excess baggage

APRIL 14TH, PILA, POLAND So here I am in Pila, about 100 km from Poznan [if that helps], Northwestish Poland. Deep, deep in the heart of farming country. Not that I kind find anyone who'll admit that. My hosts and interpreter seemed nonplussed, possibly even surprised when I mentioned how rare it is for me to see so many fields. Driving here from the airport yesterday evening, all I saw was farms and the desolate little farming villages that make me glad I've spent the vast bulk of my life walking paved streets and being ignored by my neighbours. Fields and fields. I almost started to feel like Wordsworth for a second there, but that may have just been the jetlag kicking in. What was the predominant crop in this part of Poland, I asked [taking an interest, you see]? My hosts had no idea... erm, 'lots of different crops', they opined. Well, that was nonsense - even an urban scumbag like myself could see that most of the fields were planted with the same stuff. I just had no idea what it was - it could have been hemlock for all I knew - and, apparently, for all they cared. Sigh, feigning interest in rural monotony is hard enough, but its a damn sight harder when even people who live in the middle of it are seemingly oblivious. Perhaps 'oblivious' and 'nonplussed' are misused in this context, maybe the correct word would be 'dismissive'. Maybe the fact that the vovoidship [great word] appears to be one great farm is something that forward-thinking 21st century EU'd up Poles are embarrassed by. Can't think why... people gotta eat. My hosts did seem to put great store in Pila's Philips Light bulb factory, however. Now there's an industry to get excited about! Me [trying to flow with the conversational tides]: Err... do they make some sort of, erm... special light bulbs...? Interpreter: No. Just normal light bulbs. 25 and 40 watts. Of course, they don't make bulbs stronger than 40 watts. Which seems sort of apt - dingy and depressing, much like their miens. So - much love for the light bulb factory, little knowledge of the farm the size of Liechtenstein we just drove through. Yep, 'dismissive' would be a good word. Mention of my cousins in Krakow [a supposed ice-breaker] was greeted with the po-faced 'they haven't left yet?!'. Which is perhaps the sort of jokey question I would ask if I felt cheeky, but they seemed generally surprised that anyone would willingly stay in Poland. Which surely prompts one to wonder why the fuck they are still here, if they hate the place so much. Or all of this could just be some sort of weird pre-emption, maybe Poland’s been shat upon so many times by so many different people that now they just do it themselves. Hey! At least this way it's Polish shit. OK... so I lied. Not only farmland, but trees - lots and lots and lots of trees. Make that 'woods' - lots and lots of woods. Or are they forests? I've never quite been sure on the difference between a wood and a forest. I suspect forests are darker - could that be the only criterion of distinction? If so, who judges it? Does the European Forestry Commission have some sort of Bureau of Luminosity? Are forests generally considered cooler than woods in the sylvan world? Maybe woods are like the gimpy country cousins that forests prefer not to talk about, like some mad aunt locked up in the attic - being fed laudanum in her food to get her to stop banging her tray on the floor when guests come over. I imagine the trees of the wood getting together for conferences every now and then to discuss 'Strategies for Endarkening in a Post-Industrial World', with seminars on 'Increasing Foliage in the Pesticide Age' and lectures around the subject 'Getting together: Trees of the Wood don't need nearly so much Personal Space'. Most controversial of all would be the conference-ending debate, 'This house believes that evergreen trees are cheating bastards and Canada firs especially can just fuck right off'. So... Anyway, woods lots and lots of woods. I can't remember the last time I've seen so much arboreal action. There's no variety in the woods either, just acre upon acre of those tall skinny silver-barked trees. Maybe spruce... or ash, i seem to remember ash trees are tall and skinny with silver bark. Jesus! I can't remember where I put my keys five minutes ago but I can remember that ash trees are tall and skinny! Memory's a funny thing. All these trees create a kind of monotonous melancholy in the visitor - I find it all rather European and comforting. At the same time, it's rather spooky. Imagine these people surrounded by nothing but fields and woods. No wonder they're so miserable, but then I find that kind of misery European and comforting as well - you Americans, you wouldn't understand. You begin to understand why all those nasty middle-European fairytales with wolves and incest and woodcutters and murder - lots of murder - exist. Just staring at the woods from the window of a passing car, I began to imagine all the terrible