGL has been listening to lots of Derek Bailey, the free-improv avant-garde guitarist, in preparation for ‘doing’ him on a future edition of the popular quiz. Excerpt’s from Bailey’s Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass were used by Lee on his Stand-Up Comedian DVD (very cheap on Amazon right now).

 Stewart Lee is also writing a book about stand-up called How I Escaped My Fate.

He’s currently on tour with his If you prefer a milder comedian, please ask for one show, details of which can be found here.

 Me and le Baker are big fans. We’ll be going to see the new show in ‘that London’ in a few weeks. Last time we saw Slee in the big city, Johnny Vegas got involved in dubious incident with a shy librarian; when we saw Stand-Up Comedian at the Soho, Mr Lee went a bit mad and started shouting at a man in an EGG EGG EGG EGG EGG t-shirt.

And people complain that Slee is boring.

I can hardly wait.

www.stewartlee.co.uk

Watching you, watching me: The fear of CCTV

I recently had the pleasure of reading Anna Minton’s new book, Ground control: fear and happiness in the twenty-first century city. It’s a great overview of problems with the privatisation of public space and I’d highly recommend it for anyone interested in the terrifying spread of surveillance and gentrified secure-by-design space. More than anything, it succeeds in making you angry about the ways our towns and cities are being constructed as soul-drainingly banal zones of social purity and, well, nothingness, policed by increasingly elaborate forms of surveillance technology, where some people can and do belong and others are rendered out-of-place. Purification is linked with profit, Minton argues. Counter-intuitively, the gated-communities and surveillance technologies that are supposed to make us feel safer have the converse effect: fear of crime is on the rise.

The relationship between fear of crime and surveillance technology is the subject of a new paper by forensic psychologists at the University of Huddersfield. I’m no forensic psychologist, but I was interested to see whether the paper might further flesh out the psychological reasons for a seemingly counter-intuitive rise in fear of crime in the face of increased surveillance and reductions in the amount of actual crime. Based on existing psychological models of the fear of crime, Williams and Ahmed (2009) argue that whether CCTV cameras are reassuring or fear-inducing depends on a complex range of factors influencing people’s perceptions: for example, the nature of the environment in which they’re placed, the people in that environment, and the pre-existing assumptions of the observer (along with a range of other individual factors such as age, gender and so on).

CCTV may act as kind of ‘cue’, they suggest, influencing our understanding of how much we should trust an environment and the other people in it. To use the authors’ own example, CCTV cameras outside a school might ‘cue’ a sense of vulnerability that requires protection, while CCTV cameras in a shopping precinct populated by large groups of young people might trigger interpretations of ‘threat’. On this basis, they set out to explore the dynamics of the relationship between CCTV, our preconceptions and the characteristics of the environment.

To explore this relationship the authors showed people photographs of an urban scene into which they placed different targets, including a CCTV camera and pictures of either a single female or a male skinhead. The idea was, firstly, to see whether the presence of a CCTV camera influenced ratings of crime frequency and fear of crime. Secondly, they wanted to see whether these ratings depend on the positive or negative stereotypes cued by other factors: in this case the presence of a male skinhead, assumed to trigger more negative criminal stereotypes, or a ‘studious’ female, assumed to trigger more positive feelings of protectiveness.

The paper’s key finding is that reported fears of walking in the area shown in the photograph was significantly higher when the scene included both a CCTV camera and a male skinhead. Participants were also asked to write a ‘day in the life’ of the target – only male skinheads were viewed as antisocial, and only in the presence of a CCTV camera. As such, the authors argue that CCTV and particular figures such as ‘the male skinhead’ work together to create a sense of fear and anxiety – they do not have this effect on their own.

There is an underlying political message to this research which is largely consistent with the message of Minton’s book: CCTV and surveillance technologies may be contributing to our fear of strangers and the erosion of trust in society. Rather than protecting us from particular folk devils, they play a part in creating them.

