Fall News - 31 May 1998

Records

Live To Air In Melbourne seems to be generally available; it's also generally rated as excellent.

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I hope everyone can follow this........

From: Peter Reavy
Subject: Music industry explained

The music industry is a business like any other. Entrepreneurs see that there is a demand and a supply and insert themselves in the middle to make profits. There's no way of actually stopping this from happening with music any more than it can be stopped with baked beans. If we like the beans there's no problem but if we get a real taste for them and want the best beans around, we end up trying out other ways of getting them, and have to use our own labour. That in itself doesn't explain why we find the music industry so annoying. Maybe the annoying part is that the industry keeps saying their baked beans are the best, when we know they aren't. Yet they seem to be in control of nearly all the baked bean information channels. In this they have a pact with the casual bean buyer, who wants to believe them. So that we, who keep alive what baked beans can really be, look like the kind of people who lose a shoe, fall into a hedge, and just lie there, picking through the crisp wrappers and shouting.

Peter

AND IT'LL TAKE MORE THAN YOUR BEANS TO GET ME OUT OF THIS HEDGE: AND JUST FUCKING TRY IT

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To project Peter's fine analogy a bit further, I think Fall product is like the can of Sainsbury's baked beans that had the mouse in it, only we Fall fans have acquired a taste for the mousey beans and will accept no substitute. Everything else just tastes beany! Where's the mouse?

AmC

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Here are some further implications: The Industry (no doubt created by The Machine that is run by The Man) doesn't just ignore our pleas for more mousy beans. It views any production of mouse-beans as a mistake, & does everything it can to prevent it from happening in future. Those who want that mouse flavor are labelled marginal sickos who are commercially irrelevant.

Patrick

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Precisely! The Man acts like he knows what we want: "Oh! You like the mousy beans! Cool! I dig it! I know exactly what you mean!" Then he's like, "If you like those beans, also LOVE these new beans!" Only the new beans are the same as the old beans you don't like. Maybe there's a ham hock or some pork fat in there or they're slightly more spicy this time or something, but not a trace of mouse!

And The Man's doing his best to try to discourage you because there's no money in mousey beans. The mice are hard to work with and the mousey beans don't move well. He and the Machine are just hoping you grow out of that taste, but if you don't, they don't really care. There's lots of folks in the lima bean line waving a dollar.

AmC

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Or he'll make the beans with a different sort of mouse, or a less pungent mouse, and say "hey if you liked THOSE mousey beans, you'll dig these mousey beans! Yeah Wow man groovy, we know what you kids dig we are HIP to the SCENE and its all about love baby" but those mousey beans suck and they are nothing like the REAL mousey beans. The problem is that The Man did not put the mouse in the original mousey beans, and he has no idea how the mouse got in there AND he doesn't understand that it doesn't matter, that to attempt to replicate the mousey beans is worse than not doing it in the first place. He needs to find beans with cat, or moosey beans or beans with a Maccle in em. Then he will understand. john

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::Until you get a defective Man/Machine that thinks it can sell *tons* of mousey beans -- only it just uses discarded mouse bits -- whiskers, tails, feet, heads (only a few heads, though) etc -- and floods the market with cans of what no-one can deny are mousey beans but -- well -- they maybe just aren't quite mousey *enough*...

JC

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From: Patrick Burke
Subject: Lovecraft: _At the Mountains of Madness_

Our book for today is H.P. Lovecraft's _At the Mountains of Madness_. For them that doesn't know, it tells the tale of an ill-fated scientific expedition to Antarctica by a team from Miskatonic University, whose professors & students are always getting themselves into bigtime trouble in Lovecraft stories. This bunch decides to fly from glacier to glacier in open-cockpit type planes (a brilliant move in itself) & unearth "shocking" & "hideous" evidence of prehuman civilization. From abundant stone carvings they piece together the cosmology & history that are common to most of Lovecraft's work. The presentation of the story as a scientific report robs it of a lot of emotional content, but gives sort of a delayed horror effect as you ponder on icky things that are described so briefly.