screams that have emanated from them over the centuries. My first thought on checking in at the hotel was that I should register with the local pitchfork-wielding mob just in case of... y'know... happenings. Haven't actually talked about Pila yet, have I? Well, for what it's worth, here we go. Pila makes me feel bad for being rude about Gdansk. Well, I started off rude about Gdansk then changed my mind once I'd had a chance to walk around the delightful old town and visit the Cathedral. Pila on the other hand, is exactly what you'd expect of a post-commie country - a dump. A dreary, drab, grey dump. Fine, it's only a market town of 80,000 souls serving a farming area, but it's in Poland and if there's one thing Poland's got a lot of, its history. Not here. I thought I had an answer to the horrendous modernity of it all - by which i mean 1970's Brezhnev Chic... Me [very very delicately]: Erm...everything seems so new here [serious gilding of the lily here]... erm... was the town destroyed during the war? Interpreter [sort of missing my point]: No, i don't think so. But the council has just renovated everything, which is why it looks so nice and new now. Me: Ah! Yeah, that must be it. I would guess that this hotel is the largest building in town, closely followed by some period [Warsaw Pact period] apartment blocks, which you should be able to see in the photo. Believe it or not, what you are looking at is downtown Pila. Fine, no one expects Piccadilly Circus or Times Square in Pila, but how 'bout a nice church or town hall - something with a steeple, for fuck's sake! And Pastels! Please explain pastels to me! Sure, maybe on a nice watercolor, but why on a building? Pastels are my own personal bugbear when it comes to urban planning. I don't care if you construct a large bust of Lech Walesa out of catshit and eggshells and put it in the centre of town, just don't paint it in bloody pastels. Nothing looks uglier. Primary colours are the way forward. Erm... rant over, i just really really really don't like pastels on architecture... I've just been for a walk around town, and I have to say it doesn't improve much upon closer inspection. There are one or two churches that were vaguely charming and looked as if they may be older that 30 years - but since, patently, nothing else in this town is, I find it unlikely. I guess they just like their churches to luck old. But then again, doesn't everyone? [Yes - I enjoy looking around churches - sue me!]. I did find a delicatessen, though - just walking along their meat counter was heavenly. Wonderful smells. Bought myself what I thought was a pate, but turned out to be cream cheese with meat embedded in it. Hmm... interesting [both the cheese and the previous sentence]. Further observations: · Polish women are all attractive. Ok, ok... that's like saying all Italian-Americans are mobbed up... which, lets face it, they are. It's just that nobody's allowed to talk about it in public since Giuliani got cancer and that other bloke had an airport named after him. So there you go - conclusive proof that all Polish women are attractive, except for the ones that aren't a codicil to the above point. Polish women are attractive except for the finger tips which all seemed to be adorned with the most ridiculous manicures. [can you be adorned with a manicure?]. Little facsimiles of the Mona Lisa or representations of the stations of the cross on finger nails are not really my thing [especially in the case of the Stations of which there are fourteen, as I'm sure you already know being good papists, whereas most people usually only have ten fingers]. Still I guess it works with the men. · A codicil to the above codicil. I apologise for the above implication that women only, erm... decorate themselves because it 'works with the men'. · Polish people seem unfailingly polite and friendly, which given their history strikes me as above and beyond the call of duty. · This is quite possibly the most "European" country I’ve ever been in. No bad thing. · My interpreter is attractive and young. With a very large weird-looking belly. I've been caught between my need to ask [out of politeness] how far along she is with the pregnancy and my fear that she may just turn out to be fat. My crippling terror of the social faux pas has won out. · My hosts are very nice people - husband and wife. She obviously wears the trousers. Again, no bad thing. APRIL 11TH 2006, somewhere 'tween Beijing and Poznan, Poland Drunk on an Aeroplane no. 3 So here I am again - inebriated, 40 thousand feet above ground, seized with an irresistible urge to spout crap about some music. Hey! Whaddayaknow!? We have our first regular feature. This time, we're going to talk Built to Spill. Specifically 'Carry the Zero' by Built to Spill. But we'll get to the actual song in a little bit. First let's discuss the wonder that is BTS, in case you don't already know. You know how there are standards? By which I mean standard bands/albums that