The key to poaching an egg is to keep the water at the correct temperature throughout the cooking process - a light simmer but never too hot. Then the egg, cooked for slightly over a minute and a half, should get the right consistency. I will practice!

adam

Plastic Ono Band Redux

Our dear John has lost something and needs to spend an album screaming in order to find out - the premise of his first post-Beatles album. What's he lost? Paul McCartney (and his insipid talent for cuteness). George Harrison (and his parse-able guitar parts). Cynthia Lennon (and any remaining semblance of normalcy). What's he found? Yoko Ono. Rage.

The rage is important. This is an album in which John gets naked, gets rid of the multi part harmonies, the multi-part songs and the intricate arrangements of the late Beatles albums. Track one is telling - There are three instruments on it (four if you count the gong at the start). But where the tunes are stripped of filigree they are still tuneful, still solid where Paul was fluffy, serious where Ringo was playful, real where George was trippy.

Plastic Ono band is an album in which John stops hiding behind his wit (and McCartney's wit) and his irrepressible talent and writes an album with Songs about Things. The result? We like John less now that we know him. But we love him more because he bothered.

Also of merit : the two bonus tracks in the remastered edition. 'Power to the People' - meh, socialist claptrap by a well meaning talent. 'Do the Oz' - the creepiest invitation to dance I've ever heard. And is that Yoko howling in the background?

adam

Plastic Ono Band

I bought 5 albums while on R&R in Australia. Let's check them out:

1. Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon

2. Imagine - John Lennon

3. Greatest Hits - Neil Young

4. Greatest Hits - Joni Mitchell

5. Nevermind - Nirvana

I've only had the time for 1. and 2., but 3-5 will come soon enough.

Plastic Ono Band is as good as everyone seems to say it is. Good case for John Lennon as the father of punk rock, if you ask me. It's scary that he doesn't need motherloads of distortion or screechy feedback noises to be scarily primal about music.

adam

Journal Entries : Australia

20th Oct

Last night was freezing. The sleeping bag was ok - but my colleagues are worried as I am how we'll survive in the field. We manage in our fashion, I think. Cigarettes and sheer bull-headedness. Am Looking forward to going home - but the training stretches out like a desolate track ahead of me with no end in sight. I guess I'll have to wait.

So far things have been pretty relaxed which is great for settling in - I've never lived in a place like this before. The roof of my tent is letting through ominous spots of sunlight - that won't be good when it rains.

Tonight's the 8km 'prep' march. The first of many sufferings. I'm as ready as I've ever been to eat shit but good intentions never make it into the field. By tonight I'll be collapsed somewhere wishing I'd had the good sense to report sick.

So yeah - hope is on the horizon. Until tonight at least I can stay strong, and then it's up to my body and the weather god.

25th Oct

Came back from the first mission last night. I was right about the weather - once you stop moving it's freezing. Oh well. I managed not to cock anything up for once.

I also finished Haruki Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood' while I was at Sam Hill with the planning team. I think it's a great story - a love story, but it has all the quiet subtlety a love story deserves. I think the best part is at the end where Reiko and Toru hold an impromptu funeral by getting drunk and playing every Beatles song they know. I want that done when I die.

Surprisingly, my spirits are pretty up now, despite living in this hole of a camp. I'm thriving on little happinesses, cool air at night, a hot bath, a good book and the Beatles.

Sweet Loretta Martin, thought she was a woman, but she was another man. Eat your heart out, Lou Reed! I guess now we just wait for the end. The final mission will suck but we're expecting it.

When I get back I'll buy a good bottle of whisky and drink it with my friends and sing some songs. Nobody else here appreciates the 60s like I do. Nobody back there does, but at least they play along.

Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner, but he knew it couldn't last.

Get back

Get back

Get back to where you once belonged!

Rock and roll.

26th Oct

There was an attack of boredom in the morning. I had breakfast, brushed my teeth, had two smokes and decided it wasn't working. I wish I had a guitar here. Or, for that matter, someone to talk to about anything other than cars, boobs and cigarettes.

