Favourite Album Covers: Technical Ecstasy by Black Sabbath

 

This has been my absolute favourite album cover for decades now. I've never even listened to the album.

It's hard to explain why. I just really like the atmosphere, and the colours-- the colours and textures create the atmosphere. 

I suppose you could say it evokes a kind of technological dystopia, from a human point of view, but that's not what I think of when I look at it. It actually has something of a retro-futurist feel, and the title colours my view of the picture. It's a moment of ecstasy, not of horror. Maybe my reaction, deep down, is: "Perhaps the future won't be too different from the past, in some way." Also, I've always loved escalators.

It was painted (?) by the same guy who designed the cover for Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. I've only discovered that right now. You could hardly get a more recognizable album cover than that one.

A Positive Cultural Development?

Last night I started watching a 2022 anthology horror film called Tales from the Other Side. It was, to be frank, pretty ropey: cheap, corny, and often ridiculous. But I fell asleep watching it and I'll finish watching it today. I love horror anthologiy films so much that I will (fairly) happily watch even the worst ones. I would rather watch a fifth-rate anthology horror anthology film than a second-rate gangster film, war film, or melodrama. Beside, it had some nice moments.

I came across it on Amazon Prime. This service seems to have a bottomless cauldron of cheap horror films-- most of them made within the last few years. The sort of films that don't have a Wikipedia page or any other kind of online footprint, aside from an occasional capsule review, and that will certainly never become widelly known.

I say "cheap" rather than "bad", because not all of them are bad. For instance, The Curse of Crom: The Legend of Halloween was pretty good, and there have been others.

Presumably this avalanche of horror films-- and, I assume, other genres (Christmas movies, for instance)- only exists because of streaming. Is that really such a bad thing? The people who make all these flms are getting paid, and they are also getting to do creative work. That seems like an admirable thing to me. They only exist because they meet a demand, so somebody is getting something out of watching them. (Me, for one.)

Even if you subscribe to an elitist outlook that only creative works of permanent value matter-- well, you need a mountain of mediocrity to achieve a pinaccle of excellence. The bigger the mountain...

Meanwhile, cinemas still exist, and still exhibit all their usual fare: big budget movies, not-so-big budget movies, and obscure little movies that still get a theatrical release.

I'm not often enthusiastic about cultural developments, but this seems like a good one.

There's UFO's over New York...

 ...and I ain't too surprised.

I happened to be listening to John Lennon's song "Nobody Told Me" just now, and I couldn't help being struck by the topicality of this line, given recent headlines.

(I'm surprised to be writing a second Beatles-related post in a row.)

I've long harboured a dislike of John Lennon, based on a few different factors: the lyrics of "Imagine", the way he treated his first son, and his general cynicism. I think of Paul McCartney as the good Beatle and the John as the bad one.

But of course, that's completely daft. John Lennon was a young guy with a troubled background who experienced unprecedented, unimaginable success. It's impossible to guess how that would affect any one of us.

In more recent years, I've come to really like some of his solo tracks that I didn't know about before. Most especially, "Watching the Wheels", but also "Gimme Some Truth" and "Working-Class Hero."

And "Nobody Told Me", which is a wonderfully bouncy and upbeat anthem to life's quirkiness.

More than that, though: it evokes a mood or aesthetic that I particularly relish, one best captured by Louis MacNeice in his immortal phrase "the drunkenness of things being various".

Other things that awaken this mood, or aesthetic:

The Trivial Pursuit board.

Books of quotations.

Reading old diaries, bound periodicals, or even the newspaper.

Compilation TV shows such as the Irish "Reeling in the Years" series.

I also like the "collage" style of the lyrics. It reminds me of other songs such as "Cool for Cats" by Squeeze or "The Mero" by the Dubliners.

There's something miraculous about music (and every other form of art) that awakens in us a particular mood or view of the world. It's almost the opposite of the Matthew Arnold line I posted a view days ago: "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole." That's a wonderful line, and a wonderful gift. But not to see life steadily, or see it whole, also seems important: the ability to see the world as now comic, now tragic, now mysterious, now exciting, now sentimental, etc. etc. And the fact that life can correctly be described in all these different ways!

Life is a shimmering thing.

Favourite Album Covers: Back to the Egg

This is a new regular feature which I will probably forget about immediately.

