Posts by Simon Grigg
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Gormengast is terrific
As an aside, the first (and easily the best IMO) Split Enz album, Mental Notes, opened with the line "stranger than fiction / larger than life / full of shades and echoes" lifted verbatim from the Penguin back cover of Gormengast. The album also had the track Titus.
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certainly both the British and the French haven't always been the best to their colonial subjects
Bengal 1942-43, which has only really been looked at in recent years, dwarfs (if one was able to measure such things, which is of course contentious), in it's conscious evil, pretty much anything the French did in terms of scale. And the culprit was one of BBC's Greatest Ever Britons, Churchill
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the internet and short attention spans may - temporarily, at least - have killed it.
and the age of Encarta complete with it's brief, and often to the wrong point, articles, has gone along way towards killing the Encyclopedia sadly. When I was seven my parents bought me a ten volume set of Encyclopedias, with each volume being theme-atic. I read each voraciously over and over again, with special reference to the volumes on history and geography. By the time I was nine I could (and still can) recite the kings & Queens of England from Alfred, and so on. When I was in my early teens I devoured my grandfather's sets of Chamber's Encyclopedias from the 1880s, the full Cyclopedia of New Zealand from the same period. I was lucky enough to inherit both, plus his rather large collection of New Zealand books.
The net is a wealth of knowledge and the amount we can find with a few clicks continues to astound me, but nothing can, or does, replace the intensity of knowledge and information impact, or indeed pleasure of discovery, obtained from the immersion in a dusty volume or five. It's something that I've tried to instill in my daughter...google it, but if your interest goes beyond the merely curious, pursue it in a book.
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Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters
That was quite a book for me too when I found it after a vaguely romanticizing Beat period...I read it several times and remember it as rather sad.
Mervin Peake....not only the Gormenghast trilogy but Mr Pye and his wonderful children's work. His flights of, sometimes, medieval merged with gothic fantasy enthralled me for years. I remember the three pages he took in Titus Groan to describe two steps taken on a staircase by Steerpike. The TV adaptation could not, and didn't do it justice. That said, I haven't revisited it in recent years as I think I'd be disappointed.
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Have you been forgerting to use the preview button again!!
my excuse is I'm terminally lazy I guess, I'm continually sending emails full of typos and missed words..I write and hit send...
But I suspect I'm not the only one ;) -
This opinion piece at Huffington today is timely and I think this encapsulates a lot of what I believe:
2) Recognize that the so called Muslim states aren't necessarily "Islamic." The majority of the laws in the Muslim world are an amalgam of European civil code, Shariah, and Anglo-Saxon common law. As such, fixing Religious Law is neither sufficient nor necessary. The most important element of human rights reform in the Muslim world is via legislation or regulation, not the clerics. We must not buy the right wing spin, rooted in Christian supremacism, that until the religion of Islam reforms, change is unlikely. Religions change and mature at their own pace; states evolve and legislate on their own.
The Indonesian blasphemy laws he notes earlier in the piece are a perfect example...they, like much of Indonesia's law, date from Dutch times, and I take great pleasure in yesterday's Playboy decision which speaks to the theme of the above paragraph... and is quite a milestone - one that the rest of South East Asia would do well to emulate, as an aside, Singapore in particular.
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As a very young lad I saw Led Zep at Western Springs....pivotal moment in my life at the time. I have these memories of this massive stage setup pushing out this incredible noise, but looking at the photos later, it was like a bFm summer series system.
And yes you are spot on with the singles thing...blame the rise of the album on Sgt Pepper/ Blonde on Blonde but the era you mention was the era of the FM radio explosion
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On second thoughts, you're quite correct, as usual.
I don't know if I want that burden :),. But your are right in that the Zep mythology is that they did it without singles. It's just stretching it a bit. A better analogy might have been the Beatles albums which were often single free in the UK, but, then, the Beatles being who they were, radio played the whole bloody things, without being asked. Of course in the US they released hundreds of the things without any reference to the band, and ripped the albums to pieces and banged horrendous effects all over what was left.
I'm sure there is a pop / rock album that has worked without a key song...I just can't think of it
I bought that live Led Zeppelin DVD a couple of weeks back in one of the dodgy shops here...that first disc is incredible...Live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970
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The Wall is really a great example of a, like it or not, creatively very impressive album...the enormous popularity of which had little to do with singles.
Not true. It was only middling along in the US (and indeed NZ...I was working in a record shop at the time) until Brick in The Wall drove it into the mainstream and the album went ballistic, and the other tracks simply consolidated that on FM radio which was at its peak at the time. Airplay, and more airplay was what sold Floyd to the middle market which is where the numbers are.
It's always about the song..about the airplay or the video play a song gets to take it out of the elite hardcore fanbase and into the bigger market. Dark Side of The Money was driven by Money, Wish You Were Here by Shine On. A record does not need to have physical singles released to utilize that exposure. Each Led Zeppelin album had a key track promo-ed to radio like (and I quote Wikipedia here) '"Stairway to Heaven", which became a massive album-oriented rock FM radio hit despite never being released as a single.' (and outside the UK they did release singles....Whole Lotta Love, Immigrant Song, Dyer Maker, Black Dog...I have a box set of all 10 Led Zep 45s released in the US...these being imported back to UK in some numbers). With Zep it was relatively easy since they did have a big fan base, but it was always driven by the key tracks on FM radio rather than the album itself, followed by the touring
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[PS. I reckon Auckland is pretty good by any standard other than the huge money pits in places like KL)
it doesn't cost a lot to smile...