That said, I wonder how much this research can actually tell us about the psychological mechanisms underlying fear of crime. To me, the presented photographs seem to draw attention to their own contrivance. Taking part in psychological research, people are often left searching for clues as to what is really required of them and what the researcher is looking for. This sometimes happens in qualitative research on prejudice, where people can respond in a prejudicial manner out of a kind of politeness – they respond in a negative way, not necessarily because it accurately represents their own views on a particular topic, but because they think it is what’s required of them in the research they’re taking part in. I wonder whether the visible contrivance of the photos may have communicated a need for participants to think stereotypically. It may be that the presence of a CCTV camera in this case doesn’t simply ‘trigger’ perceptions of a figure as antisocial, but instead communicates the need for, and even social legitimacy, of stereotyping.

The researchers’ own presumption that the male skinhead would be negatively stereotyped is itself somewhat dubious and risks implicitly reproducing stereotypes of the ‘threatening’ skinhead. In this way, the political objectives of the paper might be undermined by some of the banal assumptions they make.

Links

http://www.annaminton.com

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/10683160802612882

Film Friday

Stop the press: STEVE GUTTENBERG IS NOT DEAD!

As we rapidly hurtle towards our destruction by a future angry at us for crimes other people committed, the dividing lines between good and bad seem more sharply defined than ever. Climate change: bad; climate awareness: good. Swine flu: bad; pork: good. Postal strikes: bad; the postal service: good.

 Do the same dividing lines apply equally to the world of cinema? Given the willingness of some of us to lap up any old horseshit as long it’s horseshit that looks like it’s  hurtling towards us in 3-D, whilst the rest of us retreat into our Fellini DVD boxsets, I think maybe they do.

 In a world of good and bad: what of the run-of-the-mill, the ok, the mediocre? Spare a thought for Steve Guttenberg, the undisputed king of mediocrity (cf Fist of Fun, 1995). I assumed he had died a quiet, mediocre death somewhere, possibly of SARs (not swine flu: too now). I was wrong.

 Steve Guttenberg is back and seems to be undergoing a bit of a career re-positioning. First, he’s trying his hand at stand-up comedy. Second, 19 years after the last one, they’re making a new Three Men and a Baby film. It’s going to be called Three Men and a Bride. What with the announcement of a movie adaptation of the Berenstein Bears books, is this the week my childhood finally breaks down into a big weeping puddle of despair?

 Is Guttenberg funny? See for yourself (the answer is no, obviously):

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cfa7881384/guttenbergs-steak-house-from-steve-guttenberg-and-drew

Some lazy thoughts on academia:

 1) Universities are like a national witness relocation programme – they’re a great place to hide.

2) Academics are people too.

3) Worries about power inequalities go out of the window once a senior position is in the bag.

4) There is a hierarchy of disadvantage which it is helpful to understand.

5) Doing a topic that sells is a substitute for ideas and rigorous thinking.

6) Academics are good value: they’re willing to do 2 jobs (or more) for the price of one, whilst being criminally underpaid.

7) Just because you know lots of stuff, doesn’t mean you can explain it to other people.

8) Most academics over the age of 35 look and smell like divorce.

Buying a house (part 1)

Buying houses: what’s that about? Providing American stand-up comedians with the subject for a tediously inevitable rhetorical question? Middle-class angst alert! The baker and me have been trying to buy a house for a while: a humble little 2-bed Victorian terrace in Reigate, with an airy vibe (rising damp) and charming period features (a broken roof). Six months and a few thousand pounds later, we’ve downgraded our ambitions to the purchase of a secluded molecule of shit under a north-facing pebble in Blackpool. Well, not Blackpool – actually, the exact opposite of Blackpool; we’re trying to buy a flat in, erm, Guildford. I’ll probably write something about Guildford at some point; I don’t want to blow my bilious load just yet. Suffice to say I know, I know, I know.

I read a book once (I think it was Steven Shapin’s Social History of Truth, but I might be wrong) which had a bit about how trust is the cornerstone of any properly functioning society: in fact, it’s what our scientific knowledge of everything is based on. If I remember rightly, one of the arguments was that for us to successfully interact with the world around us, we have to put faith in what other people tell us. Whether it’s that a mechanic has fixed the brakes on our car, or that the car is actually a car and not a giant cake running on liquorice, we have to use what we’ve been told about the world to make assumptions and get things done.

