Inspired by this feature at Pictory ...
The first place I ever really got culture shock was Australia.
The odd thing was that I, even at that age, I'd travelled a fair amount before - going all over Europe, Morocco, Cuba, swathes of South East Asia. Not only that but it wasn't the first time I'd I'd been there either - I'd worked and travelled there for several months a few years before.
However I'd just spent 2 months in Palo Alto working probably 80 hour weeks and then flown into London on Monday and then left bound for Oz with my then girlfriend on the Wednesday at 5am.
About 3 days later I was still nauseous with jet lag and still utterly exhausted. We went into Brisbane and kept bumping into people she knew and suddenly, standing in the town center I felt a weird almost vertigo-like sensation and it dawned on me that I was experiencing acute and pronounced culture shock.
Looking back I think it's because everything was nearly the same as the UK but just very slightly different - like a weird, real life application of The Uncanny Valley. In the William GIbson novel "Pattern Recognition" the protagonist continuously refers to this phenomenon as 'The Mirror World'
"The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."
For a while I kind of had a slight feeling of how people with Capgras Syndrome - the bizarre condition in which a sufferer holds a delusional belief that a friend, spouse, parent or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor - might feel. That uneasy feeling of certainty that, even though everything looks normal, something is terribly, terribly wrong.
It passed and, since then, I've had only the faintest echoes of that sensation. Occasionally I miss it - it wasn't entirely unpleasant and, without it, I fret that I'm somehow taking it all for granted.
So I keep travelling to prove myself wrong.
I really don't get the content industry sometimes. I mean, I do - insomuch that occasionally I can flip my perspective and sort of see things from their world view in which they live in a world in which they don't really understand why the things that work for them actually work and thus they fear change no matter how illogical some of their arguments are.
As a case in point - music videos on YouTube. Music videos are adverts. Sure, ever since "Thriller" there's been the chance that you can monetise these adverts in non standard ways but still, they're adverts. The raison d'etre of adverts is to be seen by as many people as possible yet the idea that people might virally pass around music videos appears to scare the living bejesus out of the Recording Industry who, perversely, also spend millions trying to promote viral content.
Despite these self evident contradictions - and in the face of persistent and compelling evidence that new technology that aids distribution only helps content producers and that, perversely, those who "pirate" more music are also overwhelmingly more likely to both spend more money on legitimate content and eulogise, proselytize and generally act like authentic but unpaid brand ambassdors - there seems to be this gnawing pain amongst these people that someone, somewhere might be not be paying them money.
This manifests itself in the archives of the 100+ 90s Music Monday posts I've done being littered with "This content is no longer available" and "Embedding is disabled by request". Let's face it - these incoherent ramblings, as sad and nerdy as they are, basically represent one long unrequited love letter to an industry which appears to hate me. It's a sonnet composed to an abusive relationship.
I was pleasantly surprised recently to find that "Night Swimming" by REM had a video. It seemed like a somewhat unlikely choice for a single and, despite it being my favourite song off "Automatic for the People" I don't remember seeing the video in my youth. Sure it's the drowsiest of all the songs on a well crafted yet somewhat morbidly soporific album - made in the period where REM had soaked up all their angst and anger using copious wads of thousand dollar bills. By all accounts it was supposed to be a much harder rocking album but the direction was changed early on - perhaps the mega success of the acoustic influenced "Out Of Time" made boat rocking an unappealing prospect.
Anyway - the video is available here on 'remhq' on You Tube. You'll have to click through because apparently the thought that the consumer might not be able to be corralled into a tightly controlled media 'experience' is an anathema.
Instead you get "Everybody Hurts" - a song which I felt like I ought to like but which for some reason rubbed me up the wrong way, like it had been genetically engineered in lab and focussed grouped to death in order to be just emo enough. One more pinch of soaring strings, the video of cinematically compelling 'ordinary people' all with their own little burden in life, the crescendo of everyone getting out of their cars to be free of ... something, that slightly too pat fake Newscast at the end for just the right sprinkling of verité ...
Alternative titles:
- Bathroom 51
- X Flies
- Kinkiest threesome ever
- "Honey, are you sure the child is mine?"
I struggled getting started writing this week's 90MM because I don't actually have the vocabulary to describe The KLF.
I started off trying to write something comparing them to that scene in [insert name of practically any teen movie here] in which the cool kids are pretending to agree with the uncool kid but actually they're just taking the piss out of them - but that didn't quite work.
Then, worrying that I was revealing a bit too much of my not-so-secret enjoyment of trashy teen movies, I thought about Marcel Duchamps and his dubbing of a urinal 'art' and what it meant when one of the leading lights of art starts, if not rejecting the concepts but at least examining the more self-evident absurdities.
Then I started off on a tract about style-vs-fashion and how some people are able to make whatever they do look good no matter what.
