It’s 1985. I just got out of a psychiatric hospital. No, really. Free of the structure of the hospital, I’m unfocused, unable to set out on my own, unable to stay where I am, so I settle. I settle for whatever independence I can find, and that’s at night, driving around alone.

In 1985, I was a fan of Pink Floyd (and I suppose I still am, sort of), especially since at that point they weren’t really putting out anything. I was up-to-date. I had kept up with their various solo projects. And one night, while I was driving around, wasting gas at 11PM cruising up highway 6 from Sugarland back to my part of town, the radio told me something I didn’t know: Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason, had joined up with one of the 10cc guys to form Mason+Fenn, and they had put out a record called ‘Profiles.’ Mason and Fenn were doing a promotional tour, interviewing DJs, talking about this material as if it really mattered, and playing some of the tracks. So I went and got it the next day.

It didn’t amount to much, in and of itself. The importance given to these things is always disproportionate when you’re young, when you’re depressed and alienated, when you want anything at all to matter. So this album mattered. It’s basically a series of jams with some structure. There are a couple of real songs, no doubt to make Columbia Records’ A&R guy happy; something to sell on the radio. Truthfully, it’s little better than canned music. I mean, it’s nice and stuff, but listening with more sophisticated ears, there’s little else beyond all the cool musical technology of 1985 (drum machines, Simmons drums, the Yamaha DX7). An enjoyable listen, but don’t listen too closely.

There’s a very specific memory associated with this album. I put it on a cassette tape, opposite (I think) ‘Wish You Were Here.’ I bet I still have that tape somewhere, and could dig it up and know for sure. But this is me letting myself get off track. I had it on tape, and I would drive around. A lot. A whole lot. I’d drive to Galveston just to drive there. I’d drive to Austin (six hours round trip). Different tapes became associated with different drives, providing the soundtrack to my pseudo-independence.

‘Profiles’ was for driving up Eldridge to Clay, and then west across to Barker-Cypress and back to I-10 for the flip back home. Sometimes it was north on Gessner, and then across Clay to Eldridge. So one of two loops that involved Eldridge.

There’s a dam that runs across west Houston, and acts as flood prevention. Eldridge runs right through the middle of the no-man’s-land behind the dam that was flooded half the time. The road was in poor condition, and people went to dump their refrigerators and old sofas. It was like a video game driving there, which was no doubt one of the attractions.

And one night, it was raining, and I was in my little Japanese econobox with sports-car pretensions, and I was listening to Mason+Fenn, and I ran off the road into the ditch. Only I didn’t run off the road, I pulled the handbrake and skidded into the ditch. And I’ll never really know why, but I did. Completely unconscious. I found I had driven into the ditch, and noticed the handbrake, and then remembered that I had pulled it.

And this is the mystery that comes to mind while listening to Mason+Fenn’s ‘Profiles.’

I was fine, the car was fine, some guy stopped and had one of the earliest portable phones known to man, and my dad and brother came and pulled the car out of the muck. I told them I swerved to miss a… well, I guess a squirrel or a rabbit or something.

So how can I possibly let go of this LP?

The other tape associated with Eldridge was a mix tape that contained Rush’s ‘Red Barchetta.’

Tony Banks, ‘A Curious Feeling’ leads to HomerTheBrave, ‘A Feeling Of Vague Unease.’ I’m pretty sure I didn’t sell this immedately after purchase only because Tony Banks was a member of Genesis at the time. I have other Genesis solo projects, as well, and ‘A Curious Feeling’ has forced me to decide in favor of creating an ebay pile to contain whatever I find lacking.

Wendy Carlos, ‘Beauty In The Beast.’ Recently re-mastered and re-released on CD by Carlos herself, this LP came out on the Audion label back in the day. I loved Audion, because it was mainly led up by a syntho-keyboard guy called Larry Fast, who recorded many many (many) albums as Synergy (some of which I’ll no doubt talk about here), and played with Peter Gabriel and others. Wendy Carlos, of course, recorded the ‘Switched On Bach’ albums, and did electronic scores of classical music for Stanley Kubrick soundtracks. A real pioneer. ‘Beauty In The Beast’ is experimentation in using synthesizers to create music in exotic tunings and scales. Carlos created special software to allow her to finally be able to fulfill J.S. Bach’s dream: A multi-tempered musical instrument. I could go into the whole thing about the 12 tones of the musical scale and how they came to be, but it’s already far too much for this single paragraph.

So I’ll start another one. Here’s Carlos’ web page for the album. She does a better job than I could. Suffice it to say that ‘Beauty In The Beast’ is an apt title, and well worth the adventurous listen.