everyone [sensible] agrees on - that are always there - if modern music isn't working for you at a particular point in time, these standards are always there for you - doesn't matter how many times you've heard them, they always hit the spot. I'm talking about "Astral Weeks", "Let it bleed", pretty much anything the Beatles did from '66 onwards [don't deny it! Everyone loves at least SOME Beatles! How could you not?], "Face to Face" by the Kinks, Led Zep II, "Doolittle", "Achtung Baby" [yes, damn all of you revisionist scumbags to hell - it was, and remains, an amazing album], "Maggot Head", "the Bends", the second album by M83 [name escapes me at the moment], "1977" by Talking Heads... you get the general idea, I hope? These, among others, constitute the Canon. Once Bulgarian progressive ska from five minutes ago no longer gets the juices flowing like it used to, the Canon is always there, ready to warmly enfold you in its familiar genius - safe from the buffeting of the new and POTENTIALLY interesting. Shit, I haven't mentioned BTS once yet have I? My point here, as I'm sure you were quite able to gather four or five sentences ago, is that, if there's any justice in the world, Built To Spill will be an important part of your children's canon. Face it, it may be too late for you. If you're not familiar with them already and don't die a little every time you hear Doug Martsch's voice, then this shit is wasted on you. But look at it this way - None of us were alive when the Beatles actually existed as more that just a court case - I would hazard a guess that my mum liked them in a sort of dilettante-wow-what's-that-on-the-radio-its-groovy kind of the way [although the possibility that my mother ever said 'groovy' and meant it gives me the serious heebee-jeebees] , and old man Sherman, being of a slightly earlier 'youth' generation, was certainly not down with the aural or herbal benefits of the 60's, which is fine. Music is independent of time and space. Sure, Martha and the Vandellas' 'Heatwave' is very much a product of the mid-60's Motown Sweatshop, but it is also the single finest two and a half minutes of pop music ever produced -EVER. THERE IS NO ARGUING WITH THIS! Fifty years from now it will remain the best pop song ever and twenty years ago it WAS the best the pop song ever. We still haven't really talked about BTS, have we? Well, it ain't called Drunk on an Aeroplane for nothing. I'm hoping you're getting my general feeling about built to spill here. Basically, what I'm saying is - you may not get them, may not like them, may not know them [which makes you, at best, an idiot - at worst, you're my younger brother Pete] - maybe its too late for you, but your kids will know them, the way we unconsciously know the words to every Beatle's song. Built to Spill are tomorrows Canon. Fuck... and that's just the introduction to the introduction. [So it’s no longer Drunken on an Aeroplane - it's a few days later, and I'm now Drunken in an Airport - Frankfurt airport to be precise. You know, it's a funny thing... i don't think I've ever actually stepped foot in Frankfurt proper, but it seems like I've spent years of my life in Frankfurt Airport. I could say the same for Singapore, I guess. Anyway, I'm drunk in a airport because the usually highly efficient people at Lufthansa have delayed my flight by a couple of hours - what else is a boy to do. But it's a tricky thing - airport inebriation, timing is everything - you don't want to get too drunk and leery, otherwise they won't let you on the plane. The trick is to get nice and toasted - in a mellow sort of way - so that upon boarding the aircraft you can fall into a nice slumber for most of the flight. Anyway, its an art... that's all you need to know...] So we've established that twenty years from now Built to Spill will be part of the Canon, in the same way that the White Album is part of today's canon. Just go with it. Doug Martsch used to be part of a pretty decent little band called Treepeople, who essentially hitched a ride on all things early-nineties Seattle and Grungish. Not that they actually played grunge [whatever that may have been], more like a sort of guitar heavy indie-rock with stoopid inflections. When that whole scene had died the eventual death that it always was going to, since - y'know - it didn't actually exist. Martsch relocated back to Idaho, of all places, and got down to refining the rules of indie as we know it. If there are three essential nineties comparative touchstones that all commentators on modern American indie [and I stress American - British indie has very different antecedents] slavishly refer back to - then they are Modest Mouse, Pavement, and Built to Spill. MM are all about the yelping and staccato guitars, Pavement cover the left field [essentially they ARE the Indie Grateful Dead], but Built to Spill, Martsch's post-Treepeople vehicle are all about the craftsmanship. Writers like to faff on about the lo-fi aspect of