Michele!! That's awesome. I can't believed I missed him doing Francoise, darn me and my non-going out ways. Maybe I'll catch him later this year.

Anyone get any new CDs recently on the exchange? friendly reminder to get any you have in the mail by this weekend if you can.

Justine Frischman (SP?) hot. That is all.

Two Ns on Frischmann.

Echobelly beat them in terms of foxy androgyne singers:

Yum!

DIY Convention: [link]

The major labels are increasingly acknowledging the value of the entrepreneurial spirit -- witness Warner Music Group's recently inaugurated "incubator" entities and Universal Music Group's new indie distributor Fontana.

That spirit is the bread and butter of the DIY Convention

So their bread and butter is fake indies? Great....

Hollywood is so DIY.

I'm very chuffed about this contact, and pending review:

Hello there

I'm writing a feature on Lost In The Grooves for The Times in London and would dearly like to make contact with Kim Cooper and/or David Smay. I love the book...

Nice, David! Does the book have UK distribution?

Nice, David! Does the book have UK distribution?

That'd be useful, don't you think?

I'm not sure. Then again, I can't imagine why we'd be sending it to the British press if we didn't. Probably Amazon UK at the very least.

Guh. What a harrowing quote:

‘… [O]ut of the corner of my eye I saw him. He was kneeling in the kitchen. I was relieved – glad he was still there ‘Now what are you up to?’ I took a step towards him, about to speak. His head was bowed, his hands resting on the washing machine. I stared at him, he was so still. Then the rope – I hadn’t noticed the rope. The rope from the clothes rack was around his neck. I ran through to the sitting room and picked up the telephone. No, supposing I was wrong – another false alarm. I ran back to the kitchen and looked at his face – a long string of saliva hung from his mouth. Yes, he really had done it…’ - Deborah Curtis, Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, 133

But so interesting...

It was clear, in the best interviews the band ever gave - to Jon Savage, a decade and a half after Curtis’s death - that they had no idea what they were doing, and no desire to learn. Of Curtis’ disturbing-compelling hyper-charged stage trance spasms and of his disturbing-compelling catatonic downer words, they said nothing and asked nothing, for fear of destroying the magic. They were unwitting necromancers who had stumbled on a formula for channelling voices, apprentices without a sorcerer.

They saw themselves as mindless golems animated by Curtis’ vision(s). (Thus, when he died, they said that they felt they had lost their eyes…) As Mark put it in his piece on the early Eps in The Wire (over a decade ago!): ‘though the first bullying shards of Joy Division music are punk in sound, they don't clarify. This more than anything will become their signature - everything about them will be seized on, floridly discussed, and stay unexplained. Physical to a fault, the music exhibits all the the signs of the cerebral and none of its content - invention pours out of these dullard-geniuses, so stripped of hidden agendas that hidden agendas is all that many remark upon.’

From this piece :"Mark K-Punk Fisher on Joy Division, about masculinity and its melancholia..."

A cheerier (less Schopenhauer) thought here:

"Twenty years ago, people formed punk-rock bands because they wanted to create art. Now, often a rock'n'roll band is our generation's version of a bowling team: four like-minded individuals get together once a week to rehearse - that is, to bowl - and every six weeks or so they'll do a gig - like a tournament - and once a year they'll do merch, like making bowling shirts. It's a way for those four guys to get together and have a few beers, almost like a social thing. They're not willing to give up their day jobs, get in a van and go tour the country."

From Zoilus site