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Chilling in Cheshire.
It is, but Gang Of Four without Andy Gill???!!?
Yes a bit odd, like Buzzcocks without Pete but they are still putting on good shows and released a brilliant new album last year.
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It is, but Gang Of Four without Andy Gill???!!?
Another good line up for Cruel World.
Great line-up. How can the Vapors still be touring, they had one song?!
Another good line up for Cruel World.
what a dumb ass thing to say. spoken like somebody who knows nothing about fashion, current or otherwise.Blazers are out, utility jackets are in
Walt Whitman and James Baldwin. Claude Cahun and Janet Flanner. Nijinsky and Nureyev. Joan Didion. Martin Luther King Jr. Marlon Brando and Wally Cox. Nina Simone and Etta James. Thom Yorke and Benedict Cumberbatch. Nikola Tesla. RW Fassbinder and Patrice Chéreau. Gore Vidal and Liza Minnelli. Donald Glover and PJ Harvey. Barney Rosset and Jean Genet. Mike Nichols and Norman Lear. John Giorno and Brâncuşi. And a partridge in a pear tree.
Michael Stipe sat for a Q&A with the Guardian recently. I can see Harry Styles in the biopic. One thing I don't like about Stipe is that his politics have always been vanilla left. He's into Extinction Rebellion now. No bueno. They sit in the road, blocking traffic to draw attention to their cause. Nothing against the practice of infuriating the masses, but it just looks blah when your reason is, "we want insulation in every apartment," or "we want to end the use of fossil fuels." If your mission statement alone isn't enough to infuriate the masses, you probably ought to re-think.
Stipe's dinner party list is interesting. Gore Vidal and James Baldwin were both accused in their lifetimes of being anti-Semitic. But he doesn't seem to have invited any Jews for parity. He's a bit too white bread. I would have to choose between Isaac Bashevis Singer, David Cronenberg, Mia Kirshner, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Marcel Proust, Emma Goldman, Franz Kafka, Vera Nabokov, Leonard Cohen, Uriel da Costa, Susanna Hoffs, Eva Frank, &c. Stipe's list:
Well, you say that, but...this bangerGreat line-up. How can the Vapors still be touring, they had one song?!
Thanks, that was informative, and I always appreciate your well thought out descriptions. He always was eccentric, and that doesn't ever go away really - it just expands. That being said, he has said some things as an older adult that have had people scratching their heads.
Michael S. is from the incredibly rural, very southern US. He is very in-touch with his own feelings, and is somewhat enlightened. However, he has always been very rural by nature, but not a 'redneck' - he's actually rather gentle, which made him an outsider growing up where he did.
From REM's 'The Wrong Child' - which fully expresses a somewhat lonely, rural American upbringing.
I've watched the children come and go
A late, long march into spring
I sit and watch those children
Jump in the tall grass
Leap the sprinkler
Walk in the ground
Bicycle clothespin spokes
The sound, the smell of swingset hands
You probably already have, but if you've never listened to their album 'Fables of the Reconstruction' you should. If you really listen to it, you'll grasp so much of how life was in the rural US south when Stipe was growing up.
Well, you say that, but...this banger
I love Fables of the Reconstruction. It's my favorite of theirs. I grew up in the Northeast, but I've always had a deep fascination with the South. In the 80s, my family summered in North Carolina, and the best part of those two weeks every year was the rural, southern half of the drive. The reedy swamps, the dusty fields, the yellow pines, the junk dealers' roadside stands, the bungalow hovels, and the people who time plum forgot. You could go into a general store (a repurposed condemned building, essentially) and they'd have cassette bins and used book shelves full of the most interesting stuff an adolescent from New Jersey had never heard of. In a box somewhere, I might still have the Charley Pride cassette I bought aeons ago. (As you doubtless know, Stipe is reading the liner notes from a forgotten gospel record in Voice of Harold). "Forgotten" stuff was everywhere in sun-blasted eastern North Carolina. The R.E.M. trilogy from Murmur to Fables is very evocative of all that for me. The material that came after is still great, but it feels less esoteric and intimate. I remember learning the word "thaumaturgical" from a review of Stipe's lyrics & singing from that phase. And the videos are perfect: a melding of avant-garde photography and Southern decay.
