IL* Challenge!

MODERATOR INTERVENTION: You MUST do this with your own/usual e-mail address.

u kant fuckin do me kunt.

ILE? It's some kind of techie bloke thing I believe, posted to by people who eat with their elbows on the table, slice bread rolls with the butter knife and wipe their faces with the hot towels in Indian restaurants ;)

MONKEYS BLOWING JIF PEANUT BUTTER OUT THEIR ASS

But what is the sense in this, Tom. Please explain your comments one time. If I understand correct your comment you suggest that someone would want to use not authentic e-mail address. Is this korrect? This is stupid. Like soul music and falsetto.

But what do I know anyway. I'm just a mixed-up crazy who loves acoustic guitar und Nich Drake. When you hear the twelve string don't you begin to cry a little inside, no?

**who eat with their elbows on the table**

Yes, they do.

**and wipe their faces with the hot towels**

Cor, let me *savour* that for a moment.

**restaurants**

Steady Mike is back on *form*, I shouldn't wonder.

V. funny. However I don't do emoticons unless it is TOTALLY unavoidable. Ha.

Can I refer you to this thread and all the trouble it caused? It made me cry on the bus.

Dere GOD my BRANE will EXPLODE if i do not go shopping for MOCK DUCK with Katie G this evening. If you are lucky i may even bring along the MOOMIN WHOT JOY!!!!

man alive

When you hear the twelve string don't you begin to cry a little inside, no?

Yes, oh yes! ;-)

ahem today i travelled by CHOOB to met RT on the way I bought a new REKKORD, ah I mean CDEEE it was on PROMOTION at SISTER RAY. I haf a SPECIAL surprise for him, BOARDS OV CANADA - GEOGADDI and it's the SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION! I can't wait to see the GLEE! on his face when i gave him the CDEEE this evening, as he WOZ planning to BUY this album TOOMORROW. Horray! I LOVE the BRIGHT ORANGE cover it is so PSYCHEDELICXOR !

I haf also added a new LINK on sidebar to DJ MARTIAN as he has LINKED to STARRY Vs the ATTOMICK BRANE!! Now I will KNOW more about NEW REKKORDS than rickyT heh heh.

Ah, you're stressing too many wurds there DJM. You wanna link?! Why you shouldda said!

The point is, Bush see the world as a series of enemies instead of a series of consciousnesses. The issue with Enron (the sort of company the humble non-corporate Japanese would call a zaibatsu ) shows how he sees the rest of the world, and Serge Gainsbourg understood this. It's a world of ambiguity, and that is how I can be a homosexual without ever having put my penis into another man (and being constantly followed by a nonsexual harem of beautiful Asian women). So I say, let's be more like Gainsbourg, and less like Bush. I know my next album will.

Ethan wins.

yr all fucked

this remimds me of a piece i saw at a museum in victoria where the painter painted int he style of several others all in big fuck orgy of a canvas

I was going to write a post in the style of Ned, but then realized that no one would notice. *pout*

(I need to work on a distinctive style, I'm all over the place)

[PICTURE OF A BUNCHA CARS]

ANNUAL MEETING OF WOMEN DRIVERS

It was an obvious mistake for Brittish Rail, and then Railtrck, to sell off valuable land in urban locations. They now lack the space for expansion and for the reintroduction of freight service, other than postal, to city centres.

It's all about the stiletto boots. Unbelievably, I'm without a pair just now. True, I scanned the sales but couldn't *quite* face Shelley's because is staffed by Village Of The Damned. Saw a nice pair on Tracey Emin, but they're Westwood or summat, so I'm SOL. Except...there might be some at Russell and Bromley. Not Westwood, d'oh.

you guys are killing my brain cells. i bet you all have cameltoes.

%&&$£"£!!**!!!XOR! Ah was mendin' me little un's bike and guess who should drive past in a hUmBeR sCepTrE? Not Rick WakeXOR, not Keith EmersoXOR! It was Darth Vadar, on his way to the Metro Centre! I ran out front to start up me sInGeR gAzElLeXOR, then I remembered! I'd used t'alternatXOR to get me Moog going.

This reminds me of day trips to Southport in my dad's Singer Gazelle. There was a small piece of brown leather trim flapping loose from behind Dad's seat and the thought of the sunlight shining on it brings back a melancholy feeling. If only the Boo Radleys had been around back then to capture it. Still, we had Bob Latchford.

We could have taken the train instead, changing at Formby where we would have had time to stop for a Bar Six at the station cafe with a beautiful late Victorian facade.

|3U7 3y3 D0 7H|5 W|V 3V3RY P057! 4M473R5Z0RZZ!!!!!

Oh. I thought this thread might be about The Associates.

Does anyone else share the feeling that Billy McKenzie's talent would have been nurtured much more effectively had Dundee elected a radical Lib-Dem council in the early 1980's?

ha ha I haf no recognisable style AS ALL KNO. Frank Kogan = does a good young mark s but he iz elusive these days

Also fast computer is INSTALLED = ph34R ME ETCET.

Lib-Dem in early '80s surely = Alliance, ergo - radical?

Also MacKenzie came out for the Tories in '87 (NME vox popstars).

I found a copy of that NME in the loft at the weekend, Marcello. The Mackenzie piece was next to an interview with Paddy McAloon. There was an excellent free cassette with that issue too - The Kane Gang anyone?

Now, the Kane Gang album (I think there was only one?) I really must dig out and play again. Suspect that the prod will be too generic- '80s for my taste, but remember thinking at the time that "Gun Law" was one of the great album-opening tracks. Didn't they end up writing/producing for the Lighthouse Family?

no Marcello, there was more than one. Coz there was one where they did a cover of "Respect Yourself" and another where they covered "Don't Look any Further" and did a song called "Motor Town". To google we must go.............

anyone who likes the kane gang is insane

i have bought rubber shorts on ebay. they hav shit stains on them. cheer me up it makes me feel low.

i do not see why musical preferences have to classify someone as insane. this started off as a reasonable thread with coherent arguments but is now degenerating into cheap ripoff insults. please can we chill? everyone: there are bigger fish to fry in halifax.

**Now, the Kane Gang album (I think there was only one?) I really must dig out and play again. Suspect that the prod will be too generic- '80s for my taste, but remember thinking at the time that "Gun Law" was one of the great album-opening tracks. Didn't they end up writing/producing for the Lighthouse Family?**

Was that anyone in particular, Marcello ;)?

I R being surprised a fight R not breaking out yet like last time we R doing this.

I R also saying a0L 5UX, n3Wb13 5CuM!

Hi Dave! :) You are obviously not feeling yourself today as you would otherwise not be so inconsiderate of newcomers to these boards who have different outlooks on life! You are obviously requiring spiritual uplift! You are requiring to become aware of the ingrained beauty of the world and the love of God will help you to do that! You are realising that the world is not all composed of evil, drugs and music in the garage! You are hopefully to enjoy a lovely weekend! You are not needing advising to look after your neighbours! Suppose if there were a bomb blast in your street and you were to be decapitated and mutilated in numerous other fashions! That would verse you well in compassion! You are understanding that all these things happen for a reason! You are stretching out your arms! For only God can reach you via said arms! You are a true human being! Have a good Easter!! You are making sure that your supply of bunnies is adequate! Bye! (:

Hi! We're Freed Unit and we'd just like to pop up chirpily

Jel: Yeah! I like Slayer!

GALE YOU BITCH I HOPE YOU DIE AAAARGH OH CHRIST NO ONE UNDERSTANDS

That was very poor.

what does anyone think of emperor fastfax 'urban alien' ? i've never heard it. is it like d.j umlaut's 'army and navy vol.8' and should i buy it?

R Emperor fastfax a paedophile like Belle & Sebastian fans R being?

I know. I'm not very good at this game.

mentalist/instabile => marXoR off the purnicked punDITS, no? => relationship v. id => not explaining (explan in pantEhose) heh heh but novocastriana looooOSis a bunch of rite <= 4nickers/gee fr k but cannotOxCoX in the bestiary hm?

British proletarian culture always has had a contradictory and difficult relationship to the countryside and rural affairs. The old Scargillian socially conservative working-class culture (and even those on the right who broke off to form the SDP, but *not* the Lib Dems) generally felt a residual hostility to rural affairs and its associated Tory Party / Countryside Alliance / Telegraph / Mail / Times axis. This flowed into the resolutely urban character of punk and its ingrained hostility to romantic view of the countryside, XTC and Fairport Convention.

Yes, oh yes! ;-)

I have my doubts.

I was going to write a post in the style of Ned, but then realized that no one would notice. *pout*

Nicely done.

does anyone even know who i was impersonating?

I have a guess...

"so called dr c" SeZ:

%&&$£"£!!**!!!XOR! Ah was mendin' me little un's bike and guess who should drive past in a hUmBeR sCepTrE? (etc etc)

GaaaaH!!!!@#!@#!~ U have yr revenge for my "old" crax0r!!!!@#@#!~ j00 ar3 a bastard p3rs0|\| & ! h8 yr a$$ face!@#!@#!@~~ ;)

Norman, imitating yourself doesn't count. That's cockfarming to the Nth degree.

And how do you know that was me, eh?? eh?!?!

either: dirag
or: diraneko?

wrong on both counts, Mr. I Think Do Is A Loony.

that should have read: wrong on both counts, Mr. I Think Di Is A Loony.

I was in the squat this morning when my house-mate came in covered in puke and bleeding from both eyes. When she asked me for a fag I kicked her in the kidneys and told her to get a proper job. At least she's got big tits. Why is everyone in London like this?

What do you mean by "I have my doubts", Ned? He was quoting you almost verbatim: Nick Drake thread.
Denying it is just mental.

It is you who are mental, N. You are even more stupid than dr.c, and what does the inside of his head look like, yes?

I can only love music in a pure way, Tom, and if you are still having intercourse with me let me refer you to the Dusseldorfer Zeitung who says - "Ryan Adams is the futur of rock and roll. Now that he has conquered his homeland he is putting his cowboy boots all over the map of Europe".

I was in Skronk records in Tottenham Hale the other day and the long- serving owner, George, reminded me of a letter I'd written to the Melody Maker in 1983 - "What if Ornette had access to a Fairlight?"

"Mr Carling", he said "Since you're the greatest music journalist we never had, why not start a magazine to explore this a bit further". I declined but it's good to know that someone remembers true genius. And likes Ornette, too.

It started me thinking though. Who would be a good choice of producer if Ornette HAD had access to a Fairlight. I'll go for Nicky Chinn. What do you think?

Oh and by the way, if you haven't got anything much to say about this DON'T BLOODY BOTHER!!!!

Let's consider the Fairlight/glam interface for a moment, shall we? Despite the erroneous factarium - it is clear to anyone with even the barest of knowledge of post-Darmstadt constructs that (a) Coleman clearly had a Fairlight in situ in 1982 (check the APDL857.20/6 essay for photographic confirmation); (b) his predilections were for the deceptively easy-going country rock of Poco - and the potential Texan/camp dovetail plunging into post-avant cannot be overlooked. So let's ponder, shall we, on the non-metacamiconal post-musette burettes consumed in overconsideration by the nephrous McPheeites, as clearly evinced/documented on hat Art 95839.99 (1979 reprint). The glam odynophagia was undetected on messthetic biopsy.

But how to alter beneficially the reference fields? This we must address. So let us. Anyone. Come on now this is a KEY ISSUE.

erm . . .

does anyone like Farscape?

Hi, Markus and a hey-nonny-nonny. I remember that seminal article well. Mum read it out to me on the way to nursery and I swear I nearly tipped my pushchair over in delight. Thanks for writing it ;)

in the nursery = they are goths

in nurse Harry = phwoar

The Fairlight was eventually seen off by smaller, more affordable machines like the Akai S900 and the Ensoniq Mirage. It's hard to say how much a second hand Fairlight would cost you now because they don't come on sale very often (because they weren't very many of them in the first place) but it would cost you around 200 quid to get your hands on the same level of sampling power nowadays.

DigiGlitchxor is probably the nicest shareware thing, and you can get a free trial version. It's not got a whooshy dalek-like appearance, but you've got a whole load of basic tools, effects, filters and EQing (including preternatural paradoxica EQ) and you can create and save your own presets for pretty much all the effects and filters. No support for Galaxicon-style plugin effects, though, and you have to know a bit about what you're actually doing to get useful results out of some of the effects, but I guess that's more or less true of anything.

That’s all I can think of. Sorry it’s not very well written.

Oh god, this is rubbish isn’t it? I shouldn’t have said anything.

Oh that’s it, I’m going home to cry.

Why does Edna have some fancy apostophes?

he got them at Muji

Cor! I wasn't expecting *that*. But Mrs W is OTM as usual. An absolutely quality post.

But what are all these funny machines, and should I have heard of them? Perhaps Dreamy Nick will explain with some of his blue letters.

If I'm hard on Vespertine it's because I feel personally affronted by it. There are no melodies, none whatsoever. And the tunes are really banal. I'm sorry, but noseflutes + MC garage + strings lifted wholesale from obscure James Horner soundtracks does not a good album make.

jeff no fair: that could be any of us.

me me me. do me, someone! oh Tom, Tom - i've just e-mailed you. about c-90 go!: i'm sorry i'm taking so long over this!!! but it'll be worth it you'll see! i have a seventh article in the works too, about You Know What: i really think this EP is the perfect compromise between Low Birth Weight and Geogra-doggido. i’m sure i can get to the "heart" of what the record is "about". my take is gonna be that it nods towards industrial/electronic "bliss-out" that even BoC at their most reserved cannot yet do, the ethereal yet rhythmic "minimalism" of recent drum and bass, and the arch confessionals of Nick Cave.

Tom, what about that Lambchop album, then? what's that like? oh yes, my article - sorry, real life keeps getting in the way, but that's more important anyway. i think i shall say it’s "hop on"-pop in the best Les Savy Fav tradition, all swirling chords and the sound of distant drums. "wayward funk-rock", no less - equal parts Parliament, Jim Reeves and The Cramps. whaddyathink? Tom, you haven't replied to my e-mail yet. i'm hurt. i'm hurt in my heart.

