To Disco With Love

I’ve gone a bit Disco recently.

In part, this was kind of inevitable. After all a lot of the bands I’ve written about on this blog had their Disco phase, so why shouldn’t I have one too? And the truth is, I’ve always been more than a bit partial to some Disco. I was 10 years old in 1979, and I reckon that you’ll find very few people who were that age in that year with free access to a radio and Top of the Pops whose souls aren’t momentarily lifted whenever they hear the intro to Funkytown.

But my recent phase has been influenced by David Hamsley’s To Disco With Love, a book that  collects together some of the Disco era’s album artwork, grouped into different themes (with the mid 70s dominating, there’s a lot of golds, browns and sunburnt finishes), The covers are often pretty much as bad as you would expect, but then again, so what? As a Black Sabbath fan, I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea of great music coming with dreadful covers.

And a lot of it was great. Chic and Giorgio Moroder get a lot of the attention these days, but at the moment I prefer the mid 70s period: less glitter more strings plus a sprinkle of high camp (which, let’s face it, gave flavour to most of the great pop from the 70s). Disco’s borders with Funk and soul were pretty porous, and the book finds space for Kool & the Gang, Philadelphia International and even Ramsey Lewis.

The older I get, the more I like this stuff. And I like it without irony, this is no guilty pleasure, where the Salsoul Orchestra albums are tucked safely away from view. I think it’s because it’s all upbeat stuff. I find dark and edgy music overrated these days, I’ll take the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, AC/DC or ABBA any day.

9 Things About 90 Years of La Liga

The January 2019 edition of Panenka has a long feature commemorating 90 years of the Spanish football league. It’s full of interesting stuff, but my favourites are below:

1. The league’s biggest hammering came in only its second season, when Athletic won 12-1 against Barcelona. Yes, that Barcelona.
2. The second republic in the 30s meant that clubs that had “Real” in their names had to go republican too and lose their royalty. So we had Madrid F.C among others, and Real Sociedad (“Royal Society”) had to change their name to Donostia F.C.
3. During the civil war, a group of Basque players formed a team and went on tour in Europe to raise funds for the resistance. They ended up in Mexico, called themselves Deportivo Euskadi and actually played a season in the Mexican league, finishing second.
4. Celta’s Manuel Fernandez Fernandez was blocked from playing for the Spanish national team in the 40s because he was suspected of being a communist due to his liking for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
5. The players of the successful Barcelona team of the 50s may have out-partied Scottish footballers of the the 70s (“sometimes they went out for dinner on Monday and returned home on Wednesday”).
6. The U.E. Lleida team of the the 1950-51 who conceded the most in one season, letting in an impressive 134 goals in 30 games. They were relegated.
7. In the 1952-53 season, Atletico Tetuan of Morocco played one season in the first division, something that wouldn’t be repeated after the country gained independence later in the 50s.
8. In the late 50s the Fairs Cup took two years to contest, which meant that in the 1959-60 season, Barcelona were competing in the European Cup and the Fairs Cup at the same time.
9. In the 74-75 season Sporting Gijon’s Tati Valdes lost his wig while competing for a header. Unable to fix it back on, he left the pitch and didn’t reappear until two games later, where of course he was suddenly bald. I can’t tell you how much I like this story.

The 1992 General Election

Edward Pearce’s Election Rides is a collection of articles that the author wrote for The Guardian during the 1992 General election campaign. Each of the 20-odd chapters describes a different constituency, and Pearce shadowing one of the candidates for a day’s campaigning, usually involving pub lunches, visits to parts of the constituency identified as friendly or friendly-ish to the candidate, and more likely than not, a visit to an Old Folks’ home. It’s interesting to re-read this book after 27 years or so. Apart from anything else, reminds you of an older, different politics. The election was the last one before people started having internet access, and it’s the party political broadcasts that provide the background music, particularly the controversial, emotive Labour broadcast that highlighted the long waiting list experienced by a young child on the NHS.

Then, there are the old school politicians, with Pearce telling the story of John Stradling Thomas, who was a popular MP for Monmouth, until he started drinking heavily and ended up falling down a flight of stairs, sustaining head injuries. This led to a personality change, and him becoming a somewhat less-popular MP for Monmouth (this is described as a “conspicuous waning of his powers” over on the Dictionary of Welsh biography site).  Apart from that, the book describes a UK that is grumpy rather than angry. Europe barely gets a mention.

The 1992 General Election was the first one I voted in, casting my vote in the impressive surroundings of the Edinburgh Deaf school. It would have been in the holidays before my last term at college and my memory has me going there early in the morning before going to the library to study, caught in that enjoyable transition period of finishing my studying and finding something to do with the rest of my life. I also remember watching the results coming in with my flatmate on my small black and white portable. we both voted Labour and thought they would just sneak in, but once the Conservatives had held Basildon, it became clear they weren’t going to.

