Emptying the Haunted Air

Coming on after Pairs, who were utterly boneriffic, and the wondrous Duck Fight Goose, Handsome Furs were a load of derivative, four-to-the-floor shit. Shit – as in poo. Right there on the stage.

And it wasn’t just a case of unfavourable comparison – it’s aesthetics. As an audience member, to go from being face to face with the sublime to standing there, listening to something that could be an Ableton Live tutorial, is more disappointing than I am capable of expressing. And the fact that everyone in the crowd lapped it up is just depressing.

I’ll backtrack a bit, first. So, I went along to the Handsome Furs gig at Yuyintang, having never heard of the main act and only really going there because I wanted to see Pairs and Duck Fight Goose again. They were both amazing and Pairs, in particular, were better than the first time I saw them, a few weeks back. You come across music like this and, honestly, you feel like you have an ear pressed against the door to the world of Ideas. And then Handsome Furs came on and played an hour of lameness in 4/4. Stadium-rock vocals (I can’t say much for the lyrics, as I scarcely heard them, but I’m sure one of them was ‘I’ve got no feelings‘, which is about all I need to hear), insipid drum programming and blasts of Native Instruments’ tackiest synth presets were pretty much what was on offer. The guitar added some nice, chaotic textures to the by-the-numbers electronic shit, but it was pretty uninspiring. And when you have a live act where one of the two band members is completely redundant as a performer, then you’ve got problems.

Anyhow, I left the main audience and went to the beer garden after four songs. I had work early the next day, and I figured that it would be silly to endure temporary hearing damage from music that I don’t like. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be this negative about a band. I mean, there was nothing terrible about Handsome Furs and, as far as that sort of music goes, it was a tight performance. But I’m annoyed that Duck Fight Goose and Pairs were opening for them. It’s great exposure for these two, super-nifty bands, I know – they’re just on another gorram level.

At the end of The Great Gatsby, in the final four paragraphs, Fitzgerald seems to step out from behind the narrator, Nick Carraway, and he ponders the limits of our ability to see and understand the world; that which is “commensurate to his (man’s) capacity for wonder”. Fitzgerald captures this idea perfectly in the image of Long Island in the distance that “flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world.” It is one of those ceaseless, penultimate moments that you find in many great literary works; a statement about the way illusions of things that are just beyond our comprehension can captivate us. Steal us away to somewhere else. It is doubly powerful, because Fitzgerald conveys the idea in such wonderful prose.

This is about all you can hope for in the greatest of art – an encounter with the limits of human perception and embodiment – even if you’re an atheist and an anti-Platonist like me, and you know there’s nothing beyond that one can possibly encounter. Some bands really push the limits of what you expect to hear, and what your brain is wired to tolerate. Not to invoke their names with overzealous fervor – that’d be missing out on a lot of the fun – but Duck Fight Goose do just this. And so do Pairs, to a lesser extent. And so do Battles, and so did Throbbing Gristle, and Steve Reich, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cage, Schoenberg, and Schaeffer. So did Davis and Zappa. So does Aphex Twin, and Joanna Newsom, and a thousand other great musicians and artists. It’s not an exclusive club, but it requires a band to be just a little experimental – and Handsome Furs definitely ain’t that, which is why they were a waste of 120 Yuan.

Duck Fight Goose play in unconventional time signatures (I counted verses in 7/4 and 5/4 that jump into 4/4 and 3/4 – all sorts of craziness), they use tempo as liberally as a guitarist moves their hand across the fretboard. They compel you to move, jump and dance to things that your brain has difficulty processing. With Pairs, the energy they give off is visceral. They play insane, propulsive, phrenetic rock – almost more than you can take.

What possible chance did Handsome Furs stand?

In what amounted to the best weekend I’ve had in Shanghai since I arrived in February, I made my way to Yuyintang on both Friday and Saturday night for two vastly different shows. Friday was the second night of Rock0093′s third anniversary celebration and, while it was good fun, was nothing worth writing about. In fact, it was a little disappointing, because the only band I really liked there, MOMO, played but three songs as part of the night’s rapid schedule.

Saturday night was on another level.

Eat Naked Lunch, an evening of beautiful photography bookended by mesmerising, surreal music, was the sort of event that reminds you of everything you love about music, art, and the people involved with its creation. And every other damn thing in the world, for that matter.