What it comes down to though is that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in their incarnations as The KLF, The Kopyright Liberation Front/Kings of the Low Frequencies, The Jams, the Justified Ancients of Mummu, The Timelords, The K Foundation, One World Orchestra, 2K etc etc managed to simultaneously mock the whole music and art industry whilst also changing the entire face of the industry and putting out storming, anthemic tracks like this
and this
They practically invented the modern bootleg with "Whitney Joins The JAMs" whcih mashed "Mission: Impossible" samples with Whitney Houstons "I wanna dance with somebody". Then, as The Timelords they deliberately wrote a nauseatingly catchy "lowest common denominator, something that Timmy Mallet would understand" song which took samples from Doctor Who and crashed them into Garry Glitter's "Rock and Roll (Part 2)" and The Sweet's "Blockbuster!" with the explicit intention of getting a number 1 single. Which they did with "Doctorin The Tardis". Then they wrote a book called "The Manual (How to have a number 1 the easy way)" which told you how they did it and gave the guarantee that if you followed the book to the letter and didn't get a number 1 they'd refund the cost of the book.
They 'retired' in the most spectacular form possible - at the 1992 Brit Awards they performed a live "violently antagonistic performance" of "3 A.M Eternal" in front of "a stunned music-business audience" with crust punk group Etreme Noise Terror. Prevented from throwing buckets of Sheep entrails over the audience a bekilted Bill Drummond theatrically limped on stage and fired blanks from a machine gun into the air
After which they burnt their last million pounds on the Isle of Jura and filmed it.
Every time someone tries to tell you that Green Day or Limp Bizkit or Sum 41 or god-forbid Avril Lavigne are punk I want you to think of this. I'm not saying that their music is bad necessarily I'm just saying that if some one tries to straight faced tell you that those or similar artists are "punk" then I want you to cock slap them. I want you to physically either punch them in the penile or vaginal area and/or lay about their face with your penis or other similarly degrading appendage - work with what both you and they have people. Get creative. Make sure they REALLY TRULY understand.
Because it's important.
Except when it's not.
First, we're happy to announce that the team has identified and fixed the issue with the YouTube conduit; you can now find and add videos from YouTube to your library and posts. As always, thanks for your patience!
The other news we have today is about a new addition to the Six Apart family: TypePad Micro, a new free level of TypePad that is streamlined for microblogging. We see a new form of blogging emerging that lives between the quick status updates of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form posts of "classic" blogging; TypePad Micro is designed to meet that need. You can read more about TypePad Micro in Chris Alden's post on the Everything TypePad blog.
A lot of the new capabilities we've added to TypePad this year were actually inspired by some of the best things about Vox: favoriting, member profiles, a dashboard to follow other bloggers, and easy ways to post content from other social media sites. But the things that make Vox different from TypePad are still there: Vox has always been -- and still is -- the best place for "friends and family" blogging, where you're in control over who sees what. TypePad, on the other hand, is built for the blogger who wants, no, craves, attention.
Do you have a passion or interest you want to share with people beyond your Vox neighborhood? If so, we'd love it if you tried out TypePad Micro. Maybe you've always wanted to start that obsessive blog that's just about waffle restaurants. Or want a place to share videos of your favorite band (Jonas Brothers, anyone? Anyone? ...). TypePad Micro's great for those topic-specific blogs. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.
On the Vox front, our designers are working on some cool new themes (coming soon!). We'd also love to hear your thoughts about where we should take Vox in the coming year. What are the key things you'd like to see for Vox? If you've had a chance to use TypePad this year, what are the features there that we should bring over to Vox? And, if you're thinking big thoughts, how could we connect the Vox and TypePad communities in order to bring together bloggers and their shared passions? Your feedback is really important to us, so please leave a comment here, or shoot me a message.
And again, thanks for your patience as we found and fixed the YouTube bug!
~ daisy
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would...and I really enjoyed the last third as all of the seemingly disconnected bits came together. I haven't read a book this strongly about "identity" since the Auster binge I went on about 15 years ago. (Speaking of which, his new book is next up in the queue...)
House music has always veered between having a sense of humour about itself and being thoroughly up its own arse. Tracks have trodden the very thin line between novelty, kitsch and playfulness - witness the differences between The Prodigy's "Charlie" (which, even at 180bpm, sounds twice as slow now as it did in my head at the time), Urban Hype's "Trip To Trumpton" and plummeting to new depths with Doctor Spin's "Tetris".
Set against this backdrop was N-Trance who are an odd datum on the arc of early to mid nineties techno. Their first demo was an (unreleased?) rave version of the theme tune to kids' tv program "Roobarb and Custard" but in '92 they put out "Set You Free" - a genuine, euphoric, hands in air rave anthem.
and then the slightly less goofy (but only just) with their take on Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"
But more on that next week ...
As many of you have noticed, the YouTube Conduit is not working. I am so sorry about this; I know how frustrating it is.
The team is looking into how to get this fixed and I will update you as soon as I hear something. In the meantime, not all is lost... There is a work-around for posting videos.
When you're in the Compose Screen, just click on "embed." Ignore the fact that it says "Widget" before everything because you can definitely use this to embed videos as well. You'll just need to input the embed code from the video, enter a title (if you want) and hit OK.
It might not show up perfectly in your compose screen, but when you hit "Save," your video should appear just the way you wanted it to.
Hopefully this will allow you to keep posting videos while we figure out what's happening on our end.
As always, thanks for your patience.
