From: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org (idealcopy-digest) To: idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Subject: idealcopy-digest V5 #225 Reply-To: idealcopy@smoe.org Sender: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk idealcopy-digest Sunday, July 7 2002 Volume 05 : Number 225 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [idealcopy] Iain (M) Banks ["Bill Hick" ] [idealcopy] Casus Belli - Big Metal Birds ["Bill Hick" Subject: [idealcopy] Iain (M) Banks >>>>Iain M. Banks' "Use of Weapons" and "The Player of Games" - though I prefer his writing of non-SF as Iain Banks, particularly "The Crow Road". Listees might well enjoy "Espedair Street", his mock-rock-autobiography, too... The separation of his sci-fi & supposed non sci-fi is really just a publishing convenience. I prefered Walking on Glass Feersum Endjinn The Bridge The Wasp Factory Excession Song of Stone Complicity (although the plot was too easy to second guess) Use of Weapons was good but seems like a blueprint for the superior Walking on Glass (which although published earlier was written later). Reread Espedair Street a couple of years ago and found it almost insufferably twee. The Crow Road was still very entertaining second time around though, and it helped that I'd almost completely forgotten it. He's written two pretty crap books as well Canal Dreams (ridiculous) The Business (boring) I went to a book reading he did from The Business and he was very entertaining. The way he read an extract from the book really made it come alive. Iain Banks trivia: Shot by Both Sides is one of his favourite songs. BTW I liked REM (Life's Rich Pageant being possibly their highpoint for me) but detest U2. Where does that leave Idlewild? Probably in the bargain bin. No Dead Cows on the Back Cracked Machine Highly Irregular Cyberzine http://www.webinfo.co.uk/crackedmachine NP Red Red Meat - Bunny Gets Paid (Sub Pop) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 18:03:50 +0100 From: "Bill Hick" Subject: [idealcopy] Casus Belli - Big Metal Birds >>>>Janitor Joe??? Who/what is the connection? Same guitarist / vocalist as Bastards. He did at least one album with another band called Gnomes of Zurich but I never heard it. Bastards bassist went on to make two great singles (kind of sounding like a cross between Bastards & Breaking Circus) and a fairly dull album recording under the name Casus Belli. >>>>'Neighbor' was the last great record of the 80's for me. And has a song ever sounded less like it's title than 'The Joy of Gardening'! what a bleedin' Xian interpretation!!! > If you like Bastards or Janitor Joe you may also find this Leeds band entertaining > www.thejrthree.com Corrected URL above, got it wrong last time Cracked Machine Highly Irregular Cyberzine http://www.webinfo.co.uk/crackedmachine NP To Rococo Rot's first album (Andy Votel is ruining our city by getting these good bands to play here the bastard) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2002 19:09:18 +0100 From: "ian.s. jackson" Subject: [idealcopy] Jeff Buckley-Sweetheart... >Got a cdr of this one a few months ago from a fellow who was a bit too >enthousiastic about it and now I still haven't played it... Should I? worth it just for 'Witches Rave' and 'Nightmares By The Sea' and maybe even 'Everybody Here Wants You'...great tracks all, not a great LP maybe, but then it wasn't meant to be an LP anyway... ian.s.j. _________________________________________________________________ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 11:58:08 -0700 From: "Paul Pietromonaco" Subject: Re: [idealcopy] Jeff Buckley-Sweetheart... > >Got a cdr of this one a few months ago from a fellow who was a bit too > >enthousiastic about it and now I still haven't played it... Should I? > > worth it just for 'Witches Rave' and 'Nightmares By The Sea' and maybe even > 'Everybody Here Wants You'...great tracks all, not a great LP maybe, but > then it wasn't meant to be an LP anyway... > I would like to add to this thread. "Sketches" is obviously unfinished, but points at a new direction Jeff was beginning to follow. If you thought that "Grace" was a little too overblown, then you might like the relative directness of "Sketches". For me, in addition to "Nightmares By The Sea", there are a couple of amazing tracks. "Vancouver" and "The Sky Is A Landfill", although unfinished, are still effective. And on the second disc, although the home cassette 4-track material is sonically difficult to listen to, "I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby (If We Wanted To)" is very good. Did your friend CD-R both discs? Or just the one? Definitely worth a listen. Don't let the unfinished tag put you off. The first disc sounds great - Andy Wallace did a bang up job polishing the mixes without adding any parts. He only worked with what was down on tape. The addition of a couple of the Verlaine mixes on the second disc points this out. The second disc is more problematic, but you might find the germs of songs interesting. Cheers, Paul P.S. Did we get "I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby (If We Wanted To)" on the parenthesis list? (^_^) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 21:54:18 +0100 From: Andrew Walkingshaw Subject: Re: [idealcopy] Iain (M) Banks On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 05:59:39PM +0100, Bill Hick wrote: > >>>>Iain M. Banks' "Use of Weapons" and "The Player of Games" - though I > prefer his writing of non-SF as Iain Banks, particularly "The Crow Road". > Listees might well enjoy "Espedair Street", his mock-rock-autobiography, > too... > > The separation of his sci-fi & supposed