A rather lovely implication is that we need other people to survive. Togetherness defines our humanity. We need to have some faith that other human beings have the capacity for honest decency in order for everything to function. Of course, you always need to assess the credentials of your information source: only an idiot would trust anything I ever say, for example.

But when you buy a house, the opposite is true. Assume other people are acting decently at your peril. In all likelihood, they’re not. House purchasing is like driving – it’s one of those few situations in life where it seems acceptable, and almost expected, that people will act like dementedly selfish fuck knuckles.

Imagine: you go into a grocers and buy, say, a big juicy-looking watermelon. You know it’s a watermelon – it says so on the sign, and also, it looks like a watermelon. You get it home; mmm, watermelon you’re thinking. Hubba-hubba. I like watermelon. Then you crack it open. Disappointment awaits. Instead of that nice juicy pink flesh bit, the inside is made of hypodermic needles and some grit. Not quite what you were expecting; understandably, you’re a bit irritated. Still, you take it back to the shop and the grocer kindly agrees to swap it for another one, apologising for the inconvenience in the meantime.

Now, say the watermelon is a house. The following is more likely: you see a nice watermelon on the internet and ring up to say you’re interested in buying it. They ask you what your financial predicament is. You lie and tell them it’s tight – you’ll struggle to pay the full price of the watermelon, but you’d like to see it anyway. The fruit and vegetable specialist drives you to the grocers. Once there, you’re shown a small rotting turnip. This is the only thing they have left. You tell the fruit and veg specialist that it isn’t quite what you were looking for. They tell you that the turnip is actually a watermelon and, anyway, it’s a good price for the area. You say you’re not sure. They tell you that with things the way they are, it’s either this or you starve. You cave in. You tell them you’ll take it, but for less than the advertised price. The fruit and veg specialist tells you this is out of the question: the price of turnips will only increase over the next year because there’s a national turnip shortage (even though turnips are actually selling for less and less). You cave in. You say you’ll pay the full price for the turnip. Then they tell you that somebody else has expressed interest in the turnip. You’ll need to pay over the asking price, otherwise you’ll miss out. You cave in. Whatever it takes, you just want the turnip. They say you can have the turnip. On one condition: you have to get a turnip specialist to assess the quality of the turnip. You pay the turnip specialist, who tells you the turnip is riddled with aphids. But you should still buy the turnip. You buy the turnip. It gives you food poisoning and you die.

On the plus side, your children get to keep what’s left of the turnip. They put it on the internet. The fruit and veg specialist rings up – some people are interested in buying a watermelon…

Buying houses. What’s that about? Grrrr. Sometimes I think we’d be better off handing over our life savings to the KLF*.

*The K Foundation allegedly burned a million quid on 23rd August 1994 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid). Remember? No? I think I need some more contemporary cultural reference points!

A Small Town Anywhere

Yikes, I’m scared. We’re all scared, but I’m letting it show. And with good reason: it turns out I’m a convicted criminal. Worse still, I’ve no recollection of my crimes and nobody seems willing to enlighten me. It’s like I’m trapped in one of those room escape puzzle games where you wake up, covered in blood, facing a race to clear yourself of crimes you probably didn’t commit.

It’s like that, apart from the fact I’m in a Pizza Express near Clapham Junction, sipping a nice cool Peroni with the butcher and the baker – a final drink before my fate is revealed. What will the community think? Am I doomed to spend the rest of my life rotting in my own filth (admittedly, not a massive lifestyle upheaval)? Or does something far worse await me? Yikes, indeed.

“God, you’ll be fine”, says my fiancée, the baker. “Stop going on about it”. She sounds irritated: my impending exile has come between her and a cakehole full of Pollo Pancetta. The baker has her own shit to deal with right now. She’s meeting the mysterious Henri Georges in an hour; an evening of intense baking beckons. The butcher chips in: “I wonder whether I’ll get a meat cleaver”. My own concerns pale into comparison. I mouth a guilty ‘sorry’.