Excelsior

I think Stan Lee was a genius. I’m guessing that in the next few days we’ll see some articles questioning his legacy. One of the things that complicates analysis of Marvel in the 60s is the so-called “Marvel Method”, which Lee developed. This was essentially a delegation of responsibilities that enabled him to oversee multiple comics a month: Lee would first agree on a plot with an artist, then the artist would go away and pencil the comic, and Lee would then add the dialogue. How much of the comic was Lee’s work and how much of it was the artist? It’s very difficult 50 years on to separate things cleanly, and a lot of people these days give Lee a supporting role (“It was two thirds Kirby, one third Lee”).

But even accepting that, I still think Stan Lee was a genius, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was his contributions that made Marvel comics human, whether it was the Fantastic Four squabbling like an actual family or Peter Parker being worried more about his Aunt May’s health than he was about the Green Goblin. The dialogue in those late 60s Amazing Spider Man comics still fizzes.

Secondly, and more importantly, he developed the Marvel universe. The Marvel method enabled him to directly oversee every comic that Marvel produced in the 60s, and he made the most of it, planning and directing a cohesive universe that today’s Marvel Studios are benefiting from as they plan their domination of the multiplexes. Along the way, he built up a community of fans with a sense of humour that contrasted starkly with stuffy old DC (I like the story of him apologizing to the readers in one issue of Giant Man because he wasn’t sure if the story made a lot of sense). Was he a creative genius in the way that we like them to be, a tortured writer or artist? No, he was a wise-cracking huckster, whose real genius was in directing and managing. But it was still genius.

So farewell Stan, and thanks for all the great comics. Excelsior!

Greg Mitchell at IKEA

“Hello! Greg Mitchell here. I must say I’ve had a great day of shopping here in Ikea. I’ve picked up 400 apple-scented tea lights, a daybed, 3 great big canvas photos of the Brooklyn Bridge and a design award-winning lampshade that only cost $200 and .. rawr rawr rawr no no no no what am I saying? My wife’s gawna kill me!”

The Day That Tennent Caledonian Met Golden Wonder

I was intrigued to see the above Burts Guinness potato crisps in my local supermarket the other day. the crisps themselves may taste like Guinness but they aren’t alcoholic of course, but they did remind me of an ill-starred April Fool’s Day prank that the Scottish Daily Record ran back in the 80s. The paper teamed up with the Tennent Caledonian brewery and Golden Wonder crisps manufacturers to run a piece on how the two had combined to produce new, Tennent’s Lager-flavoured crisps. It was well done: they had mock-ups of the crisps with realistic looking packaging, interviewed some pub landlords who were looking forward to stocking the product and there was just enough detail to convince (they reported that the crisps would be alcoholic, but only sold in pubs so that kids couldn’t get them).

You can guess what happened next. Drinkers the length and breadth of the country got into contact with the paper, desperately asking where and when they could get these crisps. At the other end of the spectrum, Health groups condemned the companies for coming up with this new contribution to keeping Scotland top of the European Tables for Alcoholism and Coronary Diseases. I also like to think that the head of R&D at Tennent’s competitor Scottish & Newcastle was hauled into the boardroom and told to get into the bloody lab and not come out until he had a working prototype of McEwan’s Export-flavoured Monster Munch.

The next day, the Record, who probably weren’t expecting all the fuss (and who by now were undoubtedly feeling like Orson Welles the day after The War of the Worlds) published an article saying that actually, the piece was just a bit of fun, an April Fools’ Day hoax. The Health groups were placated, everything went back to normal and the country’s drunks would have to wait 20 years or so until the Buckfast Bhuna would come along to offer them the chance to eat and get drunk at the same time.

Down, Down, Deeper Downtown

My current favourite of the new set of MRT stations on the new extended Downtown line here in Singapore is Bencoolen, whose platform you reach after descending six flights of escalators. By which point you’re expecting morlocks and mole men to be getting off the train when it arrives at the platform.

Follies

I spent most of yesterday spring cleaning, though these days perhaps I should be using the phrases “Life Laundry”,  “Decluttering” or “Simplifying My Life”. To be fair, there is something to these phrases, even though in my case, the decluttering was done for practical reasons rather than spiritual, the main one being that it was not only getting more difficult to find things in the bomb shelter, if was starting to get difficult to close the door.

I’m not that bad a hoarder. Also, I’ve moved around enough over the past decade or so to have given the life a few cycles at 40 degrees, but I decided this time I was going to be a bit more pitiless than usual. It was relatively easy to get rid of some of the detritus that floats along modern life, such as the huge number of electrical cables that seem to survive and thrive, largely I think because of the inertia involved in actually finding out what they all do. Others, such as books, DVDs, magazines and comic books used to survive these purges relatively easily, but I’m finding it easier to get rid of things like these the older I get: I’m throwing out stuff that my 30 or 40 year old self would never have touched. Fools that they were.

