CCCB: The Place of Dead Roads

It’s Thursday, so it must be time for some baking and an old book.

I decided on ginger nuts, and I wanted a recipe that would give me slightly soft cookies. So I went for one with syrup. Does that makes sense? I don’t know? Do I look like I know what I’m doing?

There’s an extraordinary amount of butter in this… 250g butter vs. 400g flour. Does that even make sense?

Melting the butter in the syrup… Look how delicious that looks! LOOK!

Eww.

Fold fold.

Yeah, that’s an appealing colour. I took one quarter of the dough and added liquorice powder, because I wanted to experiment. But no matter how much powder I mixed in, the dough tasted like… dough… So I may be giving myself a heart attack.

Most important of all, I got to use one of the attachments to my kitchen machine that I’ve had for a while but never found a use for: A spice grinder thingie. It works well, but it’s fiddly: The finest powder seems to migrate to underneath the rubber sealing ring, no matter how hard I fasten it…

Roll roll…

Bake…

Er… flattening…

Growing!

Totally flat!

Well, that was a bust. Not only did they flatten out way too much, but I burned them. I tasted a couple and they were… not very good. To the trash can.

I should perhaps add more flour? I don’t know? But the dough is super-hard and that doesn’t seem likely to happen, so…

Paper cups!

Now then!

Uhm…


Mushrooms!

And…. I undercooked them.

Next try!

Ok then!

And… they turn out to just not be very good. If I bake them X amount of time, they taste like dough, and if I bake them X+3 seconds, they get hard and greasy at the same time.

And the liquorice batch weren’t much better. I’d rate them…. almost edible?

That’s an awful recipe. Or I did something really really wrong.

I hope the book’s better!

It’s The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs.

I remember when I bought this: It was one of my first trips to London, in 1993. I went there with a friend to see a week-long series of concerts called The Thirteen Year Itch. It was a showcase for the British record label 4AD, and I was all agoggle.

I was in my early 20s and made my way to all the record shops and bookstores in London, I feel, and had a suitcase filled with goodies when I left. I remember… Sister Ray on Berwick Street? And several other record shops around that area. Sister Ray was mind-boggling. I remember buying a bunch of Angela Carter books at… Blue Moon Books?

And then I bought a bunch of inter-leck-tuals books at Foyle’s. Just the size of that place intimidated me. I remember getting… I think Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow there at the same time? And a couple of Burroughs books because I had read Naked Lunch.

But I never read this book, because… I was kinda over Burroughs already, but bought it because it was something to buy. It’s not that I didn’t intend reading it, but you know.

It’s not quite what I expected slash dreaded. This is a book from 1983, and is much more subdued than Burroughs’ well-known 50s/60s work. It’s a fairly straight-forward narrative novel about a gay Western gunslinger, and has all of Burroughs’ ticks. It’s an entertaining read.

You gotta love these anti-dog rants. “… ingratiating, cop-loving …” There’s also long loving descriptions of all kinds of guns.

The narrative drops into dreams and fantasy without much preamble, so you gotta pay attention. It takes a while to get into the rhythms of any writer when starting a book, and that Burroughs takes a bit more time than most isn’t that surprising.

It’s written in third person most of the time, but Burroughs drops into “I” at particularly exciting points, and things get perhaps a bit more verbal? I thought that we were going to see Kim Carsons killed. Instead the bit after the colon is just a description of what reputation that punk was looking for.

But once I got into it, there’s so much fun stuff in here. Burroughs is funny and he writes exciting bits when he wants to. But, of course, he’s more into confounding the reader than telling gunslinger stories, which is fine.

Burroughs plays a bit with dialect, which is fun, but he also uses odd spellings in non-dialogue text. Or is “opponenet” just a typo? If so, there’s an awful lot of these, so perhaps it’s just bad proff-readding?

It’s all of Burroughs’ obsessions (guns and drugs and sex) quite condensed, but it’s a sometimes-exhilarating read. The bits about taking out mobsters and fashioning a new world were a lot of fun.

