the squirrel's hiding
up in the hazelnut tree.
we cannot see it.

DE
ein neues auto
steht in unserem garten.
das eichhörnchen lacht.

Some thoughts on Joy Division/New Order
When thinking of Ian Curtis disbanding Joy Division May 18th 1980 by hanging himself the end of The Doors comes to mind.
Jim Morrison died under never fully explained circumstances probably on an overdose in Paris in the spring of 1971. Their end is not the only similarity between them. I doubt that Morrison was an epileptic like Curtis but nevertheless when you see him in some live videos it becomes clear that this guy was mentally insane. The way he danced and did not look at the public shows that he was on an extreme ego trip. Same is true for Curtis. Even the way Curtis sang with this grave low baritone voice is very reminiscent of Morrison. Only difference is that even if The Doors music is quite dark for the US of the late sixties it is incredibly sunny compared to Joy Division. The Doors were from LA and that is not exactly a very sombre place. Manchester on the other hand...

Very soon after Curtis suicide the remaining band members decided to continue under the name of New Order. After the release of the terribly foreboding Love Will Tear Us Apart which Curtis had written shortly before his death New Order toured the US substituting Joy Division who had planned that tour already. In the beginning Bernard Sumner, the guitarist and singer of NO tried to sing with the same mannered grave voice as Curtis. But very soon NO followed a totally different path. I think they did this musical U-turn consciously. JD’s sound had been dooming and dark and the lyrics had been depressing and devastating. NO created dance music relying very much on electronics. The drum machine and the synthesizer play an important role in their music. And the lyrics sung by Sumner in a boy’s voice are devoid of any meaning. They consist of banalities and platitudes. They just sound nice and fit very well to the sunny shallow music. I think that this is intended. The remaining members of JD decided maybe unconsciously that they could not continue with the serious music JD had created. That music with those sad and pessimistic philosophical lyrics had been a dead end. It had cost the life of one band member. They had invested too much of themselves in that music. To no avail except Curtis death. Therefore they reinvented themselves completely. They tried to make perfect dance pop music, the most superficial kind of music imaginable. JD had been an album and a live band. NO was just a singles band. The lp records and the live concerts were rubbish.

Somehow both bands are great. JD as a legacy of punk and probably the most influential indie band (together with the Smiths) after Velvet Underground. NO as the New Wave band which opened the way for Techno.
The new album of NO is great as I said before. I would say it is their first real album. Only track 9 is a bit weak. The rest is not on par with their best singles but it is amazingly consistent slightly melancholic dance music with the typical NO sound. And the lyrics are totally useless again. I think it is an art to write hollow lyrics which sound good to the music. NO have succeeded in this discipline again. I was inspired to these ramblings by this really bad negative review of the new album which misses the point completely.

Happy birthday mon amour
Did you know what happened today in history?

Cleopatra committed suicide 30 B.C. aged 38 or 39, probably by means of a poisonous serpent.

Almost funny is the naiveness 855 years ago:
1146 - A conference of European leaders outlawed the crossbow. By banning the effective weapon, it was believed that the leaders had ended wars for all time.

It is Frankenstein day today. Mary Shelley, the writer of the infamous book was born in 1797.

50 years before your birth Lenin was shot but he survived.

In music your exact day of birth featured the first recordings of The Beatles for their Apple label. The initial session included Revolution and Hey Jude.

Cameron Diaz is exactly four years younger than you (but I can assure you any jealousy would be totally unfounded ;-)).

New Order
Yesterday I bought the new offering by NO which is called Get Ready. After two or three listens I must say that it is probably my favourite album by them. It is somehow softer less dance and drum machine like. The beat is not as hard and loud as during their Ibiza phase in the eighties. Almost like a mature work (Alterswerk we say in German). I have to listen to it again. The music seems subtler than in the past. And there are more than two good songs on it.

As much as I got into Joy Division's albums almost straight away after I listened to them for the first time as little I ever digged New Order's LPs. They are and will always be a singles band. I find Bernard Sumner's non-spectacular voice was quite a backslide after the intense and stark voice of Ian Curtis.

My favourite album with a member of NO (except JD's records of course) would be the first album of Electronic from 1991. A full album of very enjoyable wonderful simple and light tunes. It works from the first to the last track. A chocolate box full of dance pop. One of the few supergroup (Sumner + Marr + Tennant) outputs which is worth the money. Highly underrated by the critics (3/5 stars only) and the public.

NO disappointed me most 1992 at the Bizarre festival on the Lorelei rock (above the Rhine). They finished the evening after a superb performance by Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore played like Hendrix young brother) and seemed like little puppets to me who where dancing in the distance to electronic rhythms made for people from Mars. Absolutely ridiculous.

Last Waltz
The video I got from Amazon is a kind of watershed of pop music. A music movie by Martin Scorsese about the last concert of The Band at the Winterland, San Francisco on Thanksgiving 1976. It is something like a best of before punk broke out. The Band itself is a pretty boring rock outfit. In the movie they play with the most important artists of the 70s. Ronnie Hawkins (they used to be his support band), Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Neil Diamond etc. Even though The Band is only an average band (sic!) that movie captures the spirit of the early rock age amazingly well. One of the best rock music films around. Much better than Stop Making Sense anyway. And I love the early Talking Heads!
The film is worth buying just for Joni's beautiful rendition of Coyote, one of my favourite songs of hers. I am just "a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway...". Nevertheless she seemed a little bit out of place with The Band. Apparently she also performed Shadows and Light and Furry Sings the Blues at the concert. Both are not featured on my copy of the video.

god. i am tired.
shit. had to work all weekend.
hell. need a break soon.

i walk past a house
a cat sleeps on a pillar
psst. do not disturb.

The Strokes are dud
Just listened to the four songs I linked to below. Sorry but to compare the Strokes to VU is a blasphemy. They are just another boring retro-sounding band.
Masonic Boom (Kate St. Claire) got it totally right on I Love Music:
"The Strokes are to the Velvets/NYC punk what Oasis are to The Beatles. End of story."
Last Nite has got the garage sound of VU. But it is hollow. And after having listened to it three times it is very annoying as well.
Barely Legal starts quite well with a stolen riff (where from?). But after one minute 30 it runs out of steam. There is some 70s sounding guitar free-style wankery going on. The voice of the singer is not so bad in the beginning when it is rough.
NYC Cops is the worst song of the four. The singer sounds like Jim Morrison here. The song goes nowhere. And the chorus together with some more 70s guitar work is sooo bad.
The Modern Age is a bad copy of VU again. The singer sings like Lou Reed. He even repeats Lou's manierisms like "gogogogogogogogogo". The song is probably the best of the four. If there would not be this guitar shite in the second half again.
So my advise: Do not waste your precious hard disk space for this music.
Some more discussion on ILM here.

reading my ramblings
on music i feel like a
deaf listening to it

I know that this is not a haiku. Not only has the last line six syllables instead of five (maybe not, as it depends on how you pronounce "listening") but it resembles more a koan. And of course haikus should not be (I read that somewhere) reflective and abstract. But I have my problems right now with the concrete. I will try to do better next time.