It’s also an occasion to get rid of some of the minor follies that occupy space. Materials for hobbies never really started, or misjudged decor. The main example of the latter for me was the disco death star lampshade (yes, it is a lampshade) pictured above. Bought from Ikea for more than I was to admit, it opens and closes to regulate the light and all very elegant, but it’s only problem is that it’s too big. Looked great in the showroom, but looked ridiculous in the room it was meant for. It’s smaller brother is now there in its place.

The Joy of Fixer Upper

It’s now well into its fifth and final season, so it’s about time that I put finger to keyboard to salute the TV show that I like that is unlike most other TV shows that I like, Fixer Upper on HGTV. If you don’t know the show, it’s the one that has made stars out of Chip and Joanna Gaines of Magnolia Properties in Waco, Texas. They’ve been on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine, as well as featured in all the usual celebrity outlets, and all because of a show that is ostensibly about doing up old houses.

I say ostensibly, because the show is in reality about Chip and Joanna, but let’s come back to them in a minute. Fixer Upper as a TV show isn’t just predictable, it boasts layers of predictability. The format is the same each week: a couple or family moving into Waco Texas are shown three somewhat (sometimes very) rundown houses in decent neighbourhoods of Waco, and buy one of them which is then handed over to Chip and Joanna to renovate. If the show follows a predictable template, so does the renovation; you will usually most of the following occur if you ever fancy having a Fixer Upper drinking game:

1. Knock down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room to create some space
2. Take out the kitchen cupboards (which are always – always – walnut) and install some new ones
3. Kitchen island
4. Crown molding on the master bedroom ceiling

I’m not sure why they put crown molding on the master bedroom ceiling either. The effects, with the addition of some slow motion camera work and expensive furniture, are always impressive. But the fun of the show is watching Chip and Joanna. they’re presented as a team, with Joanna the creative one with the vision, while Chip is the practical one executing, but there’s a bit more to them than they let on. Chip acts like a doofus, running through walls and mangling words every one and again, but he isn’t really. They’re both college graduates and have built up a very successful business by knowing what they’re doing. Moreover, they’re both good TV performers, and exude a lot of southern charm (plenty of “y’all”s), and what the business magazines would call “emotional intelligence”. They usually connect immediately and effortlessly with the people on the show, who are usually what are called Middle Americans (there was a revealing episode early on when they had a wealthier than usual customer, a middle-aged surgeon whose smiles never quite reached his eyes. Chip worried at the start whether they would connect, and in fact the rapport was a lot more formal than other times).

It’s the Middle America part that’s the key to its charm, I think. This is a show that spotlights a face of America that both Americans and non-Americans can admire. It has a can-do attitude, thinks big, but is resolutely unpretentious, and doesn’t take itself too seriously (if at all).

The show is doing a Seinfeld and getting out at the top. The Gaineses are citing personal reasons for doing it, but i wonder if they haven’t realised that the Magnolia brand is now bigger than the TV channel hosting the show, and that it might be time for a solo album. I’ll miss the show, which is completely unlike any other TV show I like, which may be an indicator of their success: if they can win over folk like me, who normally runs away pretty quickly from reality TV, then who knows how big they can be?

I’ve just bought a CD Discman

It’s a phrase that in 2018 could be used as the basis for a decent defence of Diminished Responsibility, so it’s worth saying again: I’ve just bought a CD Discman.

It all happened so quickly. A post from one of the local record shops popped up in my Facrbook feed stating that they had some cheap CD Discmen for sale, and all of a sudden my mind started formulating ways in which my life would be augmented by the addition of a CD Discman. I could use it at work. It could be connected to the Marshall speaker in the living room, which would be useful as I haven’t ripped all my CDs. And so on and on. I’m an easy touch when it comes to things like this, so I gave in fairly easily, and the next day went to Peninsula Plaza and handed over 70 SGD for a Coby. Look, you can see it in the photo above, attached to the Marshall Stanmore while Harmsworth the parrot looks on approvingly.

It got me thinking about tech nostalgia. For a long time I thought that the current vinyl boom was driven largely by tactile properties. the warm feeling of cellulose album sleeves and plasticised polyvinylchloride records contrast sharply with the clickety-clackety rigidity of the cold, polycarbonate CDs. However, the last few years have seen the vinyl nostalgia extended to other pieces of tech that I wouldn’t have expected. Cassettes, Sega and Nintendo game consoles, and even Nokia phones are all now being coveted. So it can’t be the warm touch.

So, perhaps CD Discmen are next. People will remember long train journeys from their student days that were leavened by being able to take along Nirvana or Now! compilations in CD wallets. Perhaps, for once, I’m ahead of the curve on this one.