Lovecraft enjoys taking apart the scientific mindset, & he does this partly by combining the cutting-edge (in a late 1930s sorta style) with the crumbling edge: mixing the "latest" in high-tech polar exploration with Atlantis stories, 9-Unknown-Men type stuff, & some crackpot theories & folklore of his own devising. Funnily enough, he gives a fair amount of attention to plate techtonics, which at the time of writing would probably have fallen squarely within the crackpot science category.

There's plenty of horror-by-numbers stuff going on here: just calling things "hideous", or "horrible", or "beyond words". And the creepy sound that our pals hear is described about 15 million times as "a musical piping over a wide range". Ooooh, I'm scared all over again! ... not. ... Also lots of that classic schlock device where the characters approach a door with KEEP OUT!! written in fresh blood on it, which is clear enough for the audience, but doesn't make the heroes hesitate for even a moment.

For my money, the short story "Dreams in the Witchhouse" is much creepier & more disgusting. It forms a sort of companion piece to ATMOM in that the weird dream images make more sense if you know the ATMOM background. ... Plus the main character lives in a ***flat of angles***!! Oddly, that song seems to be telling a different story from the Lovecraft piece, although both contain refs to "the Black Man". ... Another little piece in the same collection I got "The Report of Mr. Randolph Carter" instantly brings to mind the phrase "He knew the evil of the phone", but again, no other similarity to "Garden" is apparent.

MES-Lovecraft Common Elements: Fascination with architecture, esp. houses; emphasis on *the telling detail*: that little thing that no one else notices, but that gives a hint of an entire unguessed reality (well, in the MES case, it's usually a piercing insight into a character or situation).

Cool quotes from ATMOM:

Best sentence that really says nothing:

To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories and impressions.

Best description of the Fall Group sound by someone who never heard them:

... and then came a sound that upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer air and light of day.

(squawking confused penguins are THE BEST!!)

Some really surprising GaseousAnimalsCon: ... tenuous atmospheric strata peopled only by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls.

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From: Peter Reavy
Subject: Bracewell plugs Fall again

This time, Michael Bracewell has popped up in the exhibition guide for "artranspennine98: an exhibition of international contemporary art". A small book that covers the exhibitions and artists, plus some regional info that wouldn't be out of place in a standard tourist guide. Here's about a third of his contribution which is a piece on Manchester.

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For me, Manchester is a city which seems to exist in a montage of periods, simultaneously: from the futuristic vista of its southern aspect, to the deliquescing industrialism of its northern rim...

Manchester is not a cosy city, and has remained unyielding to the wholesale gentrification and prettifying which has turned many other cities into shrines to pot-pourri, heritage and home-made fudge. Rather, Manchester retains an edge of eeriness and melodrama, with an urban floor which bears the imprint of a working city. Approaching the centre of the city from the north, down the long descent of Cheetham Hill - which Mark E Smith's group The Fall, as Manchester's equivalent of the Velvet Underground, have hymned on their Light User Syndrome LP - you appear to encounter a cliff of high-rise offices which look down on the stillness of blackened-brick engineering warehouses, overlaid with a grid of tracks and sectioned by railway arches. ... My own route home leads through Ancoats - a cluster of 19th-century warehouses which are bounded on one side by the old canal. The street names are poetic, Radium Street being my favourite. Here is the atmosphere of Harry Lime's Vienna, transported to the north-west of England and infiltrated by the echo of rehearsing groups and the midnight queues for Sankeys nightclub. When the legendary mists of Mancunian rain begin to drift through the streets of Ancoats, you can ask yourself the question that the whole city seems to pose: 'Is it 20 years into the future, or 50 years ago?'

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Aengus:

'Carry on Fall'

MES - Kenneth Williams
Steve Hanley - Sid James
Brix - Babs Windsor
Karl Burns - Charles Hawtrey
Tommy Crooks - Jim Dale
Julia Nagle - Joan Sims
Craig Scanlon - Kenneth Connor
Mark Riley - Bernard Bresslaw
Simon Wolstoncroft - Terry Scott
Marcia Scohfield - Hattie Jacques

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