I was just going to ask that question myself. Rats;)

Anyway, my 46th favourite album is a three-way tie between Uriah Heep's "Very 'umble (live)", The Parliaments "Live in Rotterdam" and FACT 55.

For those of you who don't know, I suppose I may as well tell you that FACT 55 is A Certain Ratio's 'Sextet'.

I saw Lee Renaldo on my block the other day. I pushed him from behind as he passed and made him agree to an interview. He played me a demo of the new SY shit. It fucking rocks like Patti Palladin and Johnny Thunders in a shitstorm with Devo. You don't get it? Stick with your pussy Destiny's Child shit.

ouch. suppose i asked for that one though.

I'm surprised that no one has pulled a hanle y yet, and I won't be the one try it either. He's too easy and inimitable, both at once. There's just no point.

Pet e did one up the top there

Oh well then, how about we just say that Pete doesn't count and I'll get to maintain my fragile delusions of dignity, shall we?

Actually I really like the sound of that record that Jeff-Jess describes.

i just had this published

by the shores of gitchee gumee, i noticed a red mark on my cock

There are at least two, possibly three ways of looking at this, one or two of which worry me greatly.

Firstly, is the canon a good and useful construct which provides valuable for the pop-ist spirit to roam? I am partially convinced that by rubbing up against the corroded scaffold which shores up alex's pantheon of rock, we transfer some of the rust to our clothes. This is both dangerous and a good thing.

Secondly, by considering pop as either un-rock or pop depending on your viewpoint, it's troubling that we don't leave the door open for a few welcome elements of indie-rock to blow through the crack.

Thirdly, I prefer Abba.

I am starting to get thee scary pheeling that 4/5 posters on ILE are actually DrC and his multiple personalities! An impressive performance, to be sure.....

Blimey!

Dr. C, before you start calling names tell me EXACTLY who these people are who claim that all indie fans are foppish bedwetters.

How do you know them, and from where? What are their names?

I don't even like 'indie', whatever that is. You're a crackpot, Dr. C.

blimeX0R!

you silly billies!

sorry I meant yay!

i found some money. it is colorued green.

same sahde of green as my cum.

i am feeling depressed.

I've been depressed with my cum for years. What am I doing posting in a pool of my own filth at 3am.

Yeah, I know how you feel. Last night, we left the club at like 5am, (ok yeah we stayed for a long time but it was shit anyway and we were all fucked out of our minds so we didn't care). And then I saw this girl from uni that I kind of like, but also don't kind of like, you know what I mean?

Anyway, so I see her and I start talking to her for a bit and it's going quite well, but then my mates said that we're all going down to McDonalds, cos my one friend knows one of the guys that works there. But he's a fucking asshole. But we all got drunk after that and went back to my one friends house and I burned his chemical brothers cd. And I got the girls number. So it was kind of a good night, but also kinda lousy.

I dunno. Maybe I'm exaggerating. Could be.

You sure showed me.

(now I feel bad. I like Ro's posts.)

No I'm only messing. . I'd never have said "Yeah I know what you mean" though. I mean, me checking to see if my story was relevent to the thread???????? Come on!. The last line was so otm though. Or maybe I'm just getting carried away and in reality it wasn't a good impression at all. Not sure. Oh well.

heh.

I think Mitch should win the prize, that was hysterical.

I say, have you heard the GLE's 'Westcombe Park'? I don't think he's ever performed it, but I was near him once when he hummed these beautiful lines :

A day trip to Westcombe Park/On a rattling bus/We'll eat an ice-cream in the dark/Just the two of us.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

He HAS performed it, Ally. I think it was at 'Tea and a Bun' in 1995. Edna was there, and also Stevie T.

I captured it on DAT, which I later transposed to 5-inch tape, adding a little top-end compression and noise reduction. I flanged the guitar *slightly* post-facto and tweaked it a touch to bring out those harmonies on the chorus. I'll have to ask the great man if we can release it sometime soon. A one-sided 10-inch flexi would work for me, although I worry about whether we could get *warm* enough grooves without a little more post-production. Maybe if I switched it onto an Ampex 'Studiomaster' 3.5 inch reel first?

1996.

DR. SEE IS SWEET CANDY in TRUMPITS!

Not trumpits, surely strumpets.

Hi all of you poor babies who missed me! :) How is THIS copy of that old magpie GALE! Do I win?

it was old crow you mentalist.

Curse curse curse....slang slang slang......ellipses.....anger and shit

okay i got to admit that was wack....shit is getting a bit rusty....but i dont go for these easy-ass games anyway...like oh, wow you made half the words all caps, just like that girl who always does that....yeah go accept your "brilliant comedy" award now...dickface

i know you lot won't like this but i think the most important band is sugarbunny they were going to do an ep on sarah but they didn't. i heard them in grad school when i was feeling sad

He probably means Skagbunny from Portland Oregon. They rock my world and if they don't rock yours, you're fucking worthless. I interviewed them on their Scottish tour in 1992. I was there more as a friend than a hack, but I managed to stay sober for 10 minutes one day to pen a review of their Pastels-influenced debut single "Rock and Roll Unconsciousness". In Greenock, they dedicated their encore "Fuck me, I'm Thick" to yours truly. Rock and Roll!

i boguht a pint of milk. it says best before 9-11-01.

it taests like chives.

i am feeling bewlidered and dejected.

Who gives a shit about Manhattan fried yuppies in the fucking Rough Trade Towers? They're capitalists, they knew the dangers. If nothing else it will teach them not to have so many fucking kids and fuck off back to the barrios where they belong. We should have shot them as they were jumping out anyway. If you disagree you are just children fucking corpses.

So, I go away for three weeks and this happens. Can we Stop The Madness now, please? Failing that, can somebody summarise this thread for me? Thanks.

Ah, Toots & The Maytals. Now you're talking, mate. But make sure you get the box set with the bonus disc of 28 rare original Kingston recordings.

Funnily enough, I was walking along Flood Lane last week, after a pretty decent pint of Young's Premium when it struck me - if only Steve Kember had slipped the ball to Alan Hudson in that 1972 League Cup Final against Stoke, instead of going for goal himself, then the result could have been quite different. Only blot on the 70s when you think about it. I tried to explain this to my neanderthal work colleagues over a stonking pint of Wethered's Bishop's Mitre, but the geezers just looked at me funny and went back to discussing strip bars and who's 'had' Jennie from Accounts. So I stuffed my copy of Spare Rib into the trusty ol' briefcase and made my excuses. The family weren't much more help. My eldest was more interested in the Blackburn-Tottenham game. God, I think I'd die if any of my kids became a Spurs supporter. But I knew the ILX massive would understand. Yeah, 'Monkey Man'. Totally fuckin' CLASSIC.

Jeff, have we met? ;)

i just drunk some oragne juice. it is overly sibilant.

i sholud have poured it down tolet and cut out the middlmean.

also piss is now saem color. this does not happen when the sun is out.

i need hapy.

Although I've never tried it myself, I've got some friends over in N.Y.C who enjoy the odd sibilant orange juice, so, Viva!

hi what's been going on i've been travelling. i drove down to somerset county nj last week to see if i could turn some high school kids onto the swell maps. they didn't want to know. when i got stopped by the cops on the turnpike i tried mentioning scritti polliti but he called me a fag and kicked my ass. my girl says i should quit the store or get a better car. mark s did you read my e- mail yet. send me that ayler tape quick. what the fucks been going on.

i have decided it is time to go on a dite.

with that in mind i fuckd and asked for dough to be pumped up my anus instead of cum.

hosepip was wrong way roudn. now look like nedd beatty. if i were cut in half would look liek nik low.

i am feeling despodnent.

This thread is the worst ever. It's bollocks. Really. It's like some sort of "who's got the biggest dick?" contest. I know Wheeler agrees with me. You guys should take a leaf out of my book. It's not as bad as Waking Life though. Now that was bollocks. I hated that almost as much as I hate my job.

Losing both legs like that must be rough Julia, but I must say it reminded me of THIS (www.looknolimbs.co.uk).

If you were to lose your arms too it looks like they'd pay you for pictures. So that's not so bad. I bet you'd still be k-ROWR, too.

It begs the question - could I still be very attractive to members of the opposite sex with no limbs? I bet I could. This boy just wouldn't be able to help himself ;)

(taking sides: no-limbs vs. goblins)

Dave, that is hopeless!

(www.looknolimbs.co.uk). Tsk, no blue writing

I bet you'd still be k-ROWR, too. - I don't understand k-speak. And anyway, I'm not known for perving on people on ILE am I??

It begs the question - could I still be very attractive to members of the opposite sex with no limbs? I bet I could. - I would never misuse the phrase 'begs the question' in this way. Actually, I'd never use it at all because I am scared of it. Furthermore, I AM NOT ARROGANT

This boy just wouldn't be able to help himself ;) - Emoticons bleh

Ok Sorry, Nick.

N>, this too is rub.

"(www.looknolimbs.co.uk). Tsk, no blue writing" - look, you've italicised your own writing, and left the text of the original post as is.

A shambles.

ARF ARF. Crappo HTML skills are my thing.

Tee hee. Crappo HTML skills are my thing.

[also general incompetence]

I would like to just say, that if a person should lose a limb, they are no less the person they have always been. If a person has lost a limb, it becomes part of you, and you learn to cope with it. In fact, I personally be more comfortable with a person who has lost a limb, than a biggot, cracking jokes.

Where was I when the Berlin Wall fell? Nearby, of course. I think I was tucked away in a delighful gay cafe in the artists' quarter near the Zoo Station,idly playing a Hindemith refrain on my mini-moog. That little piece made it onto my album 'Antiquarian Vulgarian' and I also kindly donated it to Yuzo Morimoto. He's glitched it up in a most cheeky manner.

Nicholas, you were NOT! The truth is that you were screwing a 13-year old Vietnamese waitress in a seedy hovel opposite Gilbert and George's pied-a-terre in Shadwell. You told me at lunch the next day. I distinctly remember it because Martin came over to say Hi during dessert.

That's Martin Amis. The famous author.

Did someone call?

I've got 'Antiquarian Vulgarian' on order, along with scads of other stuff. Hope it's as good as your other albums, Momus ;) They're all very good indeed.

(Sigh, glides away....)

Hey, that was pretty good. :-)

animals shagging or shagging animals ?

Hi, we all get lonely and need to help one another find the strength within or so i told Lambsie. ByeFuckingBye Gale :)

Sherbet dib dabs, Mooro?

Ooo RA-THER! And some of those fancy little wafers too. Yummy!

No, did *you know who* play 'Sherbet Dib-Dabs' at the *you know what* on Sunday?

Oh. Yes I rather think we were treated to that scrumptious little bauble abot half way through the set. Weren't we?

Now - a certain self absorption, not personal, but human, has marked almost all attempts to conceive the universe as a whole. Mind, or some aspects of it - thought or will or sentience - has been regarded as the pattern after which the universe is to be conceived, for no better reason, at bottom, than that such a universe would not seem strange, and would give us the cosy feeling that every place is like home, or indeed Greenwich.

Yes he DID play it, Mooro.

**cosy**

Did he really say this? Let me savour it for a moment. Cor - classy, cheeky and very much on the money.

pines are too rock for me. have you heard electric fuzzpony? there's a free flexi limited edition of 3 with the icklesweetie fanzine. it's nearly as good as emily.

And for me not enough rock, I think. I am nowadays not so understanding of the pop world. I believe in Mutti and Papa's day it was better, no? All around ze crackling campfire with Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, the sound of sturdy young men and women's voices melding together in the purest way! O ja!

I got :

Norseferatu - "Flesh Rots While Baby Screams"
Butchers Of Bergen - "Butchers XIII"
Devilglitchers - "Death Ritual" (on blood red vinyl, this one!)

oh, and

Burning Cathedrals - "Fuck The Dead Monk"

Dr C: your Steadymike homages are a thing of beauty.

Scrolling that is spooky, the EYE keeps catching mine and the box seems to waver like a lava lamp

I am too scared of Dr C to ever venture into ILM again.

It's not easy being a high achiever, let me tell you. For a start, what would any of my very famous and artistic friends say if they caught me soiling my Jimmy Choos in the Suburbs? Ick!

heckmondwyke 3am. burning tyres and picketywitch, cold house and cold chips. alone trying to sleep on t'moor. polvo.

Hey Dr C do me!!

If only Dr C had a quid for every time that's been said to him ...

OI!

Re:
Seigmund Hellraiser (Daveatcrossdeep@aol.com) (webmail), October 3rd, 2002. (Dr. C)

Absolutely f-ing classic ! Dr C !

Don't do DJ Martian, Dr C - we'll be here all night.

:``(

Faux-profound observations mulched into the language like so much mash on the end of your fork - Ryan Adams the absent father, the creation myth re-told (mark s, help me out here.) But - the ubiquity of oblivion? Or.... no. Hahahaha

I was supposed to be on a date last night actually. I met her right after work, at about 5.30, and we took in a gallery, had a Chinese etc. Very nice.

Anyway, I don't think I'll be seeing her again because she seemed a little bit miffed about something throughout the date. Looking back I think it might have been because I asked her if she'd mind carrying the 127 or so CDs that I'd picked up in HMV before we met. (I'm a bit skint with the house move or I would've bought a few more. OK, I did get a bit tetchy when George Jones 'Drunk as a Skunk' fell off the top of the pile and into a puddle. Still it's a shame that she didn't get to see me in my toga.

Dr. C is the Rory Bremner of ILE. Brilliant.

except funny and talented obv

ermm yeah

Indeed I very vividly remember the splendid Gruppo Sportivo cover version of "Sherbert Dib Dabs" performed on Bill Oddie's Saturday Banana in July 1978! They are playing the Lostcause and Firkin in Essex Road tomorrow evening. And is anyone else up for this? I have to go to a Jack Kirby memorial convention at Poplar Town Hall beforehand, admittedly, but hopefully should be there at 6:02 pm.

oddie => '60s improv acute angle <=> bt not really against flogging off all those esp freebies mike gibbs gave him. would not dikto be the barnett newman to kirby's lucy f?

hah i need to LOSE pop music, a little, no? I am moving away from *becoming* :-( I need to stop *drowning* puppies and start belgian waffle kristeva dancehall WOOAH :-) except my BOYFRIEND has too many (???!?()(() elephant man cds for my own good heh ;-)

**Gruppo Sportivo cover version of "Sherbert Dib Dabs**

Of course you know that the Buggles version got to number 42 in Scotland on 14th May 1980. And you'll no doubt remember that both Petula Clark (backing vocals) and Zal Cleminson (guitar) played on it. It's the third best number 42 in Scotland ever made.

