Article Response: Passing Through

The phrase 'prematurely wistful' makes it for me. Great!

Wry, wounded, wonderful. Great job, JtN. It will reward rereading too.

It's really wonderful, the finest thing I've read in a while.

It actually makes me want to seek out Baxendale -- I've never heard anything by them and I was always under the impression that they were pretty dire from what people on ILM have said about them.

I liked them but I would. I don't have this particular song JtN writes about, though, and now I'm most curious.

My fact-checker writes:
BTW: the 'i built this city' track is on Kashpoint Vol 1 not
robopop. you might wish to amend..

It's available from Rough Trade, if you're interested (or me, when I have slsk on).

They make me feel ill.

The article doesn't.

I thought I was the only one who thought of music in that cinema/TV soundtrack way, so many nights I miss the bus because I spend too long leaving the house, trying to decide what record is best for what I'm going to do, and for who I'll be seeing. Or sometimes as I'm about to walk into a pub/club, I might put on a specific part of a particular song, for the 30 or so spare seconds.

Very good piece. FT hasn't had a piece like that in a long time, more what I'd think of as traditional FT style.

Ronan is a musical chameleon. I never knew he was so diverse.

So do you listen to Lloyd Cole in the Brazen Head and the Darling Buds on the way to Mulligan's?

Heh when Stevie sent me it thats what I said, it's kind of Old School FT. Very good. I'll try and remember to switch the Robopop Kashpoint references.

I am not really diverse I guess, by your standards, if you aren't taking the piss that is.

I have a Pet Shop Boys piece kind of in my brain at the moment Tom, if you're interested, though I did see Ned mentioned he had something about PSB.

I'm always interested in stuff from you Ronan, also I feel there can never be too many pieces about the Pet Shop Boys. Ned's is running in the next couple of weeks hopefully.

yeah there can never be too many pieces about the pet shop boys, eh tom?

Hah yes good point.

This is turning into a PSB thread.

Get it back to Baxendale!

Then again -.

There should be an all psb issue!

Hey, I'm all for that!

[TS: Original draft of "Passing Through" vs "Passing Through - The Director's Cut" (or is it "Ewing Edit"?)]

I still think an all psb issue would be a great idea.

Raggett said the piece would reward rereading. Doubtless he was correct.

It’s just that I feel that so many of us, plugged into scenes and screens before we walked, now make sense of our lives as movies or tv shows, forever being re-edited. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean to suggest epic delusion or monstrous egotism. But I’d like to consider how we now have a sense of memory as not so much a passive recording, but rather something that is actively composed. Entire reels rustle forgotten on the cutting room floor, hoping for reinstated afterlife in expanded editions on undreamt-of media (with voice-overs and complaints from minor characters and notable critics). Directors and writers who handled several runs with immaculate professionalism are ruthlessly dismissed mid-season, their material reworked by ambitious newcomers, their scripts doctored to rude health.

A curious fact is that I am not sure that I agree with JtN here.

1) I don't think I see my life as a TV programme. If I do, I have forgotten.

If my life is a TV programme, what programme is it?

How about yours?

2) More fundamentally, JtN claims that memory is "something that is actively composed". But how true is this? I suppose that we can talk of 'voluntary memory' and of 'acts of remembrance'. But the idea that our... image-repertoire is ours to arrange and alter seems counter-intuitive. I think that my own sense of memory may be, not a large room of film to be edited at leisure, but an increasingly exhausted mine which can only be reached by a rickety iron lift, whose rusty chains will one day break and send it hurtling into oblivion - which is the condition that already gradually settles over all that is buried down there.

recounting for friends what happened when out drinking last night I found myself continually saying "there was this bit when..."

this is gold, jerry, GOLD!

"But I’d like to consider how we now have a sense of memory as not so much a passive recording, but rather something that is actively composed."

I think the Pinefox is on to something in his comments on the passage from which this sentence is taken, but I think that a failing memory is only a part of it. I strongly resist the notion that memory can be something that is "actively composed." If that were the case, I don't think it would be possible to experience the same feeling of loss when a memory fades. Loss must presuppose the occurrence of some real event to which one no longer has access because one can no longer remember the details, or one has simply outgrown it - the state of being which made it open to experience in the first place. Think of those photos in the novels of Sebald. Would they have the same air of mystery if memory did not have a basis in fact? The sense of never being able to get the photos quite right, of having missed part of the story, of there being a real story just beyond the scope of our experience, of wanting to make more of our everyday experience to fit in with some lost life - where does that all come from? Even if it is not real, I think we must believe it is real in order for memory to have that pull.

i forgot about english reserve: steeling yourself on the rickety iron lift, the chains break when you're on it.