non sci-fi is really just a publishing > convenience. I had heard he was intending to standardise on one of his two names from now on: but this is a) hearsay and b) if so, I have no idea which. "The Player of Games" I enjoy because, well, I am one; chess to a pretty decent standard and I'm learning to play Go. A lot of the stuff surrounding Azad I found really well observed, which probably meant I enjoyed it more. > Feersum Endjinn Not read this one. I assume it's worth the effort? > The Bridge Incidentally, the Forth Rail Bridge; which was the dominant thing visible from my bedroom window when I'm at home. Still is, I guess, though I'll be there for under eight weeks this year... > The Wasp Factory > Excession Does anyone else see a parallel between the ships' communications in this and mailinglists/Usenet? :) > Song of Stone I'd just like to add a caveat here: this is brilliant, but *SO DEPRESSING* it's not true. That's the point, of course, but it's definitely not for people looking for escapism... (which I frequently *am* with both books and music. I can't cope with seriousness the whole time.) > Reread Espedair Street a couple of years ago and found it almost insufferably > twee. Escapist is how I'd characterise it; it's a bit of fluff, but this is how I regard Excession (Big! Space! Opera!) too. I enjoyed it, but it's in no way as ... worthwhile(?) a book as some of his other stuff. I loved Whit, too. It's another of his light books, but it does have a couple of points to make. Look to Windward polarises people: they either enjoy it or loathe it. It's the "slowest" of the Culture novels, but I enjoyed that; it suits the tone that Banks is trying to generate, I think. > The Crow Road was still very entertaining second time around though, and > it helped that I'd almost completely forgotten it. The TV adaptation of it is remarkably good also. Certainly watchable. > Canal Dreams (ridiculous) > The Business (boring) Agreed: The Business is half of a really good book, then... it stops. Right at the point where you think it's getting interesting. > BTW I liked REM (Life's Rich Pageant being possibly their highpoint for me) > but detest U2. > Where does that leave Idlewild? > Probably in the bargain bin. Idlewild and U2 are both in the "escapist" part of my record collection. I'm not going to defend them on artistic grounds, but sometimes what I *need* is dumb, mood-altering music. Wire are one of the few bands which get through to me in both in both my "intellectual" and "emotional" modes, so to speak: another, bizarrely enough, are Mogwai. Andrew - -- "And you see, I kind of shivered to conformity, Did you see the way I cowered to authority?" - Mansun, "Six" ('Six') adw27@cam.ac.uk (academic) | http://www.lexical.org.uk ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 18:59:35 EDT From: RLynn9@aol.com Subject: [idealcopy] take it to the bridge..yeah! Andrew wrote: > Incidentally, the Forth Rail Bridge; which was the dominant thing visible > from my bedroom window when I'm at home. Still is, I guess, though I'll > be there for under eight weeks this year...>>>>>>> > speaking of bridges again...i took a lady friend to the Chain of Rocks Bridge (you know, the one that i blathered on about last week) here in St. Louis ...i just found out that it is the longest pedestrian bridge in the world....What a beautiful bridge this is.....brought back wonderful memories ...The Mississpi River has finally receeded from flood levels after the massive spring rains....What is the Fourth Rail Bridge Andrew? ...sorry, i am having a fascination with bridges lately.... RL ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 01:07:43 +0100 From: Andrew Walkingshaw Subject: Re: [idealcopy] take it to the bridge..yeah! On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 06:59:35PM -0400, RLynn9@aol.com wrote: > Andrew wrote: > > massive spring rains....What is the Fourth Rail Bridge Andrew? ...sorry, i am > having a fascination with bridges lately.... As bridges go, it's an important one. (And it's definitely Forth, not Fourth. :) ) It's the rail bridge over the river Forth, with its ends being in the towns of South Queensferry (my home town), near Edinburgh, and North Queensferry (in Fife); as such, pre-road it was the main arterial route for freight for the whole of eastern Scotland, and it was (if I remember rightly) the first target attacked by German bombers on the mainland UK during WW2 (they missed). It's a steam-era (opened 1890), steel-constructed cantilever bridge (at the time the largest cantilever bridge in the world), *extremely* striking looking, and one of Scotland's best known landmarks (arguably, with Edinburgh Castle, the best known man-made one). Over 50 people were killed building it, in accidents. It's 1.5 miles long, and the track is about 150ft above the river: it's nowadays accompanied by the (also fairly striking) Forth Road Bridge, which is a 1960s suspension bridge, and an ideal viewing platform for its older sibling. The sight of two bridges barely a mile apart from different technological eras is very striking, and probably the most interesting thing about my home town (which only has a population of about 10000). http://www.forthbridges.org.uk/RoadRailBridges.gif is not a great picture, but the nicest one images.google.com came up with was over 3MB. Andrew (np: Radiohead - "Shot by Both Sides") - -- ".... come and find me, I'll be waiting - with a gun and a pack of sandwiches..." - Radiohead, "Talk Show Host" ('Street Spirit', B-side) adw27@cam.ac.uk (academic) | http://www.lexical.org.uk ------------------------------ End of idealcopy-digest V5 #225 *******************************