They supported Restricted Code and The Scroats in Edinburgh in April 1979. The poster is HERE.

Nathalie, you can never have too many CDs! Here's a listing of all the essential CDs which have been released in the last three days:

Elephant Man - Don't Sue Me Chi Chi Al-Qaeda (Ripoff)

Beenie There Dunthat - Composite Punan (Sony Entertainment)

Wazzatova - Ekphlus (Conflag)

Cameron Crowd - In The Altar Fripp Feigns (thYU)

Newman Sarcoid - Love Askance (Askew)

Philip Jap - Save Us: The Complete Sessions (12CD boxset)

V/A - No New York reissue (In Your Wildest Dreams)

Ayler Memorial Bleach - Rock Gassaturi (Untactic Twinned)

DJ Bennink - Not Nippled (keWljass)

Freda Comstock - My Dirty Man Done Cleaned Up My World (Invictus reissue)

Theoretical Listenables - Only Project: 1982-95 (Wire Vanity)

Acid Mothers Temple - 28th Album This Week (No More Please!)

Cliff Carbon - I Remember Dickie Henderson (Blutacky)

Jim O'Rourke/Brian Eno/Thurston Moore - You Blister My Paint (Mogadon)

DJ Spooky - Personally I Always Preferred Ditko (He's Got A Point)

Squarepusher - My Statement (See Me: Bank Manager)

Steeleye Span/Coil - Disembodied Spleen (Keenan's Wet Dream)

V/A - Skin Scrapings: Sacrificial Tibetan Raves (4CD box set + nipple erector)

Byron Cassavetes Pro! - Every Free Jazz Improvisation Ever: Revisited! (Vols 1-28) (Why? Records)

DJ Craig Neuk - Ravenscraig Kaddish (Neckheads)

Esther Leslie and her Sex Revolts - One For Julia K (Messthetix)

Bottomley Bangbus - Sexier Than Currie (Smith Cubed)

Momus - No One's Sexier Than Me (I Have Lived In Deleuze's Boxcube)

Suzy - HAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! (Tomato Can Man)

Tam White with the Jools Holland Big Band featuring Ruby Turner - You're Holding Me Down (2002 Boogie Woogie Piano Magic Version) (Camden Town Good Music Society)

I have not heard any of these records. They are all just essential records which you should hear.

If oi'd got a job, oi'd be looking forward to the end of work right now, so's oi could pop into town and pick up some shirts and see if there's a new remix of Silver Screen Shower Scene in HMV. It's a grand track!

Then it would be clubbing with my mates and rolling all the way home in the mornin'. But only if I could be bothered. Did oi tell you about that girl I met in HMV?

**Steeleye Span/Coil - Disembodied Spleen**

HUR! HUR! My SPLEEN is discombobula-wotsit too! And my BRANE! Not enough FROOT and too much of the falling down REAL ALE! Num Num!

haha, that was pretty good!

hoorya HAH I haf been gaining XPERTIZZZ in INDUZZZZZTRIAL musick and wen asking unGREbTful ricky t he laffed and say buffy the musical CDEEEE one copy left in the SHOPPE but I gav it 2 KTEEEEE COLLARFLOPS harrumph I am not diSKoraged i wlll go and make peppermint peelings last a week in my KEWL BOWLE and when I netx return to the manor he hadd better bloodEE haf RoXoR Holly Vallnace downloads he promised me KER-TRUMPTH!

"Byron Cassavetes Pro! - Every Free Jazz Improvisation Ever: Revisited! (Vols 1-28) (Why? Records)"

yes, you must copy all these for me right away Martian you fucking idiot. The rest of your list is shit - you need to listen to more Takaynagi like wot I do instead of all this commercial chart rubbish.

No offense.

Fuck off. I hate you.

Charming.

sorry about the swearing in my previous post i had nothing to do yesterday since i can't afford to go out two nights running

"Thirdly, I prefer Abba"

what you mean 'Dr.Tom' is that you don't 'get' Xenakis. you need to give it at least 20 plays, then you'll get it

Bit of a stretch this one

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drd700/d738/d7381397jg3.jpg http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dre300/e329/e3295969yd5.jpg

*Crumb-bucket with Evan Parker*

Yes, Marcello I'll definitely be there. (what about mark s though?) I'll be at Homerton Town Hall at 7.30 sharp. Let's have a drink beforehand.

Look I'm really sorry, Marcello. (and mark s - did you go?).

My mum caught me shinning down the drainpipe and wouldn't let me go. Fair enough though - it was getting dark. Maybe next time?

AM I DUTCH?
AM I DUTCH?
AM I DUTCH?
AM I DUTCH?
AM I DUTCH?

**jon you suck**

Oh, haha, thanks! No, really. Hooray, anyway, for Massive Attack, who I first heard in a sleepy village between Tashkent and the border. Jolly good.

i bought some laec wafflse yesterday.

they got stuck in my thoart. wolud not be washde down with parazone.

it now billows out my sternum like i wsih my prick did.

i am depsondnet.

i guses i shd not try belgain chocolaets eithre.

you are all a sad bunch of loser's. I cant believe so many so-called "adults" would spend their time talking about pie and emo fashion which i think is a nice change from all those tatoos and hideous peircings the children used to wear. I only came here because I was helping my son do some research on his paper about bees and I find your only use for these beautiful insects is as covering for a saddomizing stick. ugh. you people make me sick.

no you SILLY! ;-) Yes I have doubts. But what human being wouldn't be a human being without doubt, no? Darby Crash is NOT Barthes - if he had been, Jeff Buckley would not have drowned. Oh gosh I am all wet at Tom Berman's font ;-) does jess hate me yet, no? ;-)

Marcello, YOU BASTARD ;-), you are a better copy of me. heheh (Shit, now I... AH FUCK IT, how do I NOT reply in my own style?!?)

Do me, Nathalie :-)

hahaha. I could not. On whatever level you're implying. ;-)

naht cannot do me.

i am depresede.

cage is music, de kooning the noise. i will incsribe that on my billowing sternmu.

you ppl are out of control. i do some work for an afternoon and this is what happens...

...and now i will abuse Radiohead some more. cry MelCaramel CRY!

Surely Julio Seuss would be

I hate Radiohead and Thom Yorke, I even hate them eating pork. I even hate them on a plane, I hated that tour they did through Spain.

*bows in worship*

i fucking hate this thread.

(nb: that's not me parodying this thread.)

(or myself for that matter.)

Damn, that's some funky existential metaphysical shit right there.

< /wigga>

I reckon Dr C (despite the toga and chinese food, both always out of the question) got me rather more accurately than Marcello. I am immensely flattered to be so noticed, anyway.

Look, I'd put Sarah Whatmore on the cover tomorrow, but it ain't gonna sell copies in Oakland CA, right? What we HAVE got is this fucking electric line-up - The Pastels, Bobby G, Primal Scream, Stephen Pastel and a Beat Happening roadie. Oh and the Eastbourne garage-punk scene! It's the new Detroit! The guitar is still a weapon down here in Worthing! Riot - you fuckers!

**Atomic Kitten, Right Now
Backstreet Boys, Black And Blue
Boney M, Nightflight To Venus
Pet Shop Boys, Introspective
Pink, Don't Take Me Home**

Warum? Ha Ha - big funny Tom. This joke will end where? It's time to come out of closet Tom and admit you cannot like zis pop really. Maybe you are trying to impress the prettygirls who stay in your jugend gesthaus, no?

No doubt you will say you are only following orders, but it is time to start your korrection. I recommend you start with the wierd new Wilco album record. It is very much my plate of zuppe, and I think you will find it very much to your taste also.

I zink we understand one another?

HI PRITY GURL. BECUS YOU ARE PRITY I AM ASKING YOU DAYTS. MY DAD SED IF YOU SEE PRITY GURL YOU ASK HUR DAYTS. WE CAN HAVE KFC ON ARE DATES DO YOU LIK KFC. ME TOO. I LIK MASH POTATO AND GRAYVEE TO. MY DAD IS OLD LIK KFC BUT MY DAD IS NOT KFC. IF HE WAS WE COOD HAV POTATO WENEVER WE WANT. BECUS WE ARE ASKING DAYTS AND DAYTS ARE FOR FUN THAT MY DAD SAID TO. I HOP POTATO DONT MAKE ME HAV BOWL MOVMENTS ON DAYTS. I DIDENT SAY POOP BECUS MY DAD SED IT IS RUDD AND YOU SHUD NOT SAY IT ON DAYTS. I BET KFC IS NOT RUDD TO MISSES KFC BECUS THEN THAY WUD NOT PUT KFC ON A SINE.

I was forgetting to say - Tom, when zis is all over we meet again, yes. You show me FAP and London Town and I show you real good time here. We can go a-wandering, our knapsacks on our backs!

And you show me the dreaming spires where once as a young man (fresh man I zink they call?) you learned many things. I am feeling quite moist already, Tom.

i never read this post before and see two impersonations. haha, i am not so fluffy.

CARRIE!

http://www.angelfire.com/sk/sleaterkinney2/images/carriebio.gif

oops! i spelled dates right

thanks di! i wish angelfire would let people link. it is a nice pic though. i saw s-k last weekend, but my heart was captured by shannon wright - carrie i have betrayed you :'(

someone do a hunta d post for old times sake - alex??

oh dash, that image worked on the other computer i was at an hour ago. i will see CARRIE in the FLESH in exactly 2 MONTHS! wow, i must google shannon wright, cos she must be purty HAWTT!

Nice try Marcello however if you really read my blog or linked it on Church of Me you plonker you'd know that the Byron Cassavetes Pro came out three weeks ago!

Funny you mention that, DJ M, as I just sat down to write a review of that very record for the AMG. :)

she is nice looking in a quirky way but i was v. taken with her performance. now her drummer... HOTTTT

WHEN DO WE GET TO SEE NICOLE?!?!?!

Stevie Wonder 'Superstition' vs Stevie Wonder 'I Just Called To Say I Love You' vs The Police 'Roxanne' vs REO Speedwagon 'I Want to Keep On Loving You'

'Superstition' makes me want to inject lighter fuel into each eyeball, but at least Wonder is in his proper place - shaking his butt and making like a real nigger.

Not like 'I Just Called..' which puts me right off my Evo-Stik. Look you fat blind cunt, sucking up to whitey with this piece of anus cancer aint gonna make you see again. I'd love to kick Wonder off his piano stool and watch him roll around on his flabby blind ass.

As for Sting - is there anything worse than a Limey-ass honky pretending he was born in a one-horse cesspit on the outskirts of Kingston? At least Andy Summers knows his way around the fretboard and Stuart Copeland's ride-cymbal work is great.

REO Speedwagon kick the shit out of the other three - coked-up plug-ugly whiteys doing what plug-ugly whiteys do best. You can't beat it.

I think that one's pretty poor.

i suppose i wonder why dr c's parodies of alex in mainhattan seem to be a generic pseudo-racist parody of germans rather than anything specifically relating to alex.

This troubling anyone else?

You'll find that they all contain some of alex's trademarks combined with some cartoonish elements to make horst/helmut/whoever. They're spoofs. It doesn't matter if you don't find them funny - but pls don't imply that I am any kind of racist.

Only Jeff tried to do me.
Urgh, that sounds awful.

Could I just mention my girlfriend?

heheh i didn't oppose dr c's racism because...well, hey, it's dr c, and if you can't take him seriously, why shouldn't you? that PIG Nietzsche is fit only 4 cow shagging woo booty freddie WOOAH ;-) *sigh* i am a hectique idle slackAH who has not burned cds for her favourite englishman GRRR! ;-) i must learn to divide my self.

I got:

Glitchdom - rev 4.87
Richard Strauss - unplugged
Freek Van Der Huyden - double dutchtronica (vinyl)
Delius - Waltzes
Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup ( ltd ed. purple sleeve exclusive to the low countries)
Yes - the new box set
V/A - Funky Cuts Vol 67 - Scrapin' Da Barrel Man
Den Hout - vgtk7n

And that's all ;)

too much wafflemusick, not enough français, Dr.C (but otherwise pretty close)

Yo man, this thread is wack!
http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drd000/d074/d0741783ejp.jpg
Your pal,
Ma$e

marcello, you're still a silly and loveable bastard! i will burn you those cds. in this century. :-(

I can't believe no one impersonated my ILX posting style.

It is a waste of time posting on music that is meaningless :) Black music is only melodic when performed by whites. If they had stayed slaves, we would have had no hip hop, and we'd all be better off :)

this thread hasn't become less sad in the last three months

i hate this thread because it takes the urge to be oh-so-clever-clever that underpins many of ilx's worst impulses and turns it against ourselves

???

But we use our powers for GOOD rather than EVIL...

delete the internet, plz.

that's exactly the kind of corny indie shit we've come to expect from you, Graham

Tom, delete ILX.

Jess, I'm responsible for many of the posts on this thread. They're in the main meant kindly, and in fun. A couple of them were a little sharp maybe. I guess I don't understand your point - I think it's a self-contained thread of skits which you or may not like. My impulse to create them was not to be clever-clever, just to gently take the piss.

As the 'victim' of both Dr C and Marcello's well-aimed barbs, I'd like to say that I was basically far more flattered that anyone had noticed me enough to pastiche than hurt by any of the pointier bits.

I am flattered by the post tribute, nickalicious.

no offence, but your mother should have been kicked in the stomach during pregnancy. nothing personal.

Best moment of today's play was when Boris muttered "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark" off-mike.

I am very much hoping that Kusnetsova and Olichenko win their over-35's mixed doubles semi versus Fleming and Turnbull.

ha - as children we never watched wimbledon because dad lost the television in 1965. we found it under a pile of books in 1994.

*muttered*

Steady Mike in tasty early season form.

I shouldn't be surprised if this thread matures nicely from now on.