But then there’s the third part:

It’s a time slip thing, and we go forward to the present (i.e. 1984) through a series of not very developed scenarios, and then to Venus, and then we slip back again…

… and this part of the book was a bit of a slog for me.

But I was overall surprised at how enjoyable a read this was. Nine thumbs up. Makes up for those horrible cookies.

And I’ve got one more Burroughs to do in this blog series.

4AD 1982

The 4AD 1982 playlist on Spotify.

In a shocker, not everything from 1982 is available on Spotify. The Birtday Party/Lydia Lunch split isn’t, but I’ve substituted some other live Birthday Party tracks. The Lunch track isn’t available at all.

And the We Means We Starts single (with a different version of Not To) by Colin Newman is also AWOL.

Tsk, tsk!

If anybody from 4AD is reading this: If you have the rights to these tracks, could you fix it? I mean, you have the rights to the other Birthday Party songs, and it’s the only recording of them doing Loose, I think?

Colin Newman I’m not sure about.

Anyway anyway! 1982! 4AD! What can I say? Let’s see…

1982 is very much a continuation of what 4AD was doing in 1981: We get more Wire spin-offs (Colin Newman); The Birthday Party’s final album, some spin-offs (Rowland Howard), and a live album; a Bauhaus spin-off (Tones on Tail); general oddity in The Happy Family (later to morph into Momus); and…

WE GET THE FIRST COCTEAU FUCKING TWINS ALBUM!!1!

Without Cocteau Twins and the cachet they brought, I think it’s doubtful that I would be writing this blog post about 4AD now, and you wouldn’t be reading it. Cocteau Twins were one of the tent poles of British independent music in the 80s, and inspired a gazillion bands. It’s the sound that inspired a whole new genre of music, and it sorta started here.

Only sorta, because Garlands, their first album, is an outlier. It has a much harder, colder sound than what would follow, but it had a certain something, and that certain something was Elizabeth Fraser; a vocalist you can’t help being stunned by upon hearing for the first time.

Ironically, 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell signed them based on a demo tape that didn’t feature her vocals, so he must have been pretty awe-struck when he finally visited them in the studio and heard what they’d made. I mean, just imagine: You signed up some pretty good post-punk geezers, and then you realise that you’re about to release an album that’s heart-palpitatingly good. Everything is going to change forever!

Which reminds me… Quite a few bands release one good album and then they futz around for a while, and then they disappear. That’s not the story with the major bands on 4AD, for the most part: Seldom are their first albums their best. It’s true for Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, The Wolfgang Press, Modern English, Lush, Pixies perhaps (well, debatable).

You can either say that this means that Ivo has a tendency to push bands into the studio before they’re ready. Or you can say that Ivo had a marvellous nose for talent. He could sniff out talent and let them work at it until masterpieces rolled out a couple of years later.

Or perhaps a mix of the two.

1982

 CAD201
Colin Newman — Not To

Lorries, Don’t Bring Me Reminders, You Me And Happy, We Meet Under Tables, Safe, Truculent Yet, 5/10, 1, 2, 3, Beep Beep, Not To, Indians!, Remove For Improvement, Blue Jay Way

 JAD202
The Birthday Party / Lydia Lunch — Drunk On The Pope’s Blood / The Agony Is The Ecstacy

Pleasure Heads, King Ink, Zoo-Music Girl, Loose, The Agony Is The Ecstacy

Not included in the playlist.

 BAD203
Daniel Ash & Glenn Campling — Tones On Tail

A Bigger Splash, Copper 45/33 rpm, Means Of Escape, Instrumental

 AD204
The Happy Family — Puritans

Puritans, Innermost Thoughts, The Mistake

 BAD205
In Camera — Fin

The Fatal Day, Coordinates, Apocalypse

 CAD206
Modern English — After The Snow

Someone’s Calling, Life In The Gladhouse, Face Of Wood, Dawn Chorus, I Melt With You, After The Snow, Carry Me Down, Tables Turning

 CAD207
The Birthday Party — Junkyard

She’s Hit, Dead Joe, The Dim Locator, Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow), Several Sins, Big-Jesus-Trash-Can, Kiss Me Black, 6″ Gold Blade, Kewpie Doll, Junk Yard

 BAD208
Modern English — Life In The Gladhouse

Life In The Gladhouse, The Choicest View

 AD209
Colin Newman — We Means We Starts

We Means We Starts, Not To

Not included in the playlist.