It began with Duck Fight Goose, a local band I know little about, but now desperately want to find out more. The only band I can liken them to is Battles – both in the style of their music and the tightness of their performance. Except I find that Battles’ music – their twist on the hook/verse/chorus structure of popular music – tends to draw attention to the ludicrous technical mastery of the band members in playing their respective instruments. Duck Fight Goose – themselves not lacking in technical skill – seem to be more about texture, mood and musical diegesis, while heavily experimental. The songs I heard – and I would love to get my hands on their forthcoming album to confirm this – comprise of different musical ideas that float around and combine in interesting and captivating ways.

There are moments right throughout Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians when the pulses rise to the surface and the music, all of a sudden, becomes more urgent and powerful. It happens again and again. Duck Fight Goose’s songs are a little like this. They give you the time to become accustomed to each new idea in turn, so that a simple change – like the addition of another snare hit every bar – feels all the more significant and, to the audience, seems to take the music in an entirely new direction. Having only seen them once, I don’t know how much they improvise with their music when playing live, but this is the sort of structure that makes you feel special for being there, hearing it in person. As though you’re hearing something that’s being played for the first time – a musical idea that is created right before your eyes.

Then there’s the fact that their music is incredibly textured, with warped vocals, looped guitars, and what I took to be some sort of small synthesizer. And the way they play with tempo, speeding up and slowing down, teasing you with the prospect of intensity, before settling back down into a groove. It’s great stuff. I recorded two videos of them with my cheap digital camera, one of which is a full song. The quality isn’t bad, and I remixed the sound to better capture the feeling of their performance.

The Yuyintang audience really dug Duck Fight Goose, and Yuyintang was packed and buzzing by the time Ren Huang’s photography was displayed. The photographs, which seemed to be united by a theme of playful, sexual exploitation and awakening, were absolutely stunning, and very warmly received by the audience. While they were presented as a simple slideshow, Ren had clearly given a lot of thought to the sequence of shots, which made the whole thing more cohesive and meaningful.  Pink flowers were a prominent visual motif; sometimes as background colour, line and texture, or as mise-en-scène. Or sticking out of some guy’s arse. I guess there’s the idea of deflowering in here, somewhere, or maybe that’s just my reading. This was contrasted with occasional political imagery – the Chinese flag, the colour red, a poster of Communist poster boys adorning the wall behind a girl stripped down to her underwear. Red curtains parted so as to frame a naked man looking expressionlessly out to a grey, industrial sky. But the politics seemed to be all background noise, rather than subject.

The feeling I got from the photos was a celebration of youthful polysexuality in the face of all this noise. The audience would woo and giggle at predictable moments of nudity and eroticism; stretched-out penises, a cigarette poking out of a vagina, a homosexual embrace or kiss. It’s hard to imagine that a photographer with experience of exhibiting his work would not predict such a reaction. It was all part of the show, I felt. The audience was welcomed to enjoy and react to Ren’s photographs, and the exhibition felt more energetic and moving because of it.

So, the night was going pretty well. And then came Boojii. They are, more or less, the same lineup at Duck Fight Goose, but their music is very different. Almost exclusively in 3/4 time, the best phrase I can use to describe their music is ‘nightmare circus waltz’. Or ‘drunken, swinging trapeze act’. And if they did break out of 3/4 time, it’d be for a couple bars of wonky 7/4, before returning to the waltz. Except I’m not exactly sure, because their music is so weird and wonderful and atmospheric that I had trouble counting the beats. Apparently, the drummer and singer in Pairs (Rhys, who I got to hang out with after the show was over) was trying to get my attention from the side of the stage for the whole performance. And it wasn’t as though the music was so loud as to impair my hearing; I was just utterly enthralled. One of the things I like about Boojii is the amount of sonic space they leave in their songs – you can hear the vocals, the creepy synth arpeggios, and the crooked basslines. The chaos and distortion is measured. It bursts out at you like a monster in a B movie.

Bell-like sounds and dissonant, ring-modulated synths were the timbres that characterised their sound, which contributed heavily to the tolling rhythm. The lead guitarist (who is the singer/lead guitarist of Duck Fight Goose) was in a close-eyed stupor for the whole set; it’s music for nightmares.