I was sitting there mainlining some top quality butane last night, Foreigner 4 on repeat play, when that Belgian bitch came on Wimbledon match of the day. Obviously I had an overwhelming for a brutal wank and I missed the frigging keyboard solo that segues between Cold as Ice and I Want To Know What Love Is. Fucking BBC - why is British TV always like this.

I'm stuck in this FUCKING JOB ALL DAY and you start a thread about TENNIS behind my back. You know I HATE TENNIS. I won't join in with this thread. You've ruined my life AGAIN and I'm out of here for good. Fuck you.

I said fuck YOU!

I'm out of here FOR GOOD.

Dr. C, are you coming to see the Dimmed at the Pig and Whistle, Twyford next Wednesday? They have an ex-Damned roadie and Spod from The Subhumans used to know their drummer.

merton pk is near wimbledon, no? should i go there?

bullshit you werent knuckle-shuffling on the belgian tennis player you were probably booing the other one you know who i'm talking about

look dude, seriously who needs wimbledon???? fuck wimbledon, it's nothing but a london media joke.

i don't need it. you don't need it, just like we don't need 99% of the fuckers in this shallow little world. i'm happy just sitting here, talking to bobby gillespie with my girl. you do know i've got a girlfriend, don't you?

and i got my writing, man

that's alls i need - my writing and my girl

my girl and my writing

you know its a beautiful world and i just forgot everyone's hate

and joe foster is really a beautiful dude

alan mcgee said to me the other day 'joe's so ahead of his time that he don't know what time it is, man'

i think it's my time and thats sweet

why do you people call Buchanan extreme? none of you said that about Clinton

hahaha...

i mention my girl because she is my only friend. i am actually sad. : - (

but yeah, spot-on.... with my one percent of the world is actually worthwhile, the rest can fuck off.

1 PERCENT BOO-YAH. *hands to the chest*

And we were talking to Ric Menck last night not Bobby!

but BUCHANAN is a FUNDAMENTALIST! RIGHT wing EXTREMIST! for fucks SAKE, some of you PEOPLE are so NAIVE

Yeah, but if someone was holding a gun to your head and you had the choice of getting down and dirty with Martina Navratilova and Lindsey Davenport or having your brains blown out there and then which would you choose?

Whose coming to see your second favourite band on ILX. It's amazing, I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but we've got the keyboard player from Crispy Ambulances and the bassist from The Black Factory-Line playing who were an unknown band who, because of their name, were not signed to factory records (did I mention my band was? Did I?) but instead spent the majority of their recorded output (three 7's recently going for high prices in Norwich) on Fuck Me It's Eighties Indie Records. I was involved in it recently with my band, the top indie-charting band on Factory Records called Factory Records. ERrr.. another name but you know what I mean. Factory Records.

(I really had no idea if this is correct)

You know, it is possible to parody people's styles without being nasty or catty. Threads like this only lead to trouble.

yes but that is because you take a teleological approach which exposes your viewpoint despite yourself, quite clearly if a reverse dialectical method is taken when discombobulating Ashanti, its quite obvious that a Habermasian inversion of ontological Gramsican dynamics clearly illustrates that Irv Gottis production display a Faustian/Lyotaridan deconstruction of Hegelian hegemony, and for you not to fully comprehend this i think is very disappointing, it is a clear and overt historical valedictum and justification that it is desirable and necessary for me to fuck 14 year old girls

I just want to thank everybody who came out last night to my 'Fuck me, it's Eighties Indie Night'. To celebrate I've been playing nothing but New Model Army and drawing up my plans to join a crass-style commune.

awesome! rock! KORITFW! you over here again g-money?

Oh come one doomie, I would have mentioned Factory a few MORE times than that ;)

You are all whores. Behind this smile I am thinking of ways to disembowel your entire family whilst playing DJ Sammy's Heaven. I hate you all. OMIGOD DID I SAY THAT?

how long before the first team turns into a thugs 11? sigh, i'm really having second thoughts about my season ticket now

factory records.

pub nights in birmingham. swimming pools. surburbia. The Sundays.

