clearing up on dog fiend

Alun, are you saying that the only value of a gig is self imposed? Because isn't that true of everything? I'm not trying to put words into your mouth or anything, just trying to understand. Because I feel like nothing is intrinsically good or bad, it's up to each of us individually how seriously we take something. Obviously there are outside factors and when it comes to personal enjoyment there's a nature vs nurture argument perhaps. I am certain you think this also which is why I think I don't quite understand your point.
The bottom line is I'm always very self conscious all the time about everything. Well not all the time, but enough of the time for me to say all the time. You see how I'm actually even self conscious about saying I'm self conscious?
MY POINT IS that for a long time I tried to be as objective as possible. And I managed to find a way to hate every single thing I did or decision I made or thing I said from some angle of looking at it or thinking.
Do we need to pick sides or something? Decide - these are my beliefs and I am prepared to kill anyone who disagrees with me?

Tom, are you saying I should volunteer at a dog rehab centre?

I Was a Teenage Dog Fiend

I don't wish to diminish the many and lovely notions of musically-induced communal ecstacy, but examination of the matter always makes me uneasy. It may just be my psyche getting up to its usual tricks, but I can't separate any such experiences I've undergone from an essentially narcissistic impulse, and the (perhaps equally narcissistic) guilt that I feel about the whole deal when I reflect upon it. For me, much of the satisfaction derived from a really earth-rending live-music experience takes the form of self-satisfaction at being witness to a rather exclusive EVENT of serious STATURE, and one that's probably beyond the ken of regular working, sleeping, meal-eating types.

Certainly there's a strong sense of communion involved, but how much of that is informed by a sort of siege mentality? When I think of specific concerts that have really hit me, I can't help but conjure up a fiddling-while-Rome-burns image; reality is fucked but I am king of this rather excellent little shit storm. I think I already mentioned a debate I watched recently between William F. Buckley and Christopher Hitchens, in which the former fella (there's a pun on mortality in there) glibly dismissed the conspicuous end of the civil rights movement (parades, rallies, Woodstock etc) as 'masturbatory'. Hitchens, having been directly involved, did not strongly reject this notion, although he upgraded it to full-on copulative status. He IS a sort of grinning frog-man (is Andrew Lloyd Webber moonlighting as a former-Marxist political pundit and anti-religion hatchet man?), freelove champion or not, but that assessment seems depressingly close to my experience of...you know...fun.

Is all of this paradoxical?

woof

Dogs and the Minutemen are a good match, domestic, unfussy, more about crotch breathing room than looking sharp, makes sense to put them together and that yr an endorser of both. Does you-dog camaraderie work mostly because you can project any tastes and feelings you like on to its blank hormonal enthusiasm? I don't have many (enough) good times digging music with people, even when we're both there listening a lot of the time our experiences are separate somehow, we don't communicate properly through listening. Or maybe thats not right, at concerts am I looking at the audience or with them? Sometimes the audience is an oppressive monster trapping me and polluting the music and sometimes it seems so idly lame I don't want to be in it. But sometimes, and for me this has mostly been at concerts, the audience feels like an extension of myself, like the music's a giant Katamari-style entity which has scooped us all into itself and its so immediate and strange and intense that we've all gone and shed ourselves and gone collectively crazy like its a brilliant and important new mission, a great breakthrough for understanding and mankind. Too rare. To even get a vision of that from a song is pretty good, nevermind if there is no dog out there with the same idea.

do you want to walk dogs

If you were someone who walked dogs in care centers and you were driving a car with a dog in the passenger seat to a park and you're both singing along to a song on a sunny day. Would there be a better song than It's Expected I'm Gone?
I ask myself this as much as anyone.

