Through the looking glass
Jul. 18th, 2007 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusOne of the nicest things about ego-surfing is this paradox: when you go searching for yourself out there in etherspace, what you find is inevitably other people. The fact that they're other people who happen, for the moment, to be talking about you is important, though; a kind of affinity filter guaranteeing that you'll have something in common.
I first landed on Ross Hawkins' Ideal Tiger blog when Technorati alerted me to someone talking about me and Jake Thackray on the same page. Since I'm a huge Thackray fan, I was delighted to read Ross' appreciation of the darkly funny Anglo-chansonnier, which locates Thackray as much within the perimeters of Lord Whimsy's "affected provincialism" (thus neatly side-stepping tiresome questions of authenticity) as my own slapstick glitch vaudeville sketches (Hawkins compares Thackray's "Pass Milord The Rooster Juice" -- a song you can hear him covering on his MySpace page -- to my "Corkscrew King").
It was when I found myself mentioned again -- this time in the context of a splendid meditation on the English garden and its connections to Mark E. Smith, Brian Eno and Carsten Nicolai -- that I decided to take a listen to the mp3 files at the side of the page, recorded under the name The Idle Tigers.
The material intrigued me. It was gently deviant -- "delicate with a purpose," as Ross says of his friend Anne Marie Varella, "like all atmospheric art".
Hawkins seems to be a young man suffused with delicate, carefully-structured lust, a neo-Victorian from Bradford, England who's relocated -- possibly for the purpose of study -- to Toronto, Canada. The world of his songs, though, has stayed rooted in England, or rather, the imaginary, filtered England that rises up in the spirit of an exile, replacing the reality with something more mythical. Here Lewis Carroll meets Brian Eno, and music hall meets the avant garde. Listening to The Shadow Falls Across The Fridge, Frank I was reminded of my first listens to Toog or The Divine Comedy (if they'd listened to a lot more Pierre Schaeffer) or, much further back, The Passage. These songs seemed to come from the odd place where the breezy meets the zany, and it's there we can have adventures in wonderland.
Unlace Me Behind the Hedge is a touching, absurd account of a sexual encounter which somehow reminds me of Artery's mysterious song "Into the Garden" (a Peel favourite in the 80s, it concerns sibling sex). "I reckon that sex is just special effects," the fey-voiced Hawkins sings against piano arpeggios, "a rite, a performance by the fireworks department". His song Jonah could almost be something off my own first album, Circus Maximus.
On my fantasy record label, Idle Tigers would record their debut album (if they haven't already) with prepared pianist Hauschka (see him live here).
I first landed on Ross Hawkins' Ideal Tiger blog when Technorati alerted me to someone talking about me and Jake Thackray on the same page. Since I'm a huge Thackray fan, I was delighted to read Ross' appreciation of the darkly funny Anglo-chansonnier, which locates Thackray as much within the perimeters of Lord Whimsy's "affected provincialism" (thus neatly side-stepping tiresome questions of authenticity) as my own slapstick glitch vaudeville sketches (Hawkins compares Thackray's "Pass Milord The Rooster Juice" -- a song you can hear him covering on his MySpace page -- to my "Corkscrew King").
It was when I found myself mentioned again -- this time in the context of a splendid meditation on the English garden and its connections to Mark E. Smith, Brian Eno and Carsten Nicolai -- that I decided to take a listen to the mp3 files at the side of the page, recorded under the name The Idle Tigers.
The material intrigued me. It was gently deviant -- "delicate with a purpose," as Ross says of his friend Anne Marie Varella, "like all atmospheric art".
Hawkins seems to be a young man suffused with delicate, carefully-structured lust, a neo-Victorian from Bradford, England who's relocated -- possibly for the purpose of study -- to Toronto, Canada. The world of his songs, though, has stayed rooted in England, or rather, the imaginary, filtered England that rises up in the spirit of an exile, replacing the reality with something more mythical. Here Lewis Carroll meets Brian Eno, and music hall meets the avant garde. Listening to The Shadow Falls Across The Fridge, Frank I was reminded of my first listens to Toog or The Divine Comedy (if they'd listened to a lot more Pierre Schaeffer) or, much further back, The Passage. These songs seemed to come from the odd place where the breezy meets the zany, and it's there we can have adventures in wonderland.
Unlace Me Behind the Hedge is a touching, absurd account of a sexual encounter which somehow reminds me of Artery's mysterious song "Into the Garden" (a Peel favourite in the 80s, it concerns sibling sex). "I reckon that sex is just special effects," the fey-voiced Hawkins sings against piano arpeggios, "a rite, a performance by the fireworks department". His song Jonah could almost be something off my own first album, Circus Maximus.
On my fantasy record label, Idle Tigers would record their debut album (if they haven't already) with prepared pianist Hauschka (see him live here).
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 09:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 09:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 09:47 pm (UTC)You've totally been googling yourself (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=momus&btnG=Google+Search) tonight, havent you?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 09:53 pm (UTC)But egosurfing is like dating -- you do it for selfish reasons, but it ends up involving you with another person.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 11:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 11:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-18 04:45 am (UTC)His post on Seaside Surrealism (http://idletigers.wordpress.com/2007/07/03/seaside-surrealism/) is wonderful. Brings to mind my experience of growing up by a seaside resort--near a town named Margate, no less, which is home to this example (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/130841.html) of silliness in the midst of the sublime absolute.
As far as the Thackray post goes, I thought this little passage in particular was particularly apt:
Where is Jake located, culturally speaking? Between Wuthering Heights and The Last of the Summer Wine; which is to say that he’ll never require you to choose between high romance and low farce.
As was this:
Being unobtrusive on your own terms is part of the Affected Provincial’s strategy; a strategy altogether more artful than that of completely chaotic bohemianism.
He's also wise to detect a strain of Gallic theatricality in with the old British tropes. In my own case, it is an imagined, twice-removed form of such conceits, poured into the suspect molds of native New World rascals like Lord Dexter (http://home.comcast.net/~fifth-estate/MerrimackCurrent/dexterpickle.htm) and Lord Buckley--whom Groucho Marx once described as dressing like a very successful con man. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh_68zvtk8c) No greater praise, that.
Nice to share a pair of parentheses with you, Nick.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-18 04:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-18 04:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-18 10:25 am (UTC)We await with bated breath the reactions of the young man himself.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-18 01:18 pm (UTC)Rather surprised and blushing that both you and Whimsy should write such generous things about me (who was born yesterday). Goodness.
Thanks, Momus! (I also sent you an email by the way.)
On "neo-Victorian" -- aww, go on, why not? As long as I can still be other things.
Ross
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-18 02:02 pm (UTC)