One of our most subtly paralyzing dualisms is the apparently harmless one between order and disorder. The idea of artistic liberation, under which we have labored for so many years, is especially prone to the corruptions of this dualism. For instance, if order means predictability, and predictability means predetermination, and predetermination means compulsion, and compulsion means unfreedom, the only way we can be free is if we are disordered. The failed artistic hopes of the last two centuries have been founded upon a deep discomfort with the idea of order, and what are taken to be its close relatives: hierarchy, foundationalism, norms, and essences--even with value itself, if value is conceived of as being anything other than momentary individual preference.
We have found ourselves forced by the logic of the duality to choose the random, the disordered, the arbitrary, the acte gratuit, the unconditioned, the weightless, the unfurrowed--over the ordered, the intelligible, the shapely, the traditional. Our art featured aleatory music, chance splotchings of paint, the random word-choices of "language poetry"--John Cage, Jackson Pollock, John Ashbery. What, after all, were the alternatives? We could submit ourselves to the Transcendental Signified, the old man with the white beard, Nobodaddy Himself, the ancestral authority figure who bars the doors against our franchise, our potential for achievement, our free play of art, our sexuality, our political identity and self-expression. Or we could accept that the world was a dead machine and we were merely parts of that machine, linear and deterministic. We would thus be fated to some kind of mechanistic social order determined by our genes, by the physics of our energy economy, by economic necessity or psychological drives. Indeed, it began to look as if the second alternative was just a new avatar of the first, that the scientists and psychologists and sociologists and businessmen and commissars who preached materialist determinism were really just the old white-bearded patriarchs and racial oppressors in disguise.
Nobody wants either a random universe or a deterministic one, for freedom and value and meaning appear impossible within them--though great philosophers in the tradition of Nietzsche have struggled to assert them nevertheless. But given the potential for abuse inherent in the deterministic position, it seemed safest to opt for a definition of freedom as a random relationship between the past and the future. The problem is that if this were the case, memory and experience would be completely useless, because to the extent that I act on the basis of past experience, I would not be free. Any connection with tradition would be oppressive.
The postmodernist solution was to make meaning and value completely arbitrary, imposed at the whim of the individual. At least we could individually perceive events as meaningful and valuable. One person's perception would be as good as another's, so there could be no political repression. And then--it began to look promising--we could hold the universe to be unknowable because inherently random, and dismiss all science and all objective knowledge as irrelevant, or simply the means to rationalize the political interests of the powerful. Did not quantum theory, if we squeezed it a little and did not look too closely at its beautiful mathematics, be made to say something of the same kind? Were not the white lab-coated ones condemned out of their own mouths? And this is more or less the present state of deconstruction and discourse analysis in the arts.
But then, the knots and toils we tied ourselves into when we tried to profess views such as these! We had discovered a new sin: involuntary hypocrisy--hypocrisy when we were most desperately trying to avoid it. When we opted for simple disorder and randomness, we were faced with the problems of how to mean the destruction of meaning? how to publish the discrediting of publication and public? how to achieve institutional recognition, like Jenny Holzer in the Whitney, when institutions are the legacy of the past and thus based on sadistic repression? how to attack hierarchy in a language with a syntactical tree and grammatical subordination? how to critique a work of art as good or bad? how to get paid for paintings or sculpture where payment must be in the coin of "mimetic desire," and private ownership of art is the quintessence of commodification? how, even, to act with a body possessed of an immune system of quite military rigor, and a nervous system strikingly unified under central control?
And can freedom, seriously, be the same as random or disordered behavior? According to classical physics the universe becomes more disordered over time, that is, less intelligible and less able to do work. Is freedom just our little contribution to the universal process of increasing entropy? Is it our job as free beings to assist in the destruction of this beautiful ordered universe about us? Intention takes a highly organized brain; can the only free intention be that which would tend to disorganize that brain and disable intention itself? What becomes of responsibility if freedom is randomness? Can we take credit for what we do that is good, if there is no responsibility? Can there be such a thing as justice, for instance, if we cannot be held responsible for our actions?
Until recently the best that we could do with the available intellectual tools in cobbling up some kind of reasonable account of the universe, and of our own freedom, was to devise some kind of combination between order and randomness, linear determinism and disordered noise. The title of Jacques Monod's book on biological evolution, Chance and Necessity , puts it well. Perhaps we could describe both the emergence of new species and the originality and freedom of the human brain as a combination of random mutations and relatively deterministic selection.
But even here there were deep and subtle theoretical objections. Evolution seemed to proceed in sudden jumps, not gradually; a new species did not seem to emerge slowly but rather leap into being as if drawn by a premonition of its eventual stable form. Another objection: without the right suite of species, the ecological niche wouldn't exist; but without the ecological niche, the species wouldn't. How do new niches emerge? Again, from a purely intuitive point of view even four billion years didn't seem nearly enough to produce the staggering variety and originality of form to be found among living species--birds of paradise, and slime molds, and hermaphroditic parasitical orchids, and sperm whales, and all. Most disturbing of all, it became clear that the process of development, by which a fertilized egg or seed multiplied and diversified itself into all the cells in all the correct positions necessary for an adult body, was not a mere following of genetic instructions embedded in the DNA blueprint, but was an original and creative process in itself, which produced a unique individual out of a dynamic and open-ended interplay of cells. The miracle was that the interplay could produce something in the end remotely resembling its twin siblings, let alone its parents. It was as if the individual organism were drawn toward a beckoning form, and that the genes were not so much blueprints specifying that form, as gates permitting the developmental process to rush to its conclusion.
And the same kinds of problems arose if we tried to apply the chance-and-necessity model to the working of the human brain. Maybe "nature and nurture" don't exhaust the inputs. Can it make sense to speak of internal inputs, or forms which draw an appropriately prepared human brain into a specific competence, like language? There seemed to be a huge mass of internal, newly-emergent laws and principles in such systems that we have hardly begun to understand--and where did they come from, all of a sudden?
The dualism of order and disorder was coming under increasing strain. But within the arts and humanities the traditional avant-garde hatred of any kind of essentializing, hierarchizing, (biologically-) determinist, transcendentally significant and totalizing Order was so ingrained that the more shaky that dualism became, the more passionately it was asserted. The problem the avant garde was honestly trying to solve was that the only alternative to repressive order that seemed to be offered was random disorder, or on the psychological level, whim.
Suppose we were to try to specify what an escape from this predicament might look like philosophically. We would have to distinguish between two kinds of order, a repressive, deterministic kind, and some other kind that would not have these disadvantages. We would also have to distinguish between two kinds of chaos, one which was simply random, null, and unintelligible, and another that could bear the seeds of creativity and freedom. If we were really lucky, the second kind of order might turn out not to be the antithesis of the second kind of chaos; they might even be able to coexist in the same universe; best of all, they might even be the same thing!
The extraordinary thing that has happened--an astonishing stroke of good luck, an earnest of hope for the future--is that there really does seem to be the second kind of order, the second kind of chaos. And they do seem to be the same thing.
This new kind of order, or chaos, seemed to be at the heart of an extraordinary range of interesting problems that had appeared as philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and cybernetic technologists tried to squeeze the last drops of the imponderable out of their disciplines. They included the biology and brain problems already alluded to; the problem of how to describe catastrophic changes and singularities by means of a continuous mathematics; the problem of how to predict the future states of positive feedback processes; Goedel's paradox, which detaches the true from the provable; the description of phase-changes in crystallography and electrochemistry; the phenomenon of turbulence; the dynamics of open systems and nonlinear processes; the observer problem in a variety of disciplines; the failure of sociological and economic predictive models because of the rational expectations and second-guessing of real human subjects; the theoretical limitations of Turing machines (in certain circumstances they cannot turn themselves off); the question of how to fit the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot into orthodox mathematics; the classification of quasicrystals and Penrose tilings; the whole issue of self-reflection, bootstrapping and positive feedback in general; and most troubling of all, the question of the nature of time.
In choosing the term "chaos" to describe this new imaginative and intellectual arena, the discoverers of it pulled off something of a public-relations coup without perhaps fully intending to. They could have called it "antichaos," which would have been just as accurate a term, in fact a better one, as its implied double negative--"not not-order"--suggests something of its iterative depth. But "antichaos" would have sounded too much like law 'n order to avant garde artists and humanists, who would have dismissed it as yet another patriarchal Western mystification. Indeed, some humanists have taken "chaos" to their bosom, as they once did quantum uncertainty, as a confirmation of their pro-random, pro-disorder bias.
In order to understand the deeply liberating point of chaos (or antichaos) theory, we will need to go into the differences between deterministic linear order and chaotic emergent order, and between mere randomness and creative chaos. Let us begin by considering an odd little thought experiment.
Suppose we were trying to arrange a sonnet of Shakespeare in the most thermodynamically ordered way, with the least entropy. We cannot, for the sake of argument, break up the words into letters or the letters into line segments. The first thing we would do--which is the only sort of thing a strict thermodynamicist could do--is write the words out in alphabetical order: "a compare day I Shall summer's thee to ?". As far as thermodynamics is concerned, such an arrangement would be more ordered than the arrangement "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? . . . " as composed by Shakespeare. Here, in a capsule, is the difference between deterministic linear order and chaotic emergent order.
We could even test the thermodynamic order of the first arrangement by a further experiment. Suppose we coded the words in terms of gas molecules, arranged in a row, the hottest ones corresponding to the beginning of the alphabet, the coldest ones to the end, and so on in alphabetical order. If left to themselves in a closed vessel the molecules would, because of the increase of entropy over time, rearrange themselves into random alphabetical order (the hot and cold would get evenly mixed). Just as in a steam engine, where the energy gradient between hot steam and cold air can be used to do work, one would be able to employ the movement of molecules, as the alphabetized "sonnet" rearranged itself, to perform some (very tiny) mechanical task. And it would take somewhat more energy than we got out to put the molecules back into alphabetical order, because of the second law of thermodynamics.
As arranged in Sonnet 18 those words are already in more or less "random" alphabetical order. Yet most human beings would rightly assert that the sonnet order is infinitely more ordered than the thermodynamic, linear, alphabetical one. And in other respects the poem does seem to exhibit the characteristics of order. It could, if damaged by being rearranged, be almost perfectly reconstituted by a person who knew Shakespeare's work well. The sonnet can "do work:" it has deeply influenced human culture, and has helped to transform the lives of many students and lovers. It is an active force in the world precisely because it does not have the low-entropy simplicity of the alphabetical order that might enable it to do mechanical work. Here lies the basic distinction between "power" in the mechanical, political sense, and the mysterious creative influence of art.
But though we have distinguished between the two kinds of order, it is equally necessary to distinguish between the two kinds of chaos. Otherwise we would be in the predicament of someone like Stanley Fish, the "reader response" theorist, who has been forced by the "order-disorder" dualism into asserting that any random sequence of words, chosen perhaps by flipping the pages of a dictionary, would possess a richness of interpretive potential equal to that of the sonnet; and thus that the very idea of text is either meaningless or extensible to everything in the universe.
If reader response theorists understood information theory, it would be enough to show that their mistake is to confuse "white noise" with "flicker noise." White noise is made up of random amounts of energy at all frequencies. One could certainly imagine that one was listening to the sea when one heard acoustic white noise; there are even devices that make white noise to soothe people to sleep. But there is nothing there to understand or interpret. On the other hand, flicker noise, which does not at first sound very different, is the "sound" that a system makes that is ordered in itself and at the same time highly unstable and going through continuous internal adjustments by means of feedback: a good example is a pile of sand onto whose apex new grains of sand are being dropped one by one. There are many one-grain avalanches, fewer multi-grain avalanches, fewer still mass avalanches, and only the occasional collapse of a whole slope. The sequence of these avalanches obeys laws and forms an elegant fractal pattern when plotted on a graph. What one hears when one hears flicker noise is the combination of these events; and if one analysed it carefully, one might be able to work out the size of the grains, the interval of their deposition, and so on. There is real meaning to be extracted. Our reader-response theorist refuses to extract it.
But this example is perhaps rather abstract. Flicker noise is not just the "sound" made by piles of sand. It is also what we get when we "listen" in a crude way to highly complex organic systems. For instance, suppose we take the temperature of an animal: that reading is flicker noise. The temperature is made up of a combination of fantastically organized and intricate metabolic processes; yet it is indistinguishable from the "same" temperature taken of a simple chemical reaction, or of a random mixture of unrelated processes, which would be white noise. The problem is that a thermometer is a very crude instrument; but it is not enough to do what reader-response theorists would do, that is, to accept its crudity as accuracy, and to make up for it by imagining all kinds of exotic meanings for the animal's temperature that had no necessary connection with its organic metabolism. What makes it a crude instrument is precisely that it makes no allowance for the nature of what it is measuring.
Another example of flicker noise is what you would "hear" from a set of electrodes applied to someone's skull if the electrical signal were translated into sound. Just because one could imagine that the squeaks and booms and whistles one would hear resembled perhaps the song of humpback whales, that would not mean that the sound "meant" humpback whales. But this mistake is exactly analogous to much contemporary art criticism and interpretative theories of literature, the arts, or history, which discount the inner personal intentions and meanings of the author, whether the author authorizes a poem, a piece of music, a painting, or an historical act. By discounting those personal meanings, and perhaps substituting the crude statistical measures (the "temperature") of gender or race or class interest, we may avoid the bugbear of authorship--authority--but we lose any understanding of what it is we are dealing with: we cannot distinguish a living organism from a stone, and are in grave danger of treating them the same.
In the realm of artistic value, the idea of nonlinear systems generating emergent forms of order can prove very illuminating. When, in the move away from traditional societies to the modern state, we abandoned the old religious notions of the soul, of beauty, virtue, higher values, honor, truth, salvation, the divine, and so on, we suffered a genuine loss. But perhaps now we can refound some of those beautiful notions upon a new-old basis. The strange attractor of a chaotic system can look very like an Ideal Form: though any instance of the outcome of such a system at work is only partial and apparently random, when we see all instances of it, we begin to make out a beautiful, if incomplete and fuzzy shape. Might not virtues, ethics, values, and even in a way spiritual beings, be like those deep and beautiful attractors?--and might there not be larger systems still, including many brains and the interactions of all of nature, that would have attractors not unlike the Divine as described by religion?
Meaning itself can be redefined in terms of the relationship of strange attractors to the physical processes they describe. Any nonlinear dynamical system, when triggered by a stimulus, will generate a sequence of unpredictable events, but those events will nevertheless be limited to their attractor, and further iteration will fill out the attractor in more and more detail. The brain itself holds memories in the form of such attractors, the dynamical feedback system in this case being circuits of Hebb cells. Thus we can picture the relationship of a word to its meaning as the relationship of a given trigger to the attractor that is traced out by the feedback process it initiates. When the word "refers" to a perceived object--say, a smell or a sight--that object is one which can trigger a subset of the full attractor, as a Julia Set is a subset of the Mandelbrot Set. Thus a single word can trigger a "meaning-attractor," sections of whose fine detail can also be triggered by various sensory stimuli. This description rather nicely matches with our Proustian experience of connotation and poetic evocation, and with the logical form of generalization. It accords with the results of liguistic experiments concerning the relative strength by which a given example--say, a duck, an ostrich, or a sparrow--is recognized by a speaker as belonging to the meaning of a word ("bird"). It also explains the difference between ideas and impressions, that exercised the philosophical imaginations of Locke and Hume: the richly-detailed subset evoked by the sight of an object would certainly make the general sketch of the whole set evoked by the word look somewhat pale by comparison.
Since the trigger--whether the word or the sensory stimulus--is itself part of the feedback system, it is encompassed by its description, which is the attractor proper to it when it is allowed to iterate its effects upon a complex neural network. Thus the represented, the representation, and the experiencer of the representation are all part of the same physical system. The usual critique of physical descriptions of representation--for instance, John Searle's Chinese Room analogy for artificial intelligence--is that however a given object is represented inside the physical system, it requires a smaller system inside the system to see it and know it, or, as John Eccles believes, a detachable non-physical soul. The chaotic-attractor theory of meaning holds out the promise of an intelligible physical description of meaning that does not require an inner homunculus or the intervention of a metaphysical deus ex machina, with further attendant problems of infinite regress--how does the god in the machine perceive and know the representation?--to make it work. One way of putting this is that the issue of reflexiveness, of self-reference or self-inclusion, has been transferred from the metaphysical level where it can only be interpreted as a barren infinite regress or reductio ad absurdum, to the physical realm where it can be studied as we study turbulences of other kinds, with their own emergent properties and self-generated orderliness. The reflexiveness, we feel intuitively, should be there in any account of meaning; the trick is to keep it from messing up our own thinking about it, and place it where it belongs, in the operation of the brain itself!
It remains to suggest how this "attractor theory" of signification might work itself out in the etymological history of a language, and express itself in terms of phonology, morphology, and metaphor. The social and cultural dimension of language, like the neurosensory dimension, has the form of a nonlinear dynamical system with strange attractors pulling it toward certain "archetypal" forms. Those forms could be seen in the odd "targetedness" of the great sound-shifts that periodically convulse a language; they can also be observed in the way that metaphorization will take parallel paths in different languages, so that when a colorful idiom from another language is presented to us, we can almost always find an equivalent in our own. Thus the words "spirit" in English and "Atman" in Sanskrit have identical metaphoric histories, as do the words "kind," "nature," and "genus," all of which came together again in English, having led separate lives in Germanic, Latin, Greek, and other tongues for thousands of years since their original common root in Indo-European. Metaphorization and sound-changes are every new human generation's way of committing a sacrificial impiety against the tongue of its ancestors, an impiety that commutatively atones for the crime of the ancestors themselves in similarly appropriating the language for themselves from their own mothers and fathers. And since meaning dies the moment it ceases to cut slightly against all previous usage--a valuable if over-emphasized and not entirely original contribution of Deconstruction--it is constituted by this continual low-level feedback between the language and the world it contains.
Such might be the rudiments of a new, evolutionary poetics and a new nonlinear theory of meaning and representation. Obviously I have only scratched the surface here; the point is that we do not need to sit helplessly in the morass of late poststructuralist despair and misologism, and that there are still worlds for the literary humanities to conquer.
And there are practical implications of this model of meaning. (By now such phrases as "model of meaning," with their invitations to further reflexive iteration, should hold no terrors for us, since we hold a clue to the labyrinth, a clue whose own windings are equal to the windings of that dark place we would discover.) One implication is that many of the characteristics of the relationship of word and meaning are already present in the relationship between a percept and the experience of it. If a sense-perception can generate a sort of "Julia Set," then in a way a sense perception is like a word. That is, we share with other higher animals the elements of a sensory language which preexisted the more encompassing kind of language that uses words. Or we could put it the other way around, and say that language is just a larger kind of sensing, using internal triggers to evoke larger attractor-sets than any percept could. Obviously we have here a further reason for exploring our relationship with our animal friends: it is a way of understanding the fundamentals of our own language, of discovering that ur-language we share with other parts of nature than ourselves. One huge advantage of that ur-language is that it is not riven by the linguistic boundaries that divide the more fully human languages like English and French from each other; and if we learn to speak it better, we may find more common ground with cultural Others as well as with biological Others.
In one sense, of course, we already possess such ur-languages, in the shared imagery of the visual arts and in the "universal language" of music. But the theory of meaning proposed here suggests that there is something analogous to music and visual imagery that underlies language itself, obscured by its more recent evolutionary achievements, to be neglected only at the cost of a vitiation and greying of our expression and understanding. I came to this conclusion by an entirely different route a few years ago, while translating the poetry of Miklos Radnoti with my remarkable colleague Zsuzsanna Ozsvath. In the following section I shall discuss the discoveries we made together, and in this way give body to the critical and linguistic theory proposed here, especially to the concept of the ur-language. Suffice it to say here that poetic meter turns out to be a sure road to the ur-language, or to change the metaphor, meter is the lyre or golden bough or magic flute that enables us to enter the underworld of that language and to return with intelligible gifts for the community. Meter, like music and visual imagery, is an ancient psychic technology by which human nature and human culture are bridged; appropriately, and as we might imagine from our discussion of the fractal harmonics of Hebb-cell circuitry, meter is a rhythmic and harmonic system in itself, a way of inducing the wave functions of the brain. The lyre through which Rilke traces Orpheus in the Sonnets to Orpheus is the poetic form of the sonnet itself.
If the words of a poet can induce in one brain the same strange attractor that they proceeded from in the poet's brain, an extraordinary possibility presents itself. This possibility is that when those harmonics are in our heads we are actually sharing the thoughts, and indeed the subjectivity, of the poet, even if he or she is dead. The poet lives again when his or her attractors arise in another brain. Poetry, then, is a kind of artificial intelligence program, that springs into being when booted correctly into any good human meat-computer.
The notion of the strange attractor can be useful not only in understanding artistic and poetic values, but also in the much more down-to earth realms of history and sociology. Any analysis of historical events we make, or any theory of social behavior we formulate, is itself one of the determining factors in the situation it describes. Thus there is no "meta" position, no detached Olympian viewpoint from which objective assessments can be made, and therefore no escape from the apparent chaos of mutual feedback. Even economists are just another group of competitors over what constitutes value.
Not that this struggle for ontological control is a blind one. We would be totally ineffective at it if we were not able to assess the motives and assume the worldview of others. And even this would not be enough. Our imaginative model of the other must contain its own image of oneself--the gift, said Robert Burns, is to see ourselves as others see us; and that image itself must contain its own assessment of the other. And our outer negotiations take place not just between our own persons but also among the entire dramatis personae of the inner drama by which we estimate the future. The confusion is not one of blindness, but of too much sight; not of randomness, but an excess of determinants; not of chaos, but of an order too complex to be explained before the next complicating event comes along--of which the next, complicating, event is the best explanation.
Indeed, this capacity to impose our interpretations on things is not only our predicament but also what enabled us to second-guess, predict and control the simpler systems of nature, such as the biological, chemical, and physical ones. We bought our power over the rest of nature with the essential uncontrollability of human events. We can control nature to the extent that we stay one step of reflexivity ahead of it. Nor is even nature innocent, but is itself the resultant and living history of a cosmic evolution which pitted many forms of reflection against each other; the marvellous cooperation of nature is a prudent and subtle form of mutual feedback. Even so, when we find we can reduce another organism to a successfully testable set of laws and predictions, it is a sign that we are dealing with a lower order of reflection than our own.
Thus to attempt to do so with human beings--to educe and apply the laws governing them and to predict their actions--is, in human terms, a viciously aggressive act, an attempt to get control at the expense of others' freedom. It implicitly reduces human beings to the level of lower animals, even to that of inanimate things. But this indeed is what much social and economic history, much sociology and progressive political theory, have attempted to do. The promise such studies held out was not lost on those with the sweet thirst for power. Transformed into political programs those systems appeared in our century as the great totalizing regimes--Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, International Socialism. We should not be surprised at the vigorous counter-reaction of human cultures against such systems.
In the light of this analysis it now becomes clear why, with the best will in the world, all principled revolutions have ended up diminishing human variety and freedom in their societies. For a revolution to be truly freeing it must be unprincipled, in the sense that its intentions do not rest on a predictive theory of human social behavior. Principles in this sense must be sharply distinguished from values , which are much more complex products and guides of human history, including within them the non-linear flexibility and creativity of their past. The American Revolution was an unpricipled revolution, which is why it succeeded when so many failed. But unlike most later revolutions it did not question the great values of human life, and indeed recommitted itself to them. Such principles as the American revolution possessed, enshrined in the Constitution, really amount to a declaration of regulated intellectual anarchy or unprincipledness. The separation of powers, which is, more than equality and more even than democracy, the central message of the Constitution and the thematic undertone of every article, is an intuitive recognition of the reflexive, self-organizing, unpredictable, feedback nature of history, which by reinterpreting its initial conditions is able to forget them.
Separation of powers makes politics into a drama, not a treatise. Perhaps the true hidden presence behind the Constitution is William Shakespeare. All the world's a stage. We are all actors, in both senses of the word. Our inherent value derives from that condition, not from Kant's notion that we are ends in ourselves. We can still keep our dignity even if we are, for immediate purposes, means, as long as we are actors in the drama. Even if their function is to serve, the crusty boatman or witty nurse or pushy saleslady are interpreting the world from their own center, are characters, dramatis personae, to be ignored by others at their peril; and are thus free.
But of course even this formulation which I have made is itself a part of the situation it describes; it is a speech in the play, to be evaluated by your own reflexive processes of assessment. Let us see whether the line of thought it prompts is a more or less freeing one than its competitors.
We immediately run up against a large problem. Does this critique of historical and human studies mean that they must revert to the status of chronicle and appreciative observation? Like amateur naturalists, must their practitioners only be collectors, without testable hypotheses or laws? Should we just admire the exquisite coiled turbulence of human events, wonder, and move on? The French historian Fernand Braudel is almost such a historical naturalist; there are moments as one contemplates his great colorful, slowly roiling paisley of Mediterranean history, seemingly without direction or progress, that one could wish for little more out of history. Should not the historian be a sort of Giacomo Casanova, a picaro among the courts and sewers of eternal Europe or China, remarking and "thickly describing" the choice beauties to be seen on one's travels?
On the face of it, a very attractive approach; but it abdicates that very activity--holistic understanding and the enrichment of the world by interpretation--that characterizes the human Umwelt, the human species-world, itself. The admonition not to totalize is the most totalitarian command of all, because it essentially dehumanizes history. The feedback process of human culture is a feedback of what deconstructionists would call totalizations. The open-endedness of history is created by the competition and accommodation of various candidates for the last word, the dernier cri, the formula of closure (including this one); it is an ecology of absolutisms. Nor is this ecology a random play of flows, without direction or growth; technology, records, and enduring works of art constitute ratchets which prevent any return to earlier, less complex states of the system, just as genetic inheritance did in earlier ages. Thus history is an evolutionary system, with the three factors required for evolution to take place: variation (provided by the unpredictable paisley of reflexive events), selection (provided by the competition and accommodation of "totalizations"), and inheritance, a conservative ratchet to prevent what is of advantage from being lost.
We are already embarked on the venture of making sense of things. The only way open is to seek forms of understanding and descriptive categories that are proper to our own level of reflexive complexity. To do this is essentially an artistic, a constructive, a performative, a religious activity, and it cannot fully depend on the capacity for calculation by which we claim to understand the rest of the natural world. History is an art, even a technology, even a liturgy, as much as it is a science; and it is so not only in the activity of historiography, but also in that of research.
I am proposing, in other words, a change in our fundamental paradigm of historical and human study. And here another set of major scientific advances comes into play. Most workers in the historical and sociological fields still accept the cultural determinism that was one of the first naive responses of the West to the cultural diversity of the newly-discovered nonwestern world. Thus for them the units of historical study, human beings, are tabulae rasae, blank sheets to be inscribed by cultural conditioning or economic pressures.
More recently, however, in fields as diverse as cultural anthropology, linguistics, twin-studies, paleoanthropology, human evolution, psychophysics, performance studies, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, folklore and mythology, and ethology, it is becoming clear that we human beings bring to history and society an enormously rich set of innate capacities, tendencies, and exclusive potentials. We uncannily choose, again and again, the same kinds of poetic meters, kinship classifications, calendars, myths, funerals, stories, decorative patterns, musical scales, performance traditions, rituals, food-preparation concepts, grammars, and symbolisms. We are not natureless. Indeed, our natures include, genetically, much of the cultural experience of our species in that period of one to five million years of nature-culture overlap during which our biological evolution had not ceased, while our cultural evolution had already begun: the period in which unwittingly we domesticated and bred ourselves into our humanity. The shape and chemistry of our brains is in part a cultural artifact. We are deeply written and inscribed already, we have our own characters, so to speak, when we come from the womb.
Having taken away one kind of rationality from historical and human studies, we may be able to replace it with another. But in so doing are we not committing the very sin, of reducing a self-organizing and unpredictable order to a set of deterministic laws, of which we accuse the determinist historians? Are we not replacing cultural or economic determinism with biological determinism? Not at all. First, to understand the principles governing the individual elements of a complex system is, as we have seen, not sufficient to be able to educe laws to predict the behavior of the whole ensemble. The beautiful paisleys of atmospheric turbulence are not explained by the most precise understanding of the individual properties--atomic weight, chemical structure, specific heat, and so on--of its elements. Second, the peculiar understanding of the human being that we are coming to is of a creature programmed rather rigidly and in certain specific ways to do something that is totally open-ended: to learn and to create. Our hardwiring--whose proper development we neglect in our education at great peril--is designed to make us infinitely inventive. Our nature is a grammar which we must learn to use correctly, and which, if we do, makes us linguistically into protean gods, able to say anything in the world or out of it.
Thus the paradigm change which this line of argument suggests is from one in which a social universe of natureless, culturally determined units is governed by a set of causal laws and principles which, given precise input, will generate accurate predictions, to one in which a cultural universe of complex-natured but knowable individuals, by the interaction and feedback of their intentions, generates an ever-changing social pattern or paisley, which can be modelled but not predicted. The meaning of understanding would change from being able to give a discursive or mathematical account of something to being able to set up a working model that can do the same sorts of things as the original.
Fundamental political concepts like freedom, war, civil order, equality, literacy, power, justice, sovereignty and so on would no longer be defined in terms of a set of objective abstract conditions but as living activities in a one-way unrepeatable process of historical change. It would be such a revaluation as occurred in literary criticism in the nineteenth century, when tragedy came to be defined as a process, an organic and recognizable activity, rather than as conforming to such rules as the Three Unities.
Objective and abstract definitions of political concepts imply utopias, ideal principled social states towards which historical polities should strive; satisfy the definitions, and we have perfection, the end of history, an objective rationality to judge all of the past! Horrible idea; but it governs most political enthusiasm. Instead, let us imagine a peculiar kind of progress--not the old one, towards Whig empire or Hegelian state or proletarian or socialist or technological paradise, but a progress in changing terms which themselves progress by subsuming earlier ones; a progress that looks like decline or stagnation to those fixed to one idea of it; a progress not along a straight time-line but along one that curves back and fills up the holes in itself until it begins to look like a plane or a solid; a progress forged out of the evolutionary competition of totalizations, in which those most accommodating, most loving to each other, like the mammals, have the best chance of survival.
And here we may be in a position to begin to redeem that promise, of forms of understanding and descriptive categories proper to our own level of reflexive complexity, which we implied earlier. The real forces at work on the stage of history are values. And values are uniquely qualified for a role both as tools to understand history and as forces at work in it. One qualification is just that: they straddle the worlds of action and knowledge, they admit candidly our involvement, our partisanship, our partiality and our power. Objectivity in a historian is an impossible goal in any case. Another qualification of values is that they give a kind of direction to history, the possibility of progress, which is the logical precondition of any inquiry. Values are essentially dynamic, readjusting, contested, vigorous, as the word's derivation from the Latin for "health," and its cognate "valor" imply.
We must reexamine those older partisan brands of historiography that wore their values on their sleeves: heroic, exemplary, mythic history. Perhaps their intellectual credentials were not as shaky as we thought; perhaps they were not so naively unaware of the possibility of their own bias.
It might well be objected that I am advocating an outrageous abandonment of objectivity, and giving license to the worst forms of ethnocentrism and prejudice. Indeed I must plead guilty, but with mitigating circumstances. It was the age of "objective" history that provided the fuel for scientific racism, holocausts, colonialism, and the Gulag. The ideologue who believes he has objective truth on his side is more dangerous than the ordinary patriot or hero, because he calls his values "facts" and will disregard all ordinary human values in their service. We are going to be ethnocentric anyway; let us at least play our ethnocentrisms against each other on a level playing-field and not attempt to get the objective high ground of each other. Given such a game, adaptive success in the long run attends those versions of our partisanship that have the widest, panhuman, appeal. Let us seek not to avoid bias, but to widen our bias in favor of the whole human race, and beyond.
This approach especially questions the apparently straightforwardness of the notion of political power. Events occur, and their meaning is rich and complex. The events are made up of the actions of men and women; and if they performed those actions then, tautologically, they had the power to do so. Do we gain anything by inserting the idea of power? Suppose they didn't perform the actions; could they have? Could we prove it? Power depends on values, and values on the individual and collective imagination.
This means that the capacity to recognize beauty, the esthetic sense, is the primary cognitive skill of the historian or sociologist. It is by beauty that we intuit the order of the reflexive process of human history. On the small, tribal scale the need for this essential function may well have been one of the principal selective pressures that led us toward our extraordinary inherited talents at storytelling and the interpretation of narrative. History should be refounded on story, not the other way round.
The redescription of values as the strange attractors of certain complex systems, especially human ones, rather neatly solves many of the problems thinkers in various disciplines have had in identifying the nature of values--problems so severe that many have denied the existence of values altogether. Existing descriptions include the following:
1. Values are clear, intelligible ideal forms in the mind of God. This description catches the transcendent flavor of values, the demand they make for compliance, and the sense we have that they should be eternal and independent of particular circumstances and appearances. But it misses their rootedness in actual human situations, their cultural setting, the extreme difficulty people have in discerning when and if they apply, their processual nature, and the infinite subtlety and ambiguity they display, especially in the work of the finest artists and moralists.
2. Values are nothing more than abstract reifications of personal feelings, that can and should change when those feelings change. This description has the advantage of dismissing the problem, but it is now clear that civil culture and personal happiness are impossible on this basis; and even if values are such an illusion, they are an illusion shared by such large communities of human beings that they constitute a social fact. A huge, value-shaped hole is left in human language if this definition is accepted, one which would be as hard to negotiate around as if we were to decide that all ocular vision were simply a neural illusion. Nevertheless, there seems to be some intuitive truth in the notion that values have an internal, personal, and subjective dimension; and that they have an immanent quality, and cannot be divorced from the processes in which they arise--observations that should be saved in any more satisfactory account of the matter.
3. Values are the culturally-relative norms generated by particular societies to justify and reinforce the power of the dominant ruling group to pursue its interests. This description again avoids the problem, but only by substituting two even more questionable abstractions ("power" and "society") for the supposed abstractions of value. What "interests" might consist of in a world in which values were entirely relative is hard to say. Why ordinary people should feel a duty to conform to values--why it is a value to adhere to values--is also not addressed. Yet this description has the virtue of pointing to something systematic and global in the nature of values, involving complex relationships among a number of players--another feature that must not be lost in a more accurate account.
4. Values are the human terms for the genetically-determined evolutionary imperatives of our species. This description ignores the very strong experience people report that their values are bound up intimately with their personal freedom, the very thing that separates us from the supposed automatism of lower animals. It also contains a troublesome flaw in logic: if we are genetically programmed to follow these evolutionary imperatives, we would have no need for social and cultural norms and prohibitions: if people did not at times wish to steal, lie, kill, disobey their parents and commit adultery, there would be no need for the ten commandments. Other animals have no decalogue. On the other hand, this description points to very important characteristics of values: that they largely transcend cultural differences, that they are rooted in our evolutionary history, that they are ideally conducive to the survival of ourselves and our fellow living things, and that they involve a tension between individual and collective interests (for instance, in the sociobiological account of altruism).
The beauty of the "strange attractor" description of values is that it nicely includes all the characteristics of values that this analysis suggests, while avoiding the flaws in the existing definitions. Strange attractors are immanent in the processes they attract, yet have an integrity, even an eternal and unchanging quality, that transcends them (the Lorenz attractor exists before and after the particular dripping faucet or rotating globular star-cluster it describes). Strange attractors do not determine which data point will come next, but rather the global shape of the ensemble of data points. Though the data points (in so-called "deterministic chaos") are indeed in an abstract sense deterministic, the universe itself, with its quantum graininess and indeterminacy, does not have enough acuity and indeed data processing power to predict their exact location in advance, and thus such processes are for all practical purposes both unpredictable and ordered, a very fine match with our minimum conditions for freedom. Freedom, one of our supreme values and also a precondition for most other values, resists any attempt at reduction to either traditional notions of order or traditional notions of randomness--if freedom is traditional order, then it is deterministic and not free, but if it is traditional randomness (the acte gtatuit of the existentialists) its essential quality of responsibility is lost. The unpredictable emergence of Prigoginian dissipative structures from chaotic interactions, drawn by strange attractors, similarly defies traditional notions of order and randomness.
Biological evolution, with its iterative algorithm of variation, selection, and genetic inheritance, and its massively nonlinear ecological arena of selection, is a fecund womb of strange attractors. Among these, values might well be among the most complex and sophisticated, since they arise out of the further interplay of biological and cultural evolution. Strange attractors, unlike drives or instincts, however, have the engaging if frustrating feature that they can never be fully achieved; new data points can always can be added that will deepen and enrich the detail, revealing new self-similar but not self-identical depths. Thus the requirement of a tension between the ideal and the real is preserved. Drives push; attractors invite, or pull, in an unpredictable way. Strange attractors have room for both global collective features, and individual idiosyncrasies. The "meta" quality of values--it is a value to have values--is also addressed by the essentially recursive, reflexive, self-transcending character of strange attractors and the conditions of their emergence. Further, it is a moot point whether even the entire network of human social, cultural, technological and economic feedbacks and communications over the globe is yet as complex and multidimensional as the interconnections of a single human brain and nervous system--a reflection that nicely suggests the importance of the individual conscience in discerning and generating values. Finally, the oddity of these attractors when we try to fit them into our existing categories--are they physical objects, or processes, or relationships, or adjectival or adverbial qualities, or entities, or abstractions, or essences, or tendencies, or vectors, or mathematical idealizations, or what?--exactly matches our puzzlement when we try to identify values.
If this identification of values as strange attractors can be upheld, the implications for the discipline of history and the human sciences are enormous. In seeking the key principles of historical change, social organization, and economic development in forces or drives that force and push society and individuals, we may have been deeply neglecting these mysterious, yet increasingly intelligible, attractors that invite and draw society and individuals. Even assuming we could exactly specify the origins of present events, unlikely in the light of our present understanding of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the past may be important not as the determinative cause of the present but as an archive of value-attractors for future development. It may turn out that the real reason why human beings do things is not that they are compelled into them by socio-economic causes or political and cultural norms, but that they are attracted to them by their goodness and their beauty.

