vendredi 8 avril 2005

And one more to go... I'll probably get asked "What happened?" since there are people who notice... What happened was that I didn't want an overdose of "Factory file", at a time when I've been venting spleen about absurd events and media coverage which gets worse though almost everybody knows it -- "They do, so we must too" -- more than ever since this log first started partly as a counter-balance to all that, getting mixed in with my "deeper" personal interests. So I took an entry, spliced it, added a new one in the middle, and here we are. There's the film, there's the VoW scheme, there's a job I enjoy far more for the people and friendships and doing it well than the growing problems I see in mass media coverage of world events, big or small. In daily life, I find it quite impossible to separate out work from friendship, exchange and fun and fear those who can are mad or sad. I also hate "categories", as most people know. But things also need to be in the right place at the right time. To a dear friend who writes tonight, "I admire your motivation" but sounds down in the dumps for a while; well, I admire hers. I do all this because I want to, with a feeling that life's caught up with me and none of the rest of it is to be wasted. There's always one more to go, one more day in the Factory this week, one more meeting, one more scene to write, one more friend to make, one more banker to mollify... But somewhere there's got to be at least a semblance of order. Just a semblance. This is where I still experiment. And from one of the VoWs enjoyed this week, yet to be written up, a notion: yes, reality bites. But "getting real" is getting your very own reality. We can do no less, we've no choice. It has to match the world to work, so I'm far more down to earth than I was. It has to relate to other people's, so I'm paying far more attention. But for the moment, with a log now in two parts -- the routine and the less routine -- I just don't want to get confused! Or confuse anyone else. There you go. 1:10:52 AM  link   your views? [] Sarah, of an evening, revisited Warning! Work in progress... Sarah, among others, has saved the days. Sarah Fimm was an easy, wordless tuned-in smile with a stranger while discovering a voice (the other person was flying on her on own iPod), dreaming spaces and hand-in-hand trips to the inner places you go to find hope when the news is dominated by the dead. She's about opening cages, freedom to move on. "I've walked along the edge I've seen my death It came before my eyes and blinded by the light I realized Too long I've been without The feeling of alive Lost inside the fog I've been Lost inside my mind and I forgot that I am free. I can be what I want to be." Ouf! Turns out it was high time too. I've felt hemmed in by the headlines without realising how much the week's ways and rites of the world have been getting me down. To wake to a new day in the same mood meant that voice has a hold on me! Sarah Fimm knows how to harness new technology instead of letting it lock you up and decide "Oh, that's too complicated!" Sarah Fimm's Nexus (Oct 2004; Amazon US, unavailable at the usual sidebar stores) opened my horizons so much wider within moments I knew the still tough LP scene I'm working on will sort itself out and can take a bit more of the daytime work too. Anyway, everyone's up against it. "Sarah Fimm is a dark, chaotic mixture of rock and pop with alternative influences. Her sound is colored with smooth, melodic rock fused with thick electronic grooves. A fucked up attitude with a strawberry smile account for Sarah being slightly outside, but still able to touch a mainstream audience." So said Collected Sounds. I'd leave out that "fucked up", certainly for this album, just say she's got strong attitudes, honest lyrics and ouch! what a range. She can handle a piano with classical flair and as well as sparingly used electronica, her own gifts to the fore. Comparison lovers say she's a "modern" Tori Amos, blah! Why always compare? I say she's worth a log entry I hadn't planned tonight, then another night... Sarah Fimm has a website straddled by angelic wings and a coy show of earthly paradise breasts -- no escape these days -- that tell me to stop blogging and reply to at least one of those mails, once I dare read it. Not wary of what somebody might say, but of the risks in an honest reply... Sarah Fimm's on the soundtrack to a movie (released March 22) about "crime fighting hotties with killer bodies" (sic; Lakeshore Records). They sound like a couple of my LP characters, only younger. Mine are probably fighting misdeeds of a more insidious and widespread kind. Those 'D.E.B.S.' of the film title sit oddly (at a glance of a run-of-the-mill poster) with the far from routine songs I've been enjoying. Sarah's unpredictable. From one album to the next, the iTMS can't figure out what "genre" to tell us she is and that's how it should be. Sarah Fimm really cheered me up, check her out. I'm back-tracking myself to 'A Perfect Dream', 2002, and her first, 'Cocooned', 2001, where going by the iTMS excerpts, the "fucked up" maybe fitted better, because there's plenty of optimism, toughened by experience, in some of the 'Nexus' songs. Sarah Fimm's a great find who's led me to two more. 'Collected Sounds' is "a guide to women in music", QRs included, where Amy -- hello, Amy -- runs a forum and a now blogrolled occasional corner. The other, 'Always on the Run' is a fine way to go if you're also into good sounds, from sometimes rare names, and are looking for the lyrics to match your downloads. Sarah's site obliges anyway I'll try to avoid a new VoW too soon. They've a habit of turning out to look as good as they sound; it's wonderfully distracting in a week when lone wolves with hormones and hard drive to spare are wrenched between "spiritual" theatricals and the pressing insistence of the "flesh", nearer at hand, much closer to the soul. _____________ Zach Littleman wisely suggests reconciling restricting budgets with the iTMS and kids with parents: "Now if there was a $15 a month subscription service, my parents and most others might go ahead and subscribe when you get the iPod. They wouldn't think much of $15 a month for ALL the music we EVER wanted. After all we would be on a budget and couldn't run over.  So simple, parents would think it is perfect" (iPod Garage). I think he's right, happily do that for mine ... and given these times of discovery, deal with the budget problem otherwise. The best things are often so simple, but for people. A great VoW helps to set me straight even about them. 12:01:56 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.