I could say a lot more about this – and I might well in another post- but I’ll never come close to capturing the mood, excitement and sheer awesomeness of the night. On a more personal level, it’s the first time I’ve felt a part of something really special, here in Shanghai. I loved the music, the photographs were wonderful, and I had a great time afterwards, hanging out with some of the nifty people who are involved with the Shanghai music scene. I should thank Andy Best and Jake Newby for organizing the event, as well as everyone else involved. Cheers for a lovely evening, cutters!

Zhabei at night. Not pictured: My nonexistent photos of Nanjing Road

I’m eating at a little KFC on Fuzhou Road, mainly because I felt nervous about drawing too much attention to myself at the busier one on Nanjing Road. There are a few Westerners here, possibly for similar reasons. Walking down Nanjing Road, you get waylaid frequently by street-peddlers. They swoop in, making a respectable attempt to match my brisk walking pace, and all seem to offer the same thing: watches and iPhones. Presumably these are stored inside their coats, but I will never find out for certain, because of all the things I could buy off a chap in the street, watches and phones are the least appealing. Perhaps if one of them was offering old Super Nintendo games, I might be inclined to peruse their coat pockets. Instead, I simply mutter something that means “Don’t want”, and walk on.

I walked all the way down Nanjing Road tonight. I’m not terribly interested in shopping; I derive little pleasure from the indecision. In any case, my apartment is too small to fit anything else at the moment. So I just walked and looked at the enormous advertisements, the crowds of happy shoppers, and the distant buildings fading into the smog. A skyscraper that is invisible in the night if not for the neon-blue lines that join each of its vertices. All the while keeping track of the astonishing Tomorrow Square as a geographic marker. I walked all the way to the riverbank, found that it was inaccessible for some reason, then walked down to Fuzhou Road and headed back towards People’s Square.

And I found myself in a KFC. One of the first things I notice, aside from the fact that the burgers taste the same as in Australia, is one of those employee propoganda posters on the window to the street. ‘一起工作， 一起快乐!’ Work together, happy together. It’s not at all some Communist credo. I’ve been taking note of these posters in fast food chains in Australia for a few years. They’re clearly not for the staff who, consciously or not, regard the pairing of the words team and work as nothing more than corporate speak. The posters are just marketing, and are unremarkable in this sense.

The thing that strikes me is how the face of consumerism is so similar between these two, vastly different countries, right down to the smallest details. All this advertising, the brands and the familiar images are possibly the main reason I have felt at home in Shanghai. I can decode the semiotics of commercialism on Nanjing Road as easily as in Sydney.

At the same time, this familiarity worries me, for it exposes my profound ignorance and gullibility. Everyone knows KFC, McDonalds and Apple are global empires; they, as corporate entities, can’t escape it. I didn’t know that LJ Hooker, Century 21, Boost Juice, and dozens of others were all the same. But there they are, feeding off the crowds at Nanjing Road. And I realise that, however much I have regarded my cynicism as a Palladium against the effects of advertising, it’s clearly had a lasting impact on me.

All the ads (whose early 90s iterations I seem to remember best) must have resonated in a personal way. However, for me to assume that their products are uniquely Australian, when all commercial sense should indicate the opposite, implies something else entirely. Successful advertising doesn’t just appeal to one’s personal tastes or moods. It resonates in a part of us that sympathises with that elusive thing called national identity. It’s the part of myself that I find most irrational and cumbersome. The reason, perhaps, that I have found myself in Shanghai, of all places. But it is also a part of us that is impossible to resist or escape.

So I just finish my Zinger Burger, and return home.

Sexy-smoldering Barnaby

The title is a reference to a Kurosawa Akira film, and the post isn’t about Barnaby Joyce – it’s just such a wonderful picture. I was just reading Andrew Bolt’s blog (which I do fairly regularly, in spite of myself) and wondering, for the hundredth time in my life, how a person can become such a wretched, conservative ideologue – or any ideologue at all, for that matter. The right wing/left wing spectrum is so ludicrously artificial, yet it remains a compelling way to pigeonhole those whose views about the world are passionate. Someone like Bolt selects his political causes as though completing a checklist in a Political Spectrum for Dummies book – he is a climate sceptic, an apologist for Israel’s foreign policy (and for the Howard government, as for Keith Windschuttle), and seems to have an unhealthy infatuation with Sarah Palin (I can’t quite work that one out). He posits himself diametrically opposed to ‘the left’, and presumably ‘the lefties’ as well.