[Dan replies: I'll be brief as possible in response. I'm glad to have gotten this essay because, although I disagree with the bulk of your assertions, you state your case forcefully, & are willing to stir the pot. Hopefully folks who read this will be willing to discuss such. A local fellow named Dave Okar often writes of such thema but with little talent or insight- thus his arguments descend to a gray burble. He believes all is subjective- that the objective does not exist- yet he illogically argues his point- a clear violation of his claim of subjective belief- why bother argue if it all means naught? I'll state some agreements & objections: 1st off is that 1 of the problems with mixing domains of human endeavor is that the analogies are often inapt, & the conclusions thus derived from the initial inaptnesses veer wildly. The arts & sciences are indeed different domains- Art is discovery in service to creativity, while science is creativity in service to discovery. The deep discomfort with order that you kick off your piece with is not really bolstered. Pollock, Cage & Ashbery's work certainly is ordered- just not classically ordered. The question is not of order but of excellence- Cage is quite silly, Pollock quite fraudulent, & Ashbery a disappointment after early promise. But disordered? I agree with your statements on memory & experience & your take on Postmodern aims & bedrock beliefs. Your take on hypocrisies is a nice capsule of the PC Elitist's dilemma. Then you seriously veer into absurdity by conflating freedom with entropy. How does 1 scientifically measure ideas? Plus, we have no empirical way of measuring whether or not the cosmos is indeed a 'closed system'- a prerequisite if 1 is to speak of entropy. Your take on evolution is about 15 years past due: I'd recommend comparing 2 books on the Burgess Shale: Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 tome Wonderful Life vs. Simon Morris's1998 The Crucible Of Creation- Morris really exposes the gaps in Gould's reasoning that your very oversimplified statements on evolution seem to echo. [Also read my poem Why Are Missing Links Missing?] Probably the most flagrant example of crossed domains is your view on entropy applied to Willy's Sonnet 18. Although you point out some of the folly in such an assertion the query arises- why veer that way to begin with- to strut a bit? After all, if the words were aligned by letter or syllabic count, would they be more or less entropic to the 2 orders you indicate? When you employ the word 'transform' to this sonnet's outflow I think you make the classic case of overstating. Art is, for better or worse, a luxury- the only thing odd about your assertion is that it is identical to those you previously ripped. The point on 2 types of chaos is valid, yet the delve into white vs. flicker noise seems another dip into useless domain-mixing. & the biggest problem with that is it dilutes the very good & valid points made. In my essays on Harold Bloom & B.R. Myers I lamented how Bloom's critics, & Myers, left too many openings for their foes to rip at their underbelly. Your take on religious notions is such a glint of soft white that I'll pass on & see if others take a nip. Then we veer into alot of prolixity, pseudoscience, & bigwordthrowing arounding, just to end with a weak statement on meaning's death. Not to mention the take on meter. Alot of this reminded me of some Rudolf Steiner ideas. Also, absolutist statements are another exposure of soft white. The best example of studies on humans to garner some Natural Laws was the early 20th Century Eugenics movement. Yet these studies do not implicitly reduce humans- only the way the studies are conducted & their results misused do that. Then the take on the American Revolution seems just semantic obfuscation- & Shakespeare the presence behind the US Constitution- more hyperbole with no real purpose. Et tu?: History is an art? A technology? Also I take the quotes around '"objective" history' indicate a de facto acknowledgement that the term was misused? You then end with a very simplified idea of beauty's power to mold human behavior. Again, I think there are some interesting points & alot of soft white exposed. The easiest retort is that ideas like these are probably amongst the chief reasons that Philosophy is even more culturally negligible than Poetry. But let's see what others will opine- remember, I left some soft white untouched!]
[Fred replies & Dan's Last word: On reflection, it was probably a mistake to send this essay. It condenses together material that is discussed in detail in nine of my books--Natural Classicism; Beauty, the Value of Values: Essays on Literature and Science; Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education; The Culture of Hope; Tempest, Flute, and Oz: Essays on the Future; Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (an edited volume that clearly makes the case for human universals and natural law, a very lively topic today in evolutionary psychology and games-theory replication dynamics); Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics; and the as yet unpublished Seven Blind Men and an Elephant: A Study in the Interpretation of Religion. My work on poetic meter has been tested in several scientific studies, but might well sound odd to someone coming across it for the first time after a century of (now-discredited) free verse theory. In addition, the essay probably doesn't make sense without a knowledge of my two science fiction epic poems, Genesis and The New World.
If the essay is read as an introduction to a very strange new world with its own logic and canons of evidence and general view of the universe, it might be useful. But if it is read according to how accurately it lines up against one of the established academic positions, it will be thoroughly misunderstood. For instance, I have made clear my differences with Steven Jay Gould in a number of other places, including my take on the relationship between genetics and fetal development (which is actually cutting-edge; there have been several articles on the subject in the last six months of Science. Self-organization and the homeobox genes are flavor of the month in biology right now). The extent of my failure to make myself clear is indicated by the fact that the identification of freedom with entropy is indeed an absurdity, but it is raised not as my own opinion but to show the flaws of the argument I am attacking—i.e. that order = unfreedom, disorder = freedom. Incidentally, Cage, Pollock and Ashbery would probably proudly acknowledge that their work has a major aleatory (i.e. random) element--Cage does so explicitly--and thus if you wish to argue that their work is ordered (i.e. unrandom), you had better argue with them, not me.
Thus your claim to disagree with much of the essay is rather shaky, since I obviously did not make myself understood.
Ignorance of the context is not in any sense a fault in a critic. It is the writer's job to make himself clear. Unfortunately, if one has developed a significantly different paradigm for the whole cosmos--as I suppose I have whether it is accurate or not--it is not enough to limit the topic and provide footnotes, which are the normal-science way of meeting objections. The skeptical reader must really, to be fair, read the whole oeuvre. The problem with your critique is that it reacts in anxiety against precisely what is original, unusual, and odd, if admittedly speculative, in the piece, and thus undermines the otherwise boldly contrarian and exploratory theme of your site. Your phrase "soft white" marvelously catches the sense of shocked shame that an unfamiliar and "incorrect" idea provokes. It is the soft white parts of the human body that generate new human beings and that are the sites of love and personal transformation. They are indeed scary to some. Properly read, I hope the whole essay is soft white in this sense. If I had wanted a critique from the point of view of the academic establishment, with its prudish clinging to the disciplinary proprieties, I would have sent the essay to the PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association, the society that represents the literary academy). Believe me, there is no soft white there. Frederick Turner