Anyway, I've long been of this album cover, Back to the Egg by Wings (1979) which is an example of what I call "everyday surrealism". And so seventies!

Favourite Poems: "To a Friend" by Matthew Arnold.

This sonnet is about Sophocles, of whom I know little. Well, it's about Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles. The opening is a bit shaky and awkward, although that also gives it a sort of halting dignity. But the sestet, the last six lines, are the kicker. "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole" is, in my view, one of the greatest lines in English poetry. "Business could not make dull, nor passion wild" is another wonderful line; the sort of classical antithesis native to the age of Samuel Johnson, here lit by the afterglow of Romanticism. "Mellow glory" is also a wonderful paradox, or at least, a surprising combination of ideas.

It's the sort of poem that makes me regret being so little of a classicist!

To a Friend by Matthew Arnold

Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?—
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.

Poetry and Music is "All or Nothing" For Me

Just a quick observation on my own artistic sensibilities, which may or may not chime with anybody else's.

I've noticed a big cleavage between my own attitude towards poetry and music on the one hand, and pretty much all the other arts on the other.

I'm much more tolerant towards all the other arts. I could watch a film and think: "Yeah, that was OK. It was unoriginal and corny and a bit dull, but it was enjoyable enough to watch-- though I wouldn't watch it again, most likely."

The same applies to books, the visual arts, architecture, and so on. These arts are graded on a continuum.

When it comes to music and poetry, though, I'm looking for something very specific. In those two art-forms, a miss is as good as a mile. It either happens or it doesn't happen.

Now, I don't think this necessarily has anything to do with good taste. In my own mind, I have excellent taste in poetry, but pretty awful taste in music-- for the most part.

The response that I'm looking for, when it comes music and poetry, is something like genuine laughter-- it's an involuntary response. Or it might be compared to a physical shudder, or physical attraction, or (perhaps more than else) the awakening of the sense of wonder.

This is a minimum requirement, of course. It's not to say that every poem, or piece of music, that provokes this response does so to an equal degree-- in the same way that not every laugh is equally intense.

Reading new poetry, and listening to new music, always feels like prospecting to me. Will it happen, or won't it? If it doesn't, all the critical plaudits and hype in the world, all the evident virtuosity at work, mean nothing at all to me.

The Face in the Wallpaper

My aunt and uncle, both of them now gone to their reward, lived on a farm a little bit outside Limerick City. I would visit them every summer and stay in their spare room.

One year they told me that people had seen a face in the wallpaper of that bedroom if they looked at it too long.

On the surface, it sounds like they were just trying to put the wind up me, but I don't think so. Although I can't remember exactly how I was told this, I had the strong impression it was a "true" story-- that is, it at least wasn't made up for my benefit.

I've pondered it ever since, intermittently-- what did it actually mean?

At the time, I assumed it meant the pattern of the wallpaper would somehow "resolve" itself into a face if you looked at it long enough-- like an autostereogram.

Only much later did another interpretation occur to me, one that seems rather more obvious-- that, if you stared at the wallpaper long enough, a ghostly face would superimpose itself over it. 

The funny thing is that, although the first alternative sounds less scary and even naturalistic, it scared me plenty back then.

This is the sort of "chill" I like the most-- a subtle and understated one, with no necessary hint of danger.

I had plenty of scares on that farm, perhaps because it was so far from Dublin and home.

One night I lay awake reading my aunt's magazines, one of which contained an article about the Third Secret of Fatima that suggested it would happen in 1992-- and I was reading it in 1992. I literally lay awake waiting for the bombs to fall. I was my last night in Limerick that summer. Somehow I felt convinced that, if I got back to Dublin, I'd be safe. I think, deep down, I knew it would seem less convincing in Dublin.

In another magazine (she had glossy celebrity magazines as well as religious magazines), I read an account of Michael Jackson filming the "Thriller" video, which hyped up the possibility that he had opened himself up to dark forces.

I can distinctly remember walking out into the sunlight and feeling a sense of "daylight horror"-- that the chill of the story still hung over me despite the summer sun.

I also remember reading a tabloid news story there, which suggested cancer had been mixed with a virus, and this terrified me, for all of ten minutes.

On another occasion, my uncle was telling ghost stories in the "good room", or the parlour, and all the lights went off. That was spooky.

And once I was shown a stone in the vicinity which supposedly had the devil's hoofprints on it. 

I'm very grateful for all these experiences now.