 So ok, I haven’t really committed a crime (unless you count pirating Betamax films in the 80’s). But the fear – the fear is real enough. We’re on our way, see, to visit A Small Town Anywhere at the Battersea Arts Centre. It’s been devised by Coney who describe themselves as an agency “of adventure and play, founded on principles of adventure, loveliness, and reciprocity”. They’re an enigmatic bunch. They have a leader who goes by the name of Rabbit and the rather admirable aim of bringing play and fun to the sometimes po-faced world of theatre. It’s a fairly unusual piece of theatre at that: there’s no script and the audience take on the key roles.

This is the part that really scares me. I haven’t done any amateur dramatics since GCSE Expressive Arts (not, according to the baker, a ‘proper’ GCSE). In fact, I’m so socially backward, speaking to other people in real life sends me into a crazed panic: my eyes dart around uncontrollably, I start waving my arms like I’m communicating horse odds, and occasionally resort to punching the other person in the face just to get the whole sorry incident over with as quickly as possible. Public speaking is worse. I carry a glass-encased scalpel which I’ll crack open to cut out my own tongue if anyone ever tries to make me do it.

We arrive early at the BAC, the baker nervously toddling off for her secret meeting with Henri. In fact, this is not our first encounter with Monsieur Georges: all week we’ve enjoyed intriguing correspondence with the Small Town’s cryptic historian. E-mailing Henri is highly recommended. In exchange for the revelation of a few ‘personal’ secrets you’ll be rewarded with snippets from the town’s archives and gently nudged into taking on a role within its emerging history. Tonight, I am Le Prisoner. I know nothing of my crimes, only that a shadowy character known as ‘the Raven’ may have been responsible for my incarceration. Beware inky claws, I am told.

Pre-show googling suggests that A Small Town Anywhere is heavily inspired by Henri Georges Clouzotí’s 1943 film Le Corbeau (the Raven), in which a small French community is torn apart by a series of anonymous poison-pen letters. The letters in the film are signed simply Le Corbeau. The film raises questions about how clearly we can define right and wrong. Sod that. An unshakeable backstory has developed in my mind, subtly egged on by our own Henri: this ‘Raven’ character is pure evil and needs to be taught a lesson; as a morally reformed convict, it’s my job to take him down.

After being issued with hats and badges by the only proper actor we encounter all evening, we’re ushered into the Small Town itself – a single room, with representation of the town’s architecture not much more elaborate than in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville. A voiceover guides us to our locations and takes us through a typical day: sunrise and the delivery of the town’s post, afternoon gossiping, and a meeting in the town hall perhaps (or maybe a sermon at the local church) before evening drinks at the pub. Gossiping aside, it seems our ‘days’ will be punctuated with lots of letter writing – we have our own post office and a rugged looking ‘postmistress’ unconcerned with current picket lines. A pen and paper are the only things I find in my ‘cell’. No matter. Time to stir up a shitstorm.

 Even if our ‘game’ doesn’t quite do justice to the playful build-up, what follows are an absorbing couple of hours’ fun. My fears of being forced to act prove unfounded. With no audience in the traditional sense you become immersed in the flow of events and interactions as though its everyday life – albeit everyday life in a very different social reality. Age-old questions are raised about a range of issues: the performative nature of everyday social existence, inter-community tensions and the banality of power and corruption. As someone familiar with the (in)famous Stanford Prison experiments, I’m surprised at how quickly I come to quietly despise my jailers, presuming their role selection to be based on some latent fascistic/authoritarian tendencies.

 I furiously scribble notes to the town’s journalist casting aspersions on the character of the police chief and the local undertaker (I’ve received notes, which I’m all to ready to accept, identifying the undertaker as the source of an ugly rumour about me). I let out an evil cackle: an unfortunate incident with a banana; ha ha ha, that ought to do it.

Later, after we’ve been forced to make a number of icky moral decisions, I pay a visit to the butcher and the baker. The butcher’s annoyed – somebody has stolen a tin of spam – and the baker is trying to convince the postmistress that the black stains on her hands are from cake icing. Cake icing. Cake icing? Wait: she hasn’t even made any cakes. Wha-? Could it be? The baker…my baker…my trusted, loving, lying-through-her-beaky-Raven faced fiancée?

Beware inky claws.