Dan ends it: Chronologically is the best way to engage such things- but 1st, let me state 1 of the reasons I started the Cosmoetica website, other than seeking to find publication for me & the other unpublished writers- that is to actually engage ideas without having to kow-tow to people’s weak images of themselves. My hope was to get people saying in public all the shit they hold back & merely gossip about each other. The example of Carolyn Forché in my latest essay is par for the course. When I bother criticize something it is almost always because there is something worth the criticism- the vapid are just that. Having deflated numerous literary ‘personalities’ in public, having endured reams of hate emails, gone to court against a harasser from the TC press corps, staved off a # of death threats & lawsuits, it’s always a disappointment when 1 merely has to defend the right to disagree- especially when the crux of difference lies with the idea- not the author. Also, for me to post an essay so very different in POV from my own takes on life & art- & not rebut- would open me up to a valid charge of Forchévian hypocrisy: “What, just cuz that guy’s a published writer Dan won’t stand up to him?” Sadly, such simpering sentiments are rampant in the callow minds of too many artists- trust me on that 1, Fred! That said- a brief commentary: 1) I don’t think free verse theory is discredited; I think pretty much all poetic theory is- & slowly I will knock them off 1-by-1. My next big S&D will probably be on the 20th C’s Grand Critical Poseur- Randall Jarrell, & after that I’ll probably take aim at the New Critics or the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Surrealist/Concrete/Abstract/Beatnik/Projectivist/Objectivist, etc. Schools- you’ll probably love that 1! 2) I’ve read & own The New World- didn’t think it good nor bad- but as with most long poems it could have been alot less-& subsequently given alot more. My wife Jessica [who incidentally took a class of yours @ UT-Dallas when her maiden name was Lester] owns Genesis- but I’ve not read it. 3) As for Cage & the boys- obviously there is structure; that they cannot see it, or willfully deny it is cute, but no one really takes that seriously save a few of their suckbuds who have a vested interest in things such as the vaunted Cult Of John (Ashbery- not Cage). 4) That you say the essay was not possible to be understood seems specious- but I ‘got’ it- that we disagree seems to not be a reasonable cause to backpedal- but ultimately the folk who read this piece- here or elsewhere/elsewhen- will decide on its success or not. 5) Those who know me personally, & even just from a gleaning of my poems or essays online, would be hard-pressed to find anxiety. Also, I read little fiction- most of my non-poetic reading (from childhood on) is of science, cultural knick-knackery from psi & religious/mythic stuff to pro sports & all sorts of crapola- to quote Archie Bunker. Perhaps 1 of these days, if I’ve the time & my poetic well [always the #1 priority!] runs dry I’ll try to synthesize the common threads between art theories, science, pseudoscience, religion, political screedism, paranormal beliefs, etc. There’s a guy named David Icke, who’s apparently a Brit culty/sci fi writer on the order of L. Ron Hubbard, who had some anti-Semitic screed floating around & forwarded to me about the ‘Illuminati’. Here were a lot of the same techniques in that piece that were in this- or any art theory I’ve read. I just feel if more folk spent time attempting to maximize their art- it would improve. I don't aim to be contra

l. ron hubbarb.

belgrave square. i am crying. green grass.

I agree in principle but not in theory, Gossett.

Jess and Mark S to thread!

Doom-e you think you are the hottest shit since a bomb in a pizza joint in Tel Aviv. Why don't you JUST FUCK OFF!!

Cor, doesn't Pam Shriver look more and more like Jenny from Family Affairs each day? I keep expecting her to jump up and wallop Sue Barker in the face with a wet fish, but sadly we can't have everything, can we?

Someone asked me if I was their waiter. I was so offended I decked the asshole. We've been fighting for three days straight. I'm stopping only to post this and say that I've been listening to WorldBeat.

You mean 'World BEAT-OFF'!! Ha ha, get it?

― Lord Custoss, Thursday, 3 July 2003 09:35 (twenty-two years ago)

CAST SPELL: Get rid of thread.

Did it work guys? Did it work?

Why IS THIS THREAD NOT ABOUT ME? MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE DO PARODIES OF ME. ASK ME WHAT I THINK OF IT. ME ME ME ME !!!

kim fowly
wizarrd
blue otsyer cult

all $1NZ

mother.

can you not hear?

i am crying.

awaiting your arrival.

soon my amazon order will come.

mother?

See, the problem, essentially with well, EVERYBODY if I am being honest and true is that people don't want to hear about what an album sounds like to make a decision regarding their purchase - they need to hear about me and my conspiracies.

I've just ordered :

Talk Talk - all the unreleased b-sides remixed
(Why WON'T AMAZON FUCKING DELIVER THIS IN THE NEXT 5 MINUTES!!! I'VE ORDERED 15 COPIES!!)
Disco Inferno - Go Pop
Flaming Lips - everything they've ever done
Kraftwerk - the new album (Listen AMAZON!! I DON'T CARE IF IT EXISTS OR NOT! SEND IT YOU C@NTS!)
Plaid - all their stuff too

And some reggae from Jamaica by some Jamaican reggae artists. That'll be good.

lonely. lost. s club 7 juniors. mother?

I've just ordered :
Talk Talk - all the unreleased b-sides remixed
(Why WON'T AMAZON FUCKING DELIVER THIS IN THE NEXT 5 MINUTES!!! I'VE ORDERED 15 COPIES!!)
Disco Inferno - Go Pop
Flaming Lips - everything they've ever done
Kraftwerk - the new album (Listen AMAZON!! I DON'T CARE IF IT EXISTS OR NOT! SEND IT YOU C@NTS!)
Plaid - all their stuff too

And some reggae from Jamaica by some Jamaican reggae artists. That'll be good.

i hate you all.

Bloody user log-in feature!!

there are threads worth reading and then there are threads like this one

holy shit dr c that was killer accurate! yikes!

gareth (that was gareth right) the george g one cracked me the hell up too

although actually i only paid 50c for thw wizzard album

This is how it works, right? Their people get in touch with *someone* at the record company who says they'll get back to PR. They don't. Simultaneously PR calls the mag and says person X is in town. You call the mag or the mag calls you for access. Meanwhile the record company has gotten back to their people to say PR aren't returning their calls. A *good* PR assistant will call you without letting either the record company or the mag know that YOU know that their people are waiting for a call from PR. If this doesn't happen get on their case big-time. Six months later a pleb-journo like you will get 75 seconds access to Louise from Sleeper, but only with their people around too. Do NOT accept this and remember - tape EVERYTHING.

For me it's different, because I'm more talented and, if you will, *edgy*. Say Madonna or Michael (Jackson, right?) is in town. Their people will be desperate for access to me, so that their charge can just hang with me for a few days or go shopping as friends. That's fine if I have time, but I'll make them sweat for months in advance while they try and fix things up.

Oh and Kate, you left the washing-up brush in the sink again. Ick!

It's OK I'll come down and move the brush later. Then can I get my train set out please?

Anyway, the Wimbledon final this year is going to be RUBBISH cos I'm not there. And our telly's on the blink, which means it'll be the worst final EVER. Venus and Serena will both DIE on court and none of you will get your money back. So ner!

Not that I care. I'm going to watch two Lithuanian films and then off to the Greasy Donkey in Stepney - I heart ruff pubs. Then Tom and I will go home and listen to Carter really loud, just to annoy Emma.

Hey! I saw a great tennis skirt in the shops on the way to play baseball in Central Park yesterday afternoon. And a cool pair of white tennis shoes, although I think I may try wearing it with the pair of red and white thigh-length boots I bought the other week. I think I may well go for the hot English rich girl/sultry Lower East Side crossover look this summer. It reminds me of a girl I saw on a London bus years ago, and she looked adorable!

**their people**

hi spukey what does 'their people' mean? the artist's mum and dad, right? thanks.

**Greasy Donkey in Stepney**

I think you'll find it's called the Greasy Mule, Ptee. They served me a very agreeable pint of Thornton's Old Cockfighter last weekend, as I congratulated myself on finding a mint white label copy of Gregory Isaacs' 'Too Hot Woman' in the Oxfam next door.

Pete's not going to the pub anyway, he's just pretending he is so you all think he has friends.

flying saucers!