I decided to tackle the spell of ennui with a calculated dose of music.

Here's my playlist of 4 songs:

1. Desafinado - Ana Caram

2. Free City Rhymes - Sonic Youth

3. Move - Miles Davis

4. Help! - The Beatles

1. didn't quite work. Bossa doesn't do it for me all the time.

2. Did. It's the most beautiful musical construction ever created under the banner of Rock. But SY always left a strange aftertaste, as if in reaching for the cosmic their feet had left the ground.

3. From 'Birth of the Cool'. Skin-tight arrangements, solos tumbling through the changes perfect in pitch and poise. There can be no formal complaints - but in my distracted state I couldn't summon the concentration.

4. 60s rock and roll in the middle of a dusty army camp reminded me of FMJ. And if anything is the antidote to SY's 90s cosmic freakout, it's the earthy simplicity of a Beatles song.

I feel much better. Gonna have a smoke, then see what's up.

27th Oct

There's been a stunning array of cock-ups. I'm almost beyond caring. It's so pathetic that I can barely bring myself to think about it. I'm just waiting for the end.

That was from the morning. I was too pissed for words - the men really push me over the edge some days.

Every day's pretty much the same otherwise - eating, sleeping, training, smoking. The routine grates but it has its own advantages, like enough time to write this entry. I still miss my guitar, but I'm dealing with it. My bunk mates are gambling or blackjack but I've declined to play - I suspect that makes me unforgivably antisocial but oh well.

I listen to music when the urge strikes me. It's not always easy to enjoy in this dusty little hole, but it's a welcome relief.

Speaking of relief, there was a drizzle last night - first rain in a week. I seriously thought of getting out in it and bathing - but it didn't get heavy enough. The clouds are filling up the sky though - there may be hope yet. As long as it doesn't rain while I'm on exercise! Nothing like being miserable -and- wet.

In all honesty, this is a beautiful country. The bare trees, the lone kangaroos, the dust, the endless expanse of dried foliage. It's austere in a way no rainforest is. And at night it's so quiet! I could never find a place like that in Singapore.

It's just a pity I have to do all this abominable army stuff here.

Whoops. Spoke to soon - there's a storm coming.

7th Nov

The heat is murderous at 1 o'clock. I'm writing this just to keep things off my mind. Let the night come I say! I am now officially tired of this country, trees and all, stars and sunsets and all, and the whole of Oz can jolly well fuck off and let me go home to my air conditioning.

Sinatra is doing his part to take my mind off the crippling heat rash and the sand. Good ol' Blue Eyes. I've meanwhile written a few more songs of dubious import (I don't know if I'll ever get good at it) and I hope to put them to music when I get back. Meanwhile (I've said this twice now) the sound of trumpets and piano is edifying. It occurs to me that music nowadays may require less leftist hippiedom (and I mean as an approach, not as a politic) and more rightist formalism. It is becoming dangerously neither here nor there.

I'm afraid no amount of 'inspiration' will excuse terrible lyrics and noodly melodies. Even those icons of hippiedom, the Beatles, wrote with a terrifying mastery of the fundamentals, passed off as simple good-naturedness.

Choon Ping was right. Academic rigour is needed. And not Wynton Marsalis and gang's backward-facing history worship. I mean genuine intellectual commitment, and not just warm fuzzy feelings, however the two may be related.

I am doing my best to live up to this standard but like in any art rules without that special confluence of mental states known as inspiration produces no results. I will try harder.

Frustrating that my entries always end up about music. I swear I have other interests! Aloy has taken my book now though, so I am temporarily deprived of them. I'll write another song, here:

Sing a song to let me know

you'll never go anywhere

or do anything to make me sad

and live in this house of bricks and clay

Sing a song to let me know

that you won't die to-morrow

or the day after, or the rest of my life

and you'll never fly away

Sing a song to show me

that you'll never leave the ground

that you'll fold your wings around me

and never spread them wide

Sing a song while you hold me

So I know that you are there

So I know that I'm not tying you

but you've chosen not to fly

-adam