The Fractal Hall Journal

[A couple more posts from the old blog, lightly edited again.]

September 22nd, 2005

All of Human Life is Here

Canton is a neighbourhood of Cardiff, and is a lot like every other small town that’s been absorbed by an expanding city. It’s centred around a main road lined with shops. It’s got a few laundrettes, grocers, butchers, pubs, chapels, a Tesco, the Cardiff Communication Worker’s Union, a police station, some hardware shops, about a million cafes and coffee houses. I had a coffee and a muffin in one of them. I considered joining the Communication Workers Union. I considered joining the Police. I considered buying a tool, and sort of regret that I didn’t.

You see, Canton also has a Kwik Fit. My car had ended up with freshly ground rear brake discs and had to be Seen To. The mechanic was helpful, friendly, and completely wrong in estimating that the service would only take an hour or so. I ended up on a day trip to a part of town that’s about ten minutes walk from my flat.

There’s a model/RPG shop called Dice & Disk on the main road that I never knew existed. For some reason, it sells a ton of comic book back issues from the early 90s. There’s a sex shop called Lovecraft that may or may not have inspired the title of the Super Furry Animals’ last album. It’s got a product in the window called Joy Jelly that sounds like those wobbly sweets in plastic packets moulded after cartoon characters; I particularly remember the Ghostbuster ones. I doubt anything in Lovecraft has ever appeared free on the cover of the Beano, although we’re in a whole new Century now so you never know. I know for a fact you can still get the jelly sweets in Woolworths, for Canton has one of them too. I went there and bought House of Flying Daggers for seven quid. Note it’s more expensive on their website. I’m supposed to be cutting down on impulse buying, but fuck it, it was a long day and it was seven quid. It could have been worse. I almost walked with a Batman Begins Utility Belt and 3 in 1 Power Gauntlet.

I whiled away the hours in the library, which is situated on Library Street, which a wonderful name. I want to live on a Library Street. A little further on is Chapter, the contemporary arts centre. There was a woman outside with a posh camera taking a picture of a drain cover, which is how you tell how arty it is. I stopped there for a cup of tea (which was 50p) and a fruit tart (which was not).

September 5th, 2006

If you can’t say it in three and a half minutes, it’s not worth saying

I think the above is a quote, but I don’t know who said it or, frankly, in what context. Hopefully, it wasn’t a Nazi.

Three and a half minutes is supposed to be the optimum length for a song. Not so short that it’s easily missed, nor so long that it gets boring. It’s the target length for most bitchin’ pop tunes aimed at The Kids, the gold standard for craploads of tracks from Motown to Slade to Christina Aguilera.

But in all honesty, I think 3 to 4 minutes should be the optimum length for any band’s tracks. It should be the bricks and mortar in whatever Wall of Sound you may be constructing. It’s a nice basic unit to use, because I think it forces you to selectively edit the work, to cut out the weaker bits, the same way a word-limit or poetry metre works on a writer.

Sometimes, it’s the limits we impose on ourselves that create the most interesting things, that force you to find interesting solutions. A film set entirely in one room, a tv series set on one single day; difficult, certainly, but isn’t making it difficult for yourself the point? After all, when faced with the possibility of writing absolutely anything at all you want, no limits whatsover, most people freeze and end up writing absolutely nothing. Maybe that’s why I’m not keen on modern, unstructured poetry (or modern, unstructured anything, whether on film or on canvas); I fail to see the craft, although that may be due to my own lack of insight or interest (and forgive me for using the farty old Daily Mail “modern” shorthand for anything new and rubbish. I’m currently drawing a blank on a better description.)

What it comes down to is this; I’m really aware that, if I’m busting out some super-fly, face-melting guitar work which is the very definition of freaking awesome, I never want it to end. And when you’re embedded in the heart of freakish awesomeness, it’s easy to assume that everyone’s enjoying it as much as you are.

They are not.

This goes for floor-stompin’ house choons and wildly improvisational jazz, too. Keep it concise, and you keep it interesting. If you positively have to break the barrier, ask yourself why you’re doing it. I can only think of a few extra-long odysseys off the top of my head that were worth doing, and a lot (if not all) of them stay interesting not because it’s the same three chords for eight minutes, but because they incorporate different movements. The big honking obvious one is Bohemian Rhapsody, perennial botherer of Greatest Rock Hits Charts; this one famously takes its cues from “classical” music, and incorporates several different movements.

The other track that springs to mind is Hey Jude. Now, there’s no seperate movement structure here, but this track is a very, very rare example of a song so good no-one ever wants it to end.

(As an aside, the above sentence is hyperbole. I know not everyone likes the Beatles but a huge amount of people do, and a huge amount of people like Hey Jude despite its length. Let’s just take it as read that a) everything here carries a “subjective” disclaimer, and b) lots and lots and lots of people like Bohemian Rhapsody and the Beatles.)

Example Number Three that occurs to me is Stairway to Heaven, which is kind of a mix of different movements and a track you don’t want to end. On a personal note, I also think In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 by Coheed and Cambria is an awesome long-song, but I concede that Emo-Prog Epics about interstellar war are not of universal interest.

The short version of the above is this; you are unlikely to write something like the above tracks at all, never mind on your first time out, and people are unlikely to thank you for trying.

In particular, the grouchy old band you’re supposed to be supporting.

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If there’s one thing that underlines the unique atmosphere of somewhere foreign to you, it’s the advertising.

Adverts have been a constant almost everywhere I’ve travelled to, and like lichen, or fungus, their appearance and composition varies according to region. The contrast to British advertising is, obviously, more apparent when it’s a language I’m not familiar with, but the difference still holds in countries where English is the primary language.

In Canada and the US, it’s the film posters that stand out. Ones for movies unlikely to be released back home for months, if not doomed to plunge straight to video (and isn’t that fast becoming an archaic phrase?); the subtle shift of a personal time-frame, as if I’m on holiday a little into the future.

It’s the same kind of feeling I used to get from imported US comics when I was small. To launch into old-fartery for a second, the advertisements don’t seem so exotic anymore. Most of the time, they’re just a branch of a campaign that’s already running over here, and even if they’re not, the tone and style is practically identical across the board, a slick scientific psychological method honed over a hundred years of consumer culture. The 21st Century: even the advertising is generic and homogenised.

But at the time, it was a strange contrast to the adverts in the Beano, or Marvel UK’s Transformers. Toys and chocolates alien to Wales and a complete lack of anything from Cadbury’s. Television listings for channels unknown to someone used to the four broadcast in Britain, for programmes that would never make it over the Pond. An occasional dip into a culture very familiar but still undeniably different to my own.

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