Lost Highway Roadtape

Before Neil headed off on Friday, he asked me to string together a mixtape suitable for their roadtrip and since Alternative Country is my very favourite genre of music I was more than happy to oblige. You can get to it here, the username to enter is clickerconspiracy and the password is mixtape. The songs are in the files section under the unimaginatively titled Lost Highway folder.

Actually I haven't delved very far into alt-country on the list because I already bought Neil a copy of Jim White's Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (see trailer below) and I think that was more than enough bleak gospel underbelly to keep him going for a while. I really can't emphasise how enjoyable a film this is if you are even remotely interested in the genre. I've already bought it twice in a month. So other than a few alt-country staples, the mixtape vears towards pleasant sing-along territory and would be suitable for anyone doing a bit of travelling in the next while. I've found that it even works on planes - though you may find it difficult to resist slapping the stewardess on the ass when she passes with the trolley.

However I haven't resisted the temptation to include some alt-country heroes such as Smog, Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Vic Chesnutt. It was through Bill Callahan (alias Smog) and Will Oldham (of Palace Brothers and Bonnie "Prince" Billy) that I came to love Country music as it is now - literate, strange and completely removed from the cliched stereotypes you might associate with the genre. Someone like Vic Chesnutt for instance, a pioneer of Southern gothic folks songs, incorporates his own biographical style with elements of those great mythic traditions that have sustained country and blues legacies. Wheelchair bound since childhood and resplendant in his lop-sided crown and furs, Chesnutt duets with his niece on What Do You Mean? to beguiling effect - she sits at his feet while he struggles to make sense of his strange tale:

VC: Like a puppy on a trampoline..

Niece: What do you mean?

VC: Bewildered.

I think I was irritated the first few times I heard this song because it seemed so childish and obscure but it has stuck with me a long time and never fails to make the hairs stand up on my neck (hooray for cliches). Anyway, if you find that you like any of the artists on the list then keep going and check them out. Jim White's film is a good place to start.

Douglas Coupland Rant

I GOT STUCK IN STANSTEAD AIRPORT LAST NIGHT so i decided to pick up the new douglas coupland book J-Pod to pass the time

BUT UNFORTUNEATLY COUPLAND HAS A TERRIBLE HABIT OF DROPPING MARKETING SLOGANS AND PROGRAMMING CODE IN CAPITAL LETTERS PLUS

(Don't ask me, John. Google it) random and inane things in CAPITAL LETTERS ALL OVER THE PAGE1100111000!!!

11000 command error
and as the horror of watching children count rain drops on an airport window during a thunder storm kicked in

A PAIR OF OVERSIZE GREEN FOAM LATEX incredible hulk BOXING GLOVES i came to hate the snide irony for the sake of slapstick attitude of the characters and the stupid repetitive devices that coupland uses AND SO I'M TAKING THIS OPPORTUNITY TO 3344554366577 TO RANT IN THE STYLE OF DOUGLAS COUPLAND BUT ALSO TO DROP IN A FEW THINGS ABOUT how muck i like LON-DAN

...beautiful beautiful exotic women with no orange make-up on pinched faces with freckles

SINGALONG CINEMA IN SOHO + THE SOUND OF MUSIC = NO LONELINESS IN A STRANGE CITY

incredibly nifty sweeping air conditioning system in underground that comes around the corner and nearly lifts you off your feet...

Tuesday: 31 degrees, Wednesday: 32 degrees, Thursday: 28 degrees..

Camden, Tall overhanging trees in Berkeley Square, the Gerkin and rediculously intimidating buildings in the Financial District

AND NOW THAT I THINK OF IT PEOPLE BEGAN TO MOVE FROM AROUND ME IN THE AIRPORT BECAUSE I KEPT LAUGHING OUTLOUD READING COUPLAND'S BOOK and so i worked out that even when you hate a books characters, the following statement holds true: 7 LAUGH OUT LOUD MOMENTS IN A BOOK = WORTH READING just make the resolution to cut down on pop references and don't become a douglas coupland character AND THAT MAKES IT OK TO QUOTE FROM HIS BOOKS:

Kaitlin to Cancer Cowboy: "....because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you're perpetually on the brink of being obsolete - whether it's labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness ... You're glamorised drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn't a budget-driven 18-month game production cycle, it's a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule ...

chicken ramen chicken ramen chicken ramen chicken ramen

Road Trip Pt.1 - The Plan

Neil and Brian are coming to the end of their adventures in New York and are embarking on a traditional road trip across the States before returning home. We'll keep a log of their journey here and hopefully they'll survive the attention of gambling deer, amorous truckers and drug fucked Samoan lawyers to arrive back safe and sound in recently civilised Ireland.