elemental American indie. Built to Spill put the serious kibosh on that notion. BTS are a guitar band, almost that plain and simple. Martsch loves his guitar and all things guitar. His twenty minute live version of Neil Young's 'Cortez the Killer' tells you all you need to know about the plank-spanking heroics that Martsch is not only capable of, but willing to pursue. But that's not all - I once read an interview with Martsch where he said that, essentially, his lyrics were nonsense - just sounds to build the guitars around. Bollocks. He's being disingenuous. There are countless examples of lyrical genius I could cite here but I'll limit myself to one. From Dystopian Dream Girl 'My step father looks like Bowie, He hates David Bowie, I think Bowie's cool, I think 'Lodger' Rules, 'My stepdad's a fool' Okay, so on paper they luck pretty stupid... but that's the genius! Martsch is sort of right - they are nonsense, but set to music and sung in his vaguely nasal tones they become brilliant nonsense. These are possibly my favourite lyrics ever - just the emotive mundanity [is that a word?] So, the song itself... 'Carry the Zero' appeared on 1999's 'Keep it like a secret', BTS first Warner's album. I'm not even sure if this is indie any more. I'd go ahead and call this guitar pop [which'll piss Kagler off no end, i suspect]. Clocking in at over five minutes, it's still brief and direct by BTS' standard. The production is clean. I'm gonna go ahead and use what is rapidly turning into my most overused phrase here and talk about guitar bliss. [I'm unfortunately sober whilst writing this paragraph so if some of the scattershot joy in the music is missing - now you know why]. This tune is a head swinger. From the opening introductory phrase to the vaguely Smithsian jangle riff that carries us from the intro into the main meat of the tune, one's head [unless your dead] should automatically start swaying from side to side. There is no higher praise than that. Lyrically, it's typical Martsch nonsense that seems to make profound sense contextually - some sort of poison pen letter to a woman [all the best songs are], all perfectly timed. One of the most important things with BTS, is that Martsch's vocals are always topographically perfect - by which I mean the lyrical peaks and troughs, the forceful highlands and the pensive lowlands, are always perfectly placed. I'm not sure if that makes any sense - probably not - but it will to your kids. The songs is too perfect, there are no flaws upon which to hang my scribblings. Pure bliss - a trick that BTS perform frequently. That'll do... Fuck it, just go and buy the record. Buy 'em all. I'm not going to post up the song for a variety of reasons a] This isn't some ephemeral web flotsam that I've stumbled over and liked. This is Built to Spill, each tune needs to be heard in the context of an album. b] I'm lazy. c] There on Warner's, who'll probably come and take my teeth if I 'steal' their intellectual property. d] Did I mention the laziness thing? e] Most of you probably never bother to read all the way down to the bottom of these things, where the tune is posted. Fair enough, I doubt I would either. I'm going to propose a poll for the next Drunken on an Aeroplane, just to confirm to myself that no-one really cares [time to deflate my ego a little]. So the question is this - next time I get shitfaced on a 'plane would you prefer me to spout bollocks about a] Martha and the Vandella's 'Heatwave', or b] Sisters of Mercy's 'Temple of Love'? Choice [b], by the way, would include an embarrassing sexual anecdote from the Sherman Vault [recently expanded]. Start a thread on the Board, now! In closing, I'd just like to point out that spellchecker on Word does not recognize 'Aeroplane' as a word, whilst trying to steer me in the direction of 'Airplane'. This makes me sad. Monday April 3rd, 2006 Well, another busy weekend has ended, leaving another clump of white hair in its wake. Fresh of the 'plane from Europe on Friday and I accidentally ended up seeing the mostly female Hang on the box at 2 Kolegas. Having warmed up with some drinks round at Kyle's space-age bachelor pad, I was fully prepared for some cacophonous awful wonderfulness a la classic H.O.T.B. I am possibly the only foreigner I know in Beijing who likes the Box [as I'm damn well going to call them]. It's a carefully qualified like. Their recorded albums are crap by almost any measure you care to think of, but live the crappiness usually becomes sublime. The band always seem bored, unrehearsed, contemptuous, bitchy, totally up themselves yet somehow the ability to carry this arrogance off in front of an audience of twenty in some seedy Beijing dive seems to me a reason to love them long time - with beaucoup boom boom to boot. The sheer ridiculousness of their sneers in this context warms the chilled parts of my rock and roll heart. Don't get me wrong - they are terrible live, but entertainingly so. The live Box experience is 