Assignment and 'Dig'

The weather has been mixed of late, to say the least - we've recently had hailstorms. In May! - but this morning was perfect for a pre-work walk with the Minx, taking in Peel Park and the Meadow. (My photo is taken from one of the bridges, looking back towards the Crescent.)

Today was also the day for handing in our assignments for the first part of the course at SEM. I finished mine at the weekend and here's an excerpt from the introduction to my notes:

The first step in preparing for the assignment was to select a genre. I grew up in a simpler age, when genres of music were easy to grasp – ska, raggae, rock, glam, prog, punk, new romantic – and I never really grasped the many sub-genres associated with what I tend to think of as ‘dance’. 

Whilst I have heard of techno, drum and base, house, grime and so on, I’ve never really known what distinguishes them, and I must confess that I had never heard of ‘trap’ until my first session at SEM (unless you count the von Trapps, of course).

In the end it seemed easier to create my own genre of ‘poetry over electronic music’ – or ‘PoEM’ – and retrospectively populate it. So I would start with the beat poets of the Sixties and touch down briefly in the early eighties for Angie Bowie’s performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test with Mick Karn, but alight with greater confidence on Laurie Anderson’s oeuvre, particularly her album ‘Bright Red’, which was produced by Brian Eno.

To be honest, PoEM is a genre fraught with the possibility of absolute buttock-clenching disaster and the only other album that I enjoy from this parlous field is Hannah Peel and Will Burns’ 2019 album, ‘Chalk Hill Blue’.

You can hear the final piece here.

College this afternoon was the start of the second part of the course and that involved several hours of messing with the oscillator modules of analogue synthesisers. It was fascinating and I couldn't have been happier!

After college I walked over to The Deaf Institute to meet the Minx and Hannah for a showing of the film Dig, which is very well summed up by Wikipedia thus:

Dig! is a 2003 American documentary film about the collision of art and commerce through the eyes of The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, focusing on the developing careers and the love-hate relationship of the bands' respective frontmen Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Anton Newcombe.

It was shot over seven years and compiled from over 2,500 hours of footage. It won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. and was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art for their permanent collection.


Well, I'm sad to report that apart from ourselves, there was only one other person there (although he was later joined by a friend) but the film was marvellous. I have a copy at home but I haven't watched it for years but Hannah, who loves The Dandy Warhols, had never seen it. The three of us spent pretty much the entire film either laughing or looking at one another in disbelief. Honestly, seek it out, regardless of whether you like the Dandies or not. (My Extra is a shot of  Anton Newcombe.)

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Reading: 'Touching The Void' by Joe Simpson