 BAD210
Rowland S. Howard / Lydia Lunch — Some Velvet Morning

Some Velvet Morning, I Fell In Love With A Ghost

 CAD211
Cocteau Twins — Garlands

Blood Bitch, Wax And Wane, But I’m Not, Blind Dumb Deaf, Shallow Then Hallo, The Hollow Men, Garlands, Grail Overfloweth

 AD212
Modern English — I Melt With You

I Melt With You, The Prize

 BAD213
Cocteau Twins — Lullabies

Feathers Oar-Blades, Alas Dies Laughing, It’s All But An Ark Lark

 CAD214
The Happy Family — The Man On Your Street

The Salesman, Letter From Hall, The Luckiest Citizen, Revenge!, The Courier, The Man On Your Street, A Night Underground, Two Of A Kind, March In Turin

 AD215
Colourbox — Breakdown

Breakdown, Tarantula

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.

8K: Metropolis

Look!

*gasp* The number of albums er um musical units I have surpassed an arbitrary nice-looking number in the decimal number system!

But what album was the eight thousandth?

It’s this one!

Metropolis! A jazz-ish album from the late 60s by Mike Westbrook, who I discovered recentlyish after Phil Minton did a gig here, so I got the wonderful Wesbrook Blake album, which had Minton singing in a mode that I wasn’t aware of him singing in.

Everything’s so complicated.

And buying music from before my time seems to be a theme in my music buying habits lately. I even got the new The Beatles box set. *gulp* Shame! But I’ve been getting most of the music the last half year from discogs.com. It’s such a frictionless way to explore and buy old music: I’ll just be listening to some album and then think “hm, I wonder whether they’ve done any albums/EPs that I’ve missed somehow”, and the answer is almost always “yes”. Click, click, pay, click, then be surprised the next week when I get a package in the post.

And paradoxically, as physical formats for music grows steadily less a thing, the ones that do release new music physically put more work into it.

The other week I discovered a German (?) label called Oscarsson. I’d randomly bought two of their albums because they looked nice, by Jung Body and David Allred, and they were both great, so I decided I could just as well start buying a bunch of stuff directly from them.

And the releases are all like that. With booklets and pasted-in photos and stuff.

I got them yesterday, so I don’t know whether the music’s any good yet, but c’mon. It’s gotta be.

I do buy some music “digitally”, but all other sites than Bandcamp is just too much hassle. Bandcamp sells zip files with flac files inside, and with all the metadata and covers I need inside, so it’s just so hassle free.

Hm. I do see that I have about 1K of releases on mp3 only. Shame! They’re all pre-2002-ish, I think, though, so it’s bad mp3 as well.

Whatever will album er musical thing 10K be?

CCCB: Haunted

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It’s Thursday, so it must be time to pick an ancient unread book from the bookcase and bake some cake.

The lucky winner this week is Haunted, a short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates. This is a collection of horror stories published in various magazines:

It’s time for a shocking confession: I’ve never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates. She publishes about 75 books per year, but I’ve still somehow managed to avoid all of them. And it’s weird, because I enjoy reading her essays in The New York Review of Books, but it’s just not… happened.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve had two of her books sitting unread on my bookshelves since 1996.

But still, I didn’t know what to expect here at all. And this turns out to be a pretty grisly collection of horror stories. Let’s give you a flavour:

Spooky, Gothic, unnerving, and it’s sometimes a bit on the horrific side for me, and I used to be a horror movie enthusiast. But still, thrilling, and I’m looking forward to reading the other book of hers that’s on that shelf.

I don’t have anything interesting to say about the book, though, so let’s get to the cake:

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Eek.  That’s whole lot of cream on the cake.

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But it’s banana-ey deliciousness from Betty Crocker.  And it’s delicious.  Mmm.  Bananas, banana bread, banana frosting…

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And look how well it pairs with the book. Excellent.

Banana.