I’ve often wondered whether the whole thing is self-perpetuating; that a person, through parental influence or a prejudicial stance on a particular issue, comes to adopt indiscriminately the values imposed by history and society. Or, perhaps the whole edifice is maintained by self-perpetuating mutual dislike. Bolt’s writing style is embattled and self-righteous; he’s no journalist, and doesn’t pretend to be, as he wages his daily assaults on a real-or-imagined enemy.

It’s either one of those two, or else there is some essential, biochemical characteristic that motivates an ideologue. An irrepressible awareness of, and sympathy with, all worldly things (that’d be the ‘bleeding heart lefties’, I suppose), or a complete lack of it in the case of Bolt. That is, an obsessive love for one’s own immediate locality – the foregone memories that create geography and culture. A fear to step away from it. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of fear, which I suppose is wholly natural and sensible, but it is a little pitiable. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to live without an expansive mind.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The post title is a loose reference to one of my favourite Penny Arcade comics.

So it is with the Australian Government and their divisive stance on asylum seekers. I only caught up with the day’s unfurling chaos later at night, with Lateline, having spent the day both working, and attending a TESOL course in the evening (which will be my pretense for living overseas next year).

I’d been convinced to this moment that the issue, originating from the detaining of a boat with over 250 Australia-bound Sri Lankan (Tamil) asylum seekers in Indonesia, was just a headline grab for the troubled Opposition. I thought it would last a week at most. The fire was stoked over the weekend when an Australian Customs vessel picked up a distress call – it was from a boat off the coast of Sumatra, containing 78 asylum seeekers. Today’s House of Representatives Question Time saw an escalation in the rhetoric surrounding this ludicrously exaggerated ‘problem’.

Take it away, Hansard!

(Quotes are taken from the Hansard transcrpit for 20th October, 2009: Read it here.)

2.12 pm, Malcolm Turnbull: I ask the Acting Prime Minister: why is the government trying to trick the Australian people with spin rather than admitting its policy failure has rolled out the red carpet to people smugglers?

And, after 4.41 pm, in a speech to Parliament: It should not ever be controversial to state, as a matter of policy and principle, that Australians have the right to decide who comes to this country, our country, and the manner in which they come. The previous Prime Minister, Mr Howard, was criticised for saying that, but the fact is that that is what every Australian expects of their government.

To put Turnbull’s words into context (as is only fair), the complete point he is making, in invoking John Howard’s rhetoric, is that the Australian Government should control the flow of Asylum seekers in the country, and not people-smugglers. The problem is, people smugglers don’t control anything. They don’t heed policy and legislative changes in Australia. They don’t care about the rhetoric of ‘border security’. They simply take money (lots of money), put people on dangerous boats, and send them on their way. They’d keep sending the boats even if Australia adopted the Pacific Solution again, or closed its borders entirely. The ‘push factors’ (in this case, the war in Sri Lanka) are what ultimately determine the numbers and composition of these boats.

In light of this, it was all the more distressing when, again on Lateline, I heard that Kevin Rudd had referred to “illegal immigration” in discussing this issue. (I have not yet found a source for this, aside from tonight’s Lateline interview with Stephen Smith, and will post if I do.)

And I would able to stomach all of it as typical federal politics, were it not so pointless. The opposition cannot knock over a one-term incumbent government – not to mention a very popular Prime Minister – on the issue of ‘border security’. I’m not even convinced that a party could even work the issue from opposition, having never seen it in practice. And even if the utterly infertile Coalition, and its increasingly decrepit-looking leader, could turn it into a wedge issue, it won’t make much of a difference this far from the next federal election. Kevin Rudd had nothing to gain – nothing at all, besides retaining his ballooning approval rating – with the chest-beating rhetoric. He just needs to play it straight and tight – like Gillard in Question Time, like Smith on Lateline – and it will blow over soon enough. 328 people is not a large number of asylum seekers in the context of our yearly intake.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read more >> Options >>