Here's the basic outline for the trip as outlined by Neil in a recent group email: We start in NYC and head south to camp in the Great Smoky Mountains,from there we jingle jangle our way through Memphis and Nashville in Tennessee before skipping into the deep south for a few days in New Orleans. From there we start traversing again on out to Austin, Texas then over to Santa Fe, New Mexico before a trek through the mountains to Denver Colorado. From there we leap through the Grand Canyon into Vegas for a short stop at the roulette tables. Heading north then through Death Valley and on to Yosemite National Park. Motoring nicely, we'll be pulling into San Fran a few days later. The final plan is to drive the coast road "Route 1" down the coast of California through Big Sur and all the other Beach Boys hang outs, past LA and down as far as Huntington Beach to see "the O.C". We then trek back up to L.A to catch a flight back to NYC.

28 days of travelling, i'm sure we'll kill each other by the end of it but its America so no one will find out. We have a couple of days back in the city before we leave and should be arriving home in September (to rapturous applause i'm sure).

Music in Films

I rented out Lost Highway last night and it reminded me that no matter how many times I watch the scene, I will never get tired of watching Patricia Arquette step from that car. It's the perfect marriage of film and music - the flickering camera work, Patricia Arquette's poise and the timing as she shakes her hair before the chorus line. It's as if the music is so intense that it makes colours on the screne vibrate. Even in David Lynch's rediculous canon of musical moments this counts as my favourite film scene of all.

I can think of a few other musical film favourites and have linked them below. There are some pretty obvious choices in the circumstances. Wes Anderson seems to have made a career out of extended music videos and it's almost impossible to leave out David Bowie's Magic Dance from Labyrinth - but I've tried to steer clear of the obvious ones.

Caetano Veloso ~ Currucucu Palermo from Habla Con Ella


An easy choice - this was a spell binding moment from Habla Con Ella. The performance by Caetano Veloso was so elegant that Almoldovar just sat the camera amongst the audience and let the whole song play through.

Ennio Morricone ~ Once Upon a Time in the West Theme


It would be impossible to leave out the absolute master of film scores, Ennio Morrricone. You almost don't need to know anything about the film to enjoy this scene. However, if by chance you haven't see it, then you absolutely must rent it out at the next possible opportunity. With regards to the clip, the music should be enough to raise all the tension required for the casual viewer - hands down the best death scene in movie history.

Roy Orbison ~ In Dreams from Blue Velvet


Ok one obvious choice. Is this as eerie as lip-synching gets? Well there was Milli Vanilli, but they didn't get the chance to make a film as far as I know. Things I love about this scene - the lamp, Dennis Hopper's inexplicable change of humour and the fat girl's unswerving attention to her fingernails. Let's hit the FUCKIN road!

Lovely Techprops

Came across some pretty interesting sites recently on my travels and have made a few links to them in the link section (to the right, under links). Steven Johnson wrote a wonderful book called Emergence that jump started my thesis research and his blog is enjoyable techophilea. Makezine is an interesting magazine about bizarre amateur inventions - suitable for fans of Short Circuit and Tom Waits. We Make Money Not Art is an uber-arttechno extravaganza with a host of wonderful art projects and technical stunts.

I particularly like this SMS Guerrila Projector developed by Troika - A handheld projector with integrated mobile phone that enables users to project something very private, SMS, in public. The original idea was to make a movie gun and shoot people with films. It doesn’t compete with a projection truck in terms of strength and quality of image but you can bring it anywhere you want and move from place to place very quickly and easily. A big lens is mounted on the device so you can screen very personalized messages from a distance. They tested the system several times in central London to see the reaction of the people. For example, they projected from the street messages about value, wealth or security inside the home of people, in London’s richest areas. After 10 minutes, police vans arrived. But the police didn’t know what to look for, no one expects a projector to be so mobile. Troika tried to experiment with images as well but found out that, for this particular project, texts are more powerful.

Leonard Hatred

It Had to Catch On

I haven't been out on the piss in Dublin in the last week so I haven't actually seen it happen, but I'm sure this kind of behaviour is all over town. I propose that we scrap the present date system and time Year Zero from the moment the first Zizou was executed.