a brief talk about revolution

let me preface briefly by saying i barely know what i'm talking about. So don't take this too seriously.
This! Is in response to what you were saying Tom about feeling part of that audience, that sense of revolution in music, about being part of something big.
I remember sitting at home, a year ago or two now i guess, and getting a call from a friend of mine studying photography. Him saying there was some massive protest on in town and I should grab a fucking camera and get over there. And blah blah blah but getting there and standing on top of that old war memorial looking at a street full to the fucking brim with people chanting, singing, shouting, with signs and costumes and all sorts felt amazing. The protest itself was an anti war protest. And anti Bush and Blair protest, but that didn't really feel important.
I felt like if the right person was to come along and say the right thing we would be able to do literally anything.
I remembered reading some Hunter S. Thompson stuff, there was a line like "you could spark revolution on any corner, any time" or something. The way I understand it there was a real optimism back in the 60s with all this revolution. And being in the middle of that street, those people, I could totally feel that. But there aren't that many massive revolutions and protests any more. That feeling, that optimism is definitely gone. I don't feel it anyway. Maybe i'm not in the right place, but regardless.
It seems like we have the "benefit" of hindsight. None of those protests, those revolutions, got anyone where they were trying to get. There was obviously a massive cultural impact that resonates to this day but it has been coloured by defeat and pessimism, cynicism.
I don't know fully how this ties into music. But when I'm "creating" anything, illustration, writing or music, my best stuff is only ever an awful sham rip off of someone else's.
When looking back and researching all this Russian Constructivism stuff you could get a sense of that desperate need for something new. It's there in the music you're talking about too I bet.
But maybe enough people just aren't looking back and digesting all that stuff?

Corona

A violent anxiety or I-don’t-know-what hangs around like the wringing out of my ribs and lungs. I have been awake only an hour and all I want to do is spit at what I could or should be doing.
This day, like every other day of the last however, is a fucking write off.
Over and over in my head I roll theeeeee people will survive.
It puts me on a bike in a field, air fresh and cool with a rain bringing me back to life. Everything is grey, but it’s a good kind of grey. Exactly the right kind of grey.
It will be the first day I’ve stepped outside my house in maybe a week.
The next half an hour is a shower and getting my bike out and I cycle up to the supermarket for some things. I go through that field and I hear different songs by that band, The Minutemen. But coming back over an old BMX track, rain just coming down, is when the people will survive.

Direction - Main trends in the world today

I bought the beautiful Revenant Albert Ayler box a week ago and amongst the goodies is a blisteringly articulate article by critic, ex-Beat, poet and all round true scholar Amiri Baraka that's so good its stopped me from getting any further into the rest (when's the last time you could say that?). In between writing about the pure sound and improving my vocabulary (amanuensis - thanks!), Baraka draws up a narrative in which to place his old friend. He writes about the East Village & Harlem, 60s Black ideology and big free jazz figures such as John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor. The context Baraka provides is so rich you get news ears to listen to Ayler with, every note becomes fully charged and momentous, standing on top of a great jam of history and pushing it forward. Baraka quotes his 60s self, still called LeRoi Jones, excited and eager, desperate almost, to communicate what he hears happening - "Albert Ayler is the dynamite sound of the time".

It is, let's cut me short, great music writing; focussed and passionate and generous. Now I can listen more like a part of the crowd Baraka was in, and that's better than good, I can handle Ayler's sound like its alive and busy rubbing up against all that's going on around it. Leaves me wondering about the music surrounding me at the moment, about how to hear it, about what direction its going and why its being made. Baraka seems so good I bet he could have made pretty much anything sound like a dynamic piece of a big puzzle, but you know the ingredients he's got with Ayler are so good they'd look good for a mediocre writer, a third person after the fact ghostly writer. But today none of the music I listen to sounds much like its part of a revolution on first listen, I'm can't remember hearing much ideology or community in anything, noise or r'n'b or indie or garage but I think maybe I'm being forgetful, coming at it wrong. If musics going forward there has to be something pushing, and even if not there's always gonna be a history and a why to where its festering.

Alun here's that big book review berating the beraters, seems like big thoughts but slower than glass: http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=f3839c75-3724-4154-adc4-e0638e30448a