I live in North Carolina now, and it's nothing like it is was forty years ago. There are still nooks and crannies of the bygone culture, but in many respects it's as modernized and uninspiring as its country and gospel music scenes have become. Stipe, unfortunately, has suffered the same fate. He did wear a Sufi beard a couple years ago, but he hasn't been the eccentric he once was for a long time now. I don't think his eccentricity has expanded—if anything, it's contracted. R.E.M. became massive, and Stipe was able to very comfortably inhabit his fame. But the edges became smoothed down and the mystery went away. Wouldn't you agree his politics are boring? Even though Morrissey is now regrettably being taken up for praise by certain goonish pundits on the right, Stipe by contrast is just the generic sort of liberal of whom a Fox News blowhard would sneer, "shut up and sing." Morrissey is more complicated and interesting.
That was a wonderful story, and thank you for sharing that with me. I'm also from the Northeast, and feel the same way you do about those early REM albums, and just the mystery of the South in general. You've got a point as well in REM's material, after a certain year, not having the same intimacy about them. For me, it's when Bill Berry left the group (in like 1997 or close) that the music changed. He was basically like the father of American Alternative drumming - incredibly capable as a musician, and a very close friend to the other members, especially Mike Mills. You could hear 'the loss' in their future releases.
Yes, Stipe is much less interesting now (for one, where's he been?), and never was as interesting as Morrissey - you're completely right. It's a shame it seems that he's taking the 'celebrity-politics-bandwagon' route that so many others have gone down in our country, to my total dismay (because I keep kicking people off my 'love-list' most of the time when they fool around with that stuff). Like Stipe wrote - 'there's lots of room, for you, on the bandwagon'. These celebs are not political-scientists, and somebody like Michael S. really isn't a leader (which is fine), he's much more of a poet (also fine), and wants to be left alone (perfectly okay). He probably wouldn't be a good spokesperson in 2023, and should stay out of politics - it's not his arena. That being said, Stipe has been a tremendous contributor to American music, and I very much respect his musical work, as I'm sure you do just from what you wrote.
Maybe I'm saying too much, but I'm registered Independent, and avoid today's politics like the plague --- and I'm actually sorry that I can't engage with you on a political level, because I'm just not as informed and wouldn't want to waste your time or insult your intelligence, out of respect. But, I'm happy to answer any specific questions you have of me, even if they are political in nature, to the best of my abilities. However, I can't freely wax about politics (like I've seen that you are great at doing) as I've avoided having that background, and that's no offense.
what the f*** is this? is this how you react to two intelligent people having a conversation that you're not a part of??
I just heard an elderly lady say she wanted to go somewhere where she'd never been before. I couldn't help thinking to myself that we're all eventually going to go there. And even in fairy stories in our infancy we prepare ourselves for that other place that's different to what we know now. Somewhere that might be magical but might also be inhabited by monsters. There's a 50/50 chance it good be a good place I suspect. I keep my fingers crossed. I often feel I need to travel and be somewhere else. Forebodings of death.
You seem really melodramatic!I think there's a tendency to think of death as either good or bad whereas really it might just be like life where there are some good things and bad things about it. There have been periods in my life where I'd rather have been dead. Terribly uncomfortable situations. People go on about 'brimstone and fire' but I've already encountered that. Surely death can't serve up anything as disturbing as what I've already gone through in life?
I just heard an elderly lady say she wanted to go somewhere where she'd never been before. I couldn't help thinking to myself that we're all eventually going to go there. And even in fairy stories in our infancy we prepare ourselves for that other place that's different to what we know now. Somewhere that might be magical but might also be inhabited by monsters. There's a 50/50 chance it good be a good place I suspect. I keep my fingers crossed. I often feel I need to travel and be somewhere else. Forebodings of death.
I think there's a tendency to think of death as either good or bad whereas really it might just be like life where there are some good things and bad things about it. There have been periods in my life where I'd rather have been dead. Terribly uncomfortable situations. People go on about 'brimstone and fire' but I've already encountered that. Surely death can't serve up anything as disturbing as what I've already gone through in life?
it's possible this elderly lady is just bored. I consider myself to be an elderly lady, and I often fantasize about starting a cult after buying a mansion in Mexico City!