Senseless Violence

I always appreciate it when an event is witnessed in public that demands the christening of a new word in the English language. Last night we saw what, from now on, can only be described as a Zizou - a diabolic bull charge to the chest of an adversary. Has anyone in the history of human conflict ever even had the idea to perform a Zizou? It was, for me, absolute and utlimate confirmation of Zinedine Zidane's genius.

My first reaction when I saw the slow motion replay of our new bovine ritual was to leap out of my seat shouting Thats Impossible! I couldn't control my glee. And it has only gotten better with repeated viewing. I don't know what it is about completely random and senseless petty violence that sets me off but this has to be the most poetic execution of such behaviour I have ever seen.

You begin to wonder if other great figures from history were capable of such classy acts of random petty violence. Einstein revolutionised the way we see the world with his Theory of Relativity - but did he ever exercise a compulsion to charge his research assistants and aim his head between the legs of an unsuspecting physicist? And Joyce, dictating the wormy nonsense of Finnegan's Wake to Samuel Beckett - did he not feel compelled to tap out the rhythm of his prose by caneing the back of Beckett's head on the adverbs and pronouns?

The whole business made me mourn the fact that I wasn't 7 years old and that my brother was overseas. I can just picture brothers across the world taking turns in their front rooms to execute a Zizou. Then the mind would wander. They would become experimental. What other parts of the human body can cause it to be felled with a single head charge? Obviously the groin. Maybe the knees. Oh who cares, lets go for the groin again.

Speculation is rife of course about what Materazzi could have possibly said to exact such brilliance from Zidane. First reports indicate that Materazzi discribed Zidane's mother has having T Rex Tits. Other reports have said that Materazzi, an agent of International Witch Crime, had hypnotised Zidane during the game so that he would respond to the word Moo! by performing a chest high head charge. Other members of the Council of International Witch Crime, Michael Jackson and Uri Geller, are being interrogated about their part in the shamozzle.

Chorus Lines

There's a story that Chuck Palahniuk tells about his time in college, where he and his mates would skip classes to go to a strip bar called The Carriage Room. One of the regulars in the bar was this old wreck of a man who used to park himself by the stage each night and sit mysteriously under a Panama hat. The man would take dollar bills and, licking the long edge of each note, he would carefully roll the paper as tight as a pencil. Sticking these notes together, the gentlemen would fashion a long thin walking stick, which he would then wave musically in the direction of the strippers. As the ladies approached, the man would lean back, whip the girls on the ass and in a horribly cancerous voice yell ARCH YER BACK, BABY! ARCH YER BACK! As the ladies leaned over, he would then place a single dollar in each behind. To this day, Palahniuk will pick up the phone and the sound of one of his old mates yelling Arch Yer Back Baby into his ear will set him off to such an extent that he has to promise to call back. He calls this a Chorus Line and it is a piece of shorthand language that we all use to inclusively fix shared experience.

I can see, looking back through pictures or letters, that remembering a group of mates' chorus line is as good a snapshot of events as anything else. The faces in my Montauk photos are a little strange now but everything falls into place when I picture those people yelling ME KNICKERS ARE RINGIN LUV! right in my face. The same goes for the naked I Can't Dance walk that became best practice in Ocean City and the terrible monkey screams that haunt my memories of Santa Ponsa.

Of course the chorus line has a life of its own and there comes a time when it has to be retired before it becomes a cliché. This can be done in two ways. You can either let everyone tire of saying it and scold the parrot members of the group for overuse. Or you can take heed of the clearly recognisable signposts that exist for chorus line retirement. In my experience this has proven to be when the line is yelled in a wildly different context to the one it was conceived in.

For example, we knew it was time to retire our favourite chorus line when Lorraine and I witnessed, three days into an inter-county booze cruise, what was unquestionably the ultimate possible delivery of that line. Dredging through a lampless Wicklow pub car park, we turned to witness Manc-madman Everton pitching himself in the dark with a drunkenly wild stance. Arms were thrown aloft and though all we could see were two pints of Guinness and the moon on his bald black head, the sound of SUCKIN DIESIL! is unmistakable when yelled through gappy teeth in a Manchester accent.

It's a delicate business as to the proper use of a chorus line. Often they don't translate when groups overlap and you have to be careful with your delivery. Spontaneous pile-ons may go down well in one group. But you run the risk of finding yourself lying on a panicked stranger if you introduce it too early in a new group.

So I suppose my advice is to base your chorus lines on spontaneous shared experiences, to confine them to those directly involved and to give up the ghost when that line is perfected. Feel free to leave your own chorus lines in the comments section so that everyone knows what lines act as laughter triggers in your mucky heads.

PS. Please don't leave safety words.