Fucking Democrats.

Rented ‘The Fountain.’

If you’re at all like me, or maybe just from my age group, you remember when ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ had a certain psychedelic street-cred. It was really the only movie out there actively trying to blow your mind. There were stories, half-joking, half-serious, of people dropping LSD and going to see ’2001,’

It was with this baggage that I finally saw it, on TV. It doesn’t quite work its magic when the trip-out blinky-lights scene is interrupted for a commercial break. Not to mention the pan-n-scan aspect, which renders the space baby part completely menaningless (rather than simply inscrutable). Later, when it was re-released into theaters in the late ’80s, I went to see it on the big screen, but it still didn’t capture me. I understood it, and I saw it as a metaphor for the, shall we say, quantum leap required to come up from animal consciousness and into humanity, and then to step beyond, guided by the mysterious, to be reborn into something new, but still just as primitive as the ape-man throwing his jawbone into the sky.

But by that point, I already understood that. I’d read some Timothy Leary, some mysticism… ’2001′ might have cracked this kind of evolutionary spirituality through the membrane of popular culture, but watching it from this side of that membrane was more like being an anthropologist than an audience member filled with wonderment.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

And ‘The Fountain’ treads similar ground, but takes us into ourselves, our attachments to those we love, and our desire to cheat death. We’re given plenty of psychoactive imagery designed to throw us into a new perspective, and we see the development from conquest of the world to conquest of the body to conquest of one’s own spirit, all folded out from the tale of the mythical fountain of youth.

It’s like reading a children’s book by your favorite author when you were a kid; a book you didn’t know about at the time, but now you’ve read it and so that part of you is complete. If I’d seen this movie about 15 years ago, it would have blown my mind, and I’d be so very glad to have seen it. I’m glad this movie was made (its production was cancelled once by the studio, and then it was re-written to be less costly to produce independently), and it has a definite charm. The very idea of a transparent spherical spaceship hurtling through space makes me happy.

But ultimately, it just drags too much, and loses opportunities for humor. The story is too much a story and not enough an allegory. The multiple tales each lose their focus, even as some similarities are hammered home with great obtuseness. The climactic scenes are beautiful and inspiring. The denument answers only one of about a dozen questions relating to the plot… But again, this is all doubting the forest because of the trees. So to speak.

Go ahead. Rent it. Imbibe and see. They’re making the effort, and that counts for a lot.

I love the central conceit that these are things you might purchase and use. This via boingboing which leads to this, which you really should watch.

Hey! Guess what the banner thing just told me! They’re bringing Lifetime Premium back! W000!

(I mean, yeah, this is a cheap shot, but come on, Xanga-doodz…)

SeeqPod Music beta – Playable Search

Do you know any other songs about listening to records? Seeqpod couldn’t find Genesis’ ‘Another Record’ or Richard Thomposon’s ‘Don’t Sit On My Jimmy Shines.’

And… Ask and ye shall recieve:

A long journey through Editions EG, an early ‘alternative’ label from Britain.

Back when it was originally released, this album was made of unobtainium. I got ahold of it through second-hand second-handed-ness. A friend of a friend gave it to that friend, and then that friend gave it to me, and now I’ve had it for twenty years.

It’s just great. A sampler of all kinds of interesting music that came down the pipe, from Adam and the Ants to Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Jon Hassell. And my favorite Brian Eno song: ‘The Seven Deadly Finns.’

I also listened through Fripp & Eno’s ‘Evening Star.’ My friend Brett asked me what I thought of it one time and I told him it was OK as background music, and I totally dug the idea of Frippertronics (feedback tape loops). He said it was the first ambient album he ever heard, having only ever heard Eno’s rock music and Fripp in King Crimson. He kept waiting for the song to start after the droning introduction, and he waited for twenty minutes. So a little disappointing for him.

OK, so in the late ’80s, there was this British band called Marillion. And they came along just in time for all the old prog-rockers who were getting tired of playing their old Genesis records over again. They were big and overblown and they could fill a stadium with sound. Their songs were all about alcoholics and hookers and cocaine and being depressed and alienated. Their album cover art all fit together with little details here and there… Magpies and clowns and jesters and pissed-off children and puzzle pieces and caged chameleons.

Perfect. Absolutely perfect for that time of my life, anyway.

Now it’s just embarassing, though of course I respect their musicianship and creativity. I gave up on Marillion when their lead singer left. He went by the name Fish (as in ‘drinks-like-a-’), and had some solo projects, but I couldn’t get into those either.

Listening to ‘Misplaced Childhood,’ after side 1 of ‘Fugazi’ earlier.