Did I mention how damn sexy I find you all? I'd definitely have sex with all of you - at once!! But I'm busy tonight so it'll have to wait.

Next Wednesday maybe? I could meet everyone in a little pub just around the corner from work at say, around 5.17 pm precisely. If any of you don't know what I look like, just surf the web for five minutes, my picture is in all kinds of places!

And I need help taking home the 3,545 cds that I just acquired at the HMV sale!

It's funny, actually, that the more and more I watch Wimbledon the more it hits me what an important tournament this is. It feels like we're seeing a real sea change in stylistic trends in both the mens and womens game. It really feels like we're watching the last days of the late 90s serve-and-volley game and seeing the return of the big serve game to dominance, the two of which I think you'll agree are wholly antithetical.

I mean, there's obviously loads of serve-and-volley play still making it in the lower reaches of the tournaments, but it doesn't seem to have that same freshness and potency of prime Becker or Agassi. Likewise, you get the feeling that a lot of players have just been found out, that their stars are fading because their approach just doesn't seem as *fresh* any more. It's hard for anyone to stay at the top of their game for long, as the Williams sisters will no doubt find out a few years down the line. But keep Leyton Hewitt though, he's hot.

I don't know much about tennis so I'll stay out of this.

Junior. Senior. It strikes me that there are four, and only four, ways to like them. Firstly you could approach J-S from the classical indie perspective - you're a Pavement fan but you like a bit of novelty - heh!
Then there's a pop-centric (but open to a bit of rock or disco) view, which dicates that you see J-S as flavoured with *just enough* rock to make it palletable.
Thirdly, you're a *rockist* (heh - I know we don't use that term any more except ironically, and that's exactly how I'm using it here!) but you're open to pop.
And finally, you're an old Carter fan like me and Ptee.

this thread sucks

except for what ethan said

This thread reminds of something really embarassing that happened to me a couple of years ago. I was back at my parents house and I'd come back from the pub and had a nostalgic flick through some Icelandic porn my dad had bought me when I was twelve. Anyway, I think I was sitting there in just my AFC Wimbledon boxers and I think I must have dislodged something from the bookshelf because suddenly several glossy photos fell out of an old book that I'd never seen before. It took me a while to realise what they were but I soon realised that they were a set of nude photos of my aunt (who's been living with us for the past few years) taken in the 1970s with her made up as a vampre. Anyway, I was so shocked that I knocked over a lamp which broke and made a huge crashing sound and prompted footsteps of someone rushing up the stairs to see if I was okay. It turned out that it was my aunt who came rushing in to find me in (almost) my full glory. Funnily enough, that I'd been caught with ancient nude photos of her bothered me far more than the fact that she'd caught me standing there in my pants with a barely-concealed erection. Please don't tell anyone about that.

Yes, Mark, but HOW WAS THE BOOTY?!

*applauds*

(but I use paragraphs)

I'm pleased to be on this thread - but Doomie, today it was the Virgin sale that I was buying CDs at.

this thread is really sad

and yes, this is actually me

Your "Jess" is spot-on Dr C!

this thread is fucking funny.

i got

disco inferno - in debt
fennesz - thing ep
laika - space
st.hilaire - flows
glopp - gloppy/poppy 7"
disco inferno - di go pop
mr.mungo - circus
bark psychosis - hex
tuxedomoon - live
disco inferno - live in dalston
field mice - mouse crap (I think its a bootleg)
4 kevin blechdom 12" singles
miss kittin and thee hacker
disco inferno - live at the budokhan
hub - hubbleybub
v/a - micro beat
spacewagon - glam kick
spearmint - rhino
beatbop - sizzle 7"
disco inferno - in doubt
the trammps - disco inferno (not what i was expecting)
buggergrips/barkpsychosis split 7"
guided by voices - bee thousand
momus - pretence
felt - space blues flexi
disco inferno - open doors 12"
felt - forever breathes the lonely turd
tok-tok + ms soffy o - lp
tik tik - EP
tik and tok - i am a robot
gary numan - we are glass 12"
archers of lunch - frat dweeb
disco inferno - technicolour
disco inferno - di go poop
disco inferno - burn baby burn it's a...
david bowie - fashion 7"
royksopp - 7pm
japan - assemblage lp
disco inferno - with the london philharmonic
emily hecht - neder-bleep
kukl - eye
bark psychosis - hex (yellow vinyl)
cabaet voltaire - mix-up
disco inferno - in debt
disco inferno - sing the songs of cole porter
felt - me and a monkey on the moon
durutti column - for belgian friends 12"
loopy - non-stick
disco inferno - in debt

*hub - hubbleybub*

My dear friend, you have excellent taste ;).

Re-reading Matt's parody of me above I thought it was my own parody of me (if you see what I mean). *applauds once again*

ha ha Matt! I missed this the first time.

HI DERE!

WHAT!

i was down loftus rd on sat to see qpr draw 1-1 with stockport - danny shittu was total slick badboy motherfucker in defence u get me? but i was well pissed off because we queued for twenty minutes for pies and ting and then the game kicked off half an hour late and i missed getting down to independance in time for my crackhead riddim fix - that is libs! so anyway i was on my way back home and then my phone rang and my mate was like "come, we await you in the pub for Juve Milan" but i thought i'd come back here first and tell you all that i think Stelfox is a cunt.

I've tracked down Fred from The Cigarettes and there's simply no chance that 'Best Bitter Tales' will ever be reissued. He says that it feels right to leave it as it is - i.e one half of the split 7" flexi (limited edition of 73 copies) with Lincoln's The Frogs. I own 38 of these flexis by the way and last Saturday I met a guy from Cincinatti whose brother owns 6 more. As a 5th grader in 1979, I was really impressed by this record and I always wanted to live in Lincoln. Still do.

uh.

Zemko - I was at that game too! I sat in the Q Block in a Fulham No.9 shirt. I don't even like Fulham, but I'd bought especially just to annoy people. Miserable bunch down at QPR, aren't they? Shit ground, good pies. I had three mince and onion pies, followed by a chicken pastie and finished off with meat pie for good measure. No bouze though, Vicky says I've got to stay healthy for the wedding. We're getting a fresh consignment of horse in especially.

what?

I am touched that there is, after all, upthread, a halfdecent, if scanty, parody of me on ilx.

There have been parodies of me before, but in my view they have all been poor.

Naturally the Doc impresses again, on rereading the thread. His abilities can be little less than uncanny. Perhaps that means he's trés canny.

Yet let us recognize too DC's contributions and talents. Perhaps we will never look at him the same way again. Perhaps we never did.

Here's a list of good bands from this weeks Stylus. I think it's an interesting take on things. What do you think?

1. Radiohead
2. Primal Scream
3. Arab Strap
4. The Pixies
5. New Order
6. The Strokes
7. Talk Talk
8. David Bowie
9. The Beatles

Oh wait, we couldn't think of 10. Can you help think of another one for us?

uncanny!

Also, LilJon - he's on a track with Usher and Ludacris. So he must be good, then. I don't know, I had to go and make dinner for my mum and dad and missed the whole thing, but he's probably not as good as Bearsuit. GOOD GOD WHY AM I FORCED TO SIT HERE AND LISTEN TO THIS SHITE EVERY SINGLE SUNDAY?! I am very unhappy with this.

Here's a picture of an indie girl that I fancy instead.

http://www.lazylinepainterpage.hpg.ig.com.br/imagens/isobel9.jpg

Hi Kate! The boy and I are coming to London on Saturday! ON THE TRAIN! We will buy handbags. Mwah Kate. Love you!

I didn't bloody go because HSA was 10 minutes late home on Friday and I was sick with anxiety. He tells me the bus broke down, but I know he WAS TALKING TO SOMEONE ELSE. I could tell as soon as I saw him. Then he played his theremin all night in a sulk and DIDN'T SPEAK to me once. I WANT A NEW BOYFRIEND!

Couldn't make it either. I bumped into Tracey (Emin) in Starbucks and she whisked me off to Stella McCartney's bash in Milan. There we met Jarvis's divine new PR, Gideon, who knows, like, everyone.

revive

I've been trying to finish up this screenplay, so I've been smoking a lot lately. Which is probably not good, but as I was taking a drag last night at the computer, I suddenly remembered this gardener that worked for my friends Melissa and Steve's parents when I was about 10 or 11. I would go over to their house during the summer and we'd play hopscotch on their driveway, drawing the "board" with different colored chalk that would sometimes crumble in your hand. Anyway, this gardener's name was Carlos, and I was never sure, but I think he was Colombian. Or maybe I just wanted him to be, because I felt this affinity for him right away. He was always very brown from the sun, and I can still picture his sweat-stained undershirt and nylon shorts, and this vague sense of mystery about him. He always seemed very strong and wise. Years later, my mom told me he died in an auto accident.

There's no one at the news desk today, except this woman who's been on the phone ALL DAY and laughing in this really annoying way. Oh also, someone stole my lunch. Thanks. I hate this job. I would leave right now, except it is approximately - 80 degrees outside right now.

this wz a funny thread!!

i hate this thread

I'm flattered, jmc, and impressed! But your comma usage is too good. To really get the Remy-essence, you have to sprinkle in at least 3x too many commas, or apostrophes (I call 'em leaky periods'), right?

(Wow, this thread that loomed large in the legend of Dr. C actually exists and lives up to its billing and then some!)

yes.

i think, about, this thread

Dr C ain't all that, just face it. Yes, this thread is all very fancy and tippy tappy but I wouldn't like to see him up against some proper hard 80s-style parody. Brittle as fuck, I'm telling you.

Chelsea are overrated as well. If it wasn't for Cech, Cudicini, Terry, Carvalho, Gallas, Ferreira, Lampard, Cole, Duff, Robben, Makelele, Kezman, Drogba and Gudjohnsen they'd be shite. Not to mention that oil-baron mafioso funnelling cash in stolen cash made from the blood and sweat of crushed Lilliputians, all of this with Thatcher's full support, I might add. Oops, did I say that out loud?

Anyway, I'd better get on - I'm off to rant on Five Live about how shit the tea at the FA is. Then I've got to speak in front of 500 football league delegates on the subject of how to bring down the filthy capitalist pigdogs, erm, I mean increase gate numbers at lower league grounds throughout the country. To tell you the truth, I'm a bit nervous, last time I arrived after my mate's stag night with seconds to spare only to later realise I'd spoken in front of the entire Premier League with the words I AM A CUNT written on my forehead in biro. I blame Urs Meier.

PS - France were shit.

has ilx died?

Some time ago.

I R missing Fat Nick.

Looking over this thread, I can't even tell who's being lampooned half the time.

Hasn't this thread been done already?

No, really. Hasn't it?

(I think I understood most of them, but a lot of them are UK-based which might be difficult for some on this side)

I like this thread.

hey GARETH and MARCELO and TIM HOPKINS! mcghee just sent me all captain and tenille's lps on poptones does music get any better call me xx

suzy lets drink frapuccino. i love my girl.

Rah for Dr. C, a fine fellow indeed :)

Hey! My icons have a nose! :-)

Sorry! I'm not a professional like Dr. C.

Aw, fret not. :-)

well is it?

Punk died on November 14th 1979, or at least what you youngsters call punk. Or you would have called punk if you youngsters were old enough to have been around in the heyday of *punk*. Or put it this way : there's nothing wrong with having more than one idea of what punk is or was, depending on your perspective. One old accountant's idea of punk is surely another man's poison. Or if you like, punk with the punkiness taken out. To me, punk means puking up in a litter bin outside the Roundhouse in 1977, after seeing The Damned, The Cortinas and Chelsea. What does it mean to you?

Oh Dooms darling, tres busy at the mo, working on you know what for (whisper it)you know who. You should call Jess, my friend Hugo's PA, she might be able to spare 5 minutes if you want to chat with someone. She knows someone who once took a photograph of Jarvis, so there's an opening. Bye!

Suzy, sorry I haven't returned your call - I've run out of credit due to not being paid for the last five years. Also I feel like a pub carpet wrapped in satin. I didn't get home until 4am last night and I fell over and landed in a bin in front of the bass player from the Von Bondies. Then this morning a stranger asked if he could have sex with me so I beat him to death with my handbag. I bet this never happens to Zoe Williams.

STOP PRESS. Portsmouth have just signed :

Roy Carroll
Deco
Lee Bowyer
Peter Crouch (again!)
Robbie Keane
Jan Koller
Paul Dickov
Jonathan Stead
Barry Ferguson
Duncan Ferguson
Les Ferdinand
Ronaldo (useful option up front)
Ronaldinho (ditto)
Scott Parker
Bobby Charlton
Julian Dicks (our kind of player)
Julian Clary
Darth Vadar
Matt DC
Terry Hurlock
Dennis Wise
Teddy Sheringham
Tony Cascarino
Pavel Nedved
George Best
John Fashanu
Bill Beaumont
Vladimir Smicer
Vlad The Impaler (competing with Hurlock for the anchor-man spot)
Mark Sinker
Isabelle Huppert
Thora Hird
Kenny G
The Bay City Rollers

see the news here on http://www.footballtalkingbollocks.com

Nedved? No fucking chance. What use would that cunt be on a wet Tuesday in Bolton?

Pub carpet wrapped in satin?

Now my sodding manager has got me working a 19 hour stretches without even time for a dunny break. Sheesh! AND I don't get to claim any fucking overtime! Some dealio. Aw sod 'em.

i got up early and was punching weights in front of the new dr who (er indoors said don't) when i dropped a glass glass of juice i'd bended in my new juice-o-maqtic. and it shattered all over my xtc box set. i blame john fuckwit howard.

*astonished*

*roffle*

It's pretty obvious that The Labour Party should ditch Crossrail and commission a cross-London maglev line using rolling stock based on the TGV's Class 11B Euroliners. Greenhouse emissions could be minimized using Deutsche-Bahn Type 49 locomotives, converted to run on compost. The compost would be provided by a London-wide initiative in which human and animal waste would be collected and dispatched to a purpose-built depot on the site of the old Jubilee-line platforms at Charing Cross. The main aim would be to get a direct route from Hoxton to Berne (via the Simplon Tunnel) with a journey time of just under three hours. A free bicycle link would be provided at the other end.