1.3% ability, 13% fit bass player [Oh, how I do love the fit bass players of the world], 55.7% attitude and 30% megaphone. Whenever the megaphone comes out at a Hang On The Box show, as it does frequently, and they kick into the 'Shanghai' song everything else is forgiven, if it wasn't already. Sadly, however, all this seems to be by the by now. Someone round at Hang On The Box Central - which i suspect they'd like us to believe is some sort of squat up in the 'Wu but in actual fact is probably daddy's apartment in Guo Mao - has been reading their own reviews and decided to 'improve'. Fuck! Big Capitalized Mistake. This wasn't the we're-shit-but-we-don't-care-and-you're-going-to-love-us-anyway-did-we-mention-that-we-don't-care Hang on the box of yore. This was a band that's been rehearsing, a band that's trying, a band that pauses between tunes for applause, a band that's trying out a new direction - trip hop, of all things! Why? The one thing the band had going for it in the first place - the 'we'd rather be going down on Jiang Zemin than playing to you scumbags' attitude - has been removed. Fuck - they were almost humble on Friday. Now all that's left is the crapness. My world has changed just a little. [someone presumably hadn't had his weetabix that morning] APRIL 2ND THIS IS ALL BULLSHIT! JUST RANDOM CRAP! There... just thought this should be pointed out to those of you who somehow haven't figured it out yet [if 'you' actually exist]. Feeling a little ranty today, consider yourself warned. The above statement has been prompted by some negative feedback i've received. I guess I wouldn't/shouldn't normally respond to this slagging - if ever there was writing begging to be slagged off it'd be mine. It's just in this case the source and nature of the abuse is so weird. I've received word that this guy [who's a lot closer to the steering wheel of the tag team juggernaut than I] has taken issue with my comment of a while ago that Rebuilding the Rights of Statues were, in my humble opinion, the best live band in Beijing. If he had another opinion, that would be fine. I clearly state in the text that not only is it my opinion but it is my humble opinion. But this guy doesn't have an opinion. Why not? Because he lives in Los Angeles and to the best of my knowledge has never been to Beijing or even China and therefore cannot possibly ever have seen R.R.S. To be fair to my detractor, let's call him Aurelius, I don't really think his deal is whether or not I like R.R.S., I think he has some sort of journalistic beef with me. The message I received was that I shouldn't make absolute statements - 'the BEST'. Why the hell not? Aurelius is a professional music journo/record label type, and apart from a totally misguided take of Frank Black's Teenager of the Year, writes good stuff. Good for him. But I'm not. Which I was assuming anyone reading more than five words of this would have realised. Apparently not - hence to reiterate the point at the top. If you want good solid professional online music journalism, i'd advise you to go check out Said the Gramophone, Zoilus, Coke Machine Glow or Under The Radar's website [no I'm not linking to them! You're not done here yet]. In the unlikely event of you wanting to read the poorly punctuated, poorly organized, frequently drunken scribblings of some wanker in Beijing, then... well, you've definitely got too much free time, BUT you now know where to spend some of it. Aurelius' beef may also have been the lack of plugging of T.T.'s family of quality releases or live performances. Bite me! There's no contractual obligation to relentlessly plug and nor is one necessary. T.T. have, and will continue to put out, the best independent music in China. There - another absolute statement! I love watching LCD gigs - they get better every time, and I highly anticipate Arrows Made of Desire's debut at the end of the month. But I rate R.R.S. It's a simple as that. As I said, their recorded work so far sucks [unlike LCD's], but they tear up a fucking stage. God knows why, but the gullible people at Tag Team have given me this little slice of cyberspace to do with as I please. But I don't think anyone was ever dumb enough to expect sense or accurate spelling. In fact the only suggestion I received was 'be snarky'. Well, obviously I'm eminently qualified to be snarky. I'm also pompous, arrogant, insecure, bitchy, sarcastic, drunk, egomaniacal, timid, humourless, tired, energetic, defensive, confused, happy and anything else I want to be from one minute to the next. Which should be blindlingly obvious, for fuck's sake! Otherwise, as George Bernard Shaw probably said from time to time - kiss my arse. [This was originally written as an email to a friend of mine. I've removed all of the sexual innuendo. By the way, some of my best ex-girlfriends are German, any nastiness that follows should be seen strictly in the context of the text, i.e. how I would expect Poles to feel] [back to Excessbloggage Archive]