Now then, New Year and all that...

Resolution: get more involved and all that...

OK, have written to my MP asking him where he stands on the referendumn on voting reform coming up in May, and why. And let him know (in case he's interested/cares) what I reckon.

Have also written to the Peak District National Park Authority asking, basically, what they are up to flogging off the family silver, sorry, Roaches Estate.They don't give much away here, though what's obvious is that they speak with a forked tongue the size of the Derwent-Wye confluence:

http://www.peakdistrict.gov.uk/roaches-estate


Result! Now I feel much more involved!

Now, what was the other resoluition? Ah yes: try and get out more. 


And then I got diverted and wrote some stuff about prog rock on a chat site, where many contributors expressed quite understandable revulsion, loathing, etc. Before too long my reponse was far too long for that purpose, but too much fun to delete entirely. Here it is...
 
Percentage Padding Discount for Piss-Poor Prog - a new marketing plan for the download era

Most objections to Prog centre on its pretentiousness, rather than it being rubbish, which seems a little superficial. A more discerning listen would reveal that much of it was, in fact, rubbish. But much was not, and these days when I listen to Prog I try to forget about the alleged pretentiousness. Otherwise I can't get anywhere and enjoy it, which I do now much more widely than I did in its 70's heyday.

Although 'pretentious' was a word bandied about habitually in the '70s, it wasn't the dismissive condemnation it is now - rather it was often perfectly descriptive. So much so as to be superfluous: much of prog was so deliberately theatrical that it hardly made contact with reality at all. For the truly rigorously anti-pretentious rock fan in the mid-nineteen seventies, Steely Dan and Little Feat were pretty much your only port in the Prog storm. I know, I tried to be as anti-pretentious as living in a Barrow suburb would allow, which was plenty, but if you were at a Boy's Grammar School in 1974 and wanted any friends you had to buy in to the Prog deal to some degree or you were walking home with the speccy kids who did their homework on time and sat at the front in class (OK, we all did our homework on time, I admit it). Or the ones that sat right at the back and were into Sabbath and metal, most of which was just too dumb.

There's not much sex and precious litle rhythm in Prog, so you can throw out another set of dimensions along with your pretensiousness-ometer. Look at Prog in this new light and, paradoxically, it benefits from a pretty minimalist aesthetic, potentially free from blues and folk influences, as well as pop (obviously), but allowing poetry - most of it terrible, needless to say. Semetimes the poetry would be quite good and the band would be co-opted into Prog despite actually mostly playing three-minute pop songs  - this happened in the case of Procol Harum for instance. 

A lot Prog was interesting stuff, if flawed. Here's a simple trick though: if you apply just one measure, Percentage Padding, to Prog LP's you can usually discern a direct assessment leading to the best prog albums. 


100% is worst, 0% is best.


Thus...Yes albums max at about 75%, largely mitigated by tunes like Roundabout and And You and I, whereas Genesis LP's score a more respectable 60% largely due to no-padding heavyweight tunes like Firth of Fourth. ELP generally hovered in at 50%, while The Floyd were erratic as hell scoring anything between 10% (eg the brilliant Ummagumma disc 1) to 100% (eg the hopelessly self-indulgent Ummagumma disc 2).

As it happens, this rating scheme correlates pretty well with the quality of the remaining, ie non-padded, music, presumably due to some built-in quality control ethos that stopped things getting too silly too often. 

It has its limitations, granted. Neither Hawkwind nor Van der Graaf Generator lend themselves to assessment by Percentage Padding. Hawkwind realised that their live audience basically would tolerate any amount of pointless repetetive headbanging so long as it was loud enough to make you feel like you were on a space shuttle to Metabelis Three. Any music you can dance to has a sex element, so Hawkwind weren't really prog, but still score a respectable 35% for padding on most of their 70's LPs. Van der Graaf Generator were unique in realising that their audience of male postgrad physics students were interested in chess, not music, let alone sex. If you manage to listen to a whole Van der Graff LP in one go - a task so weightily bereft of enjoyment that it regularly defeats me -  you're well on your way to imagining what it's like to write a PhD thesis. 


And John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra don't count - they are so unmitigatedly turgidly terrible that no-one, repeat no-one, has ever listened to them, not even John McLaughlin.  

Nowadays we allow ourselves to be grateful that songs generally got shorter in the 80s. This is generally accredited to the effects of Punk, but plenty of Prog bands were already trimming their sails well before the Pistols shook the still brown waters of the River Thames and The Clash went international with smart songs that even American kids seemed clever enough to want to imitate. Contemorary ex-prog acts like Yes and Genesis were selling many more, generally terrible, singles than punks were in the 80s. We also allow ourselves to believe that this happened just in time to stop the 78-minute, one-track prog CD ever taking off. But the truth is that the grat ship Prog just drifted off into the twighlight because it ran out of ideas, taking its audience and Procol Harum with it. Mike Oldfield would have you believe otherwise, but what's he ever done in three minutes? Oh God, I remember now.... 

These days the multi-keyboard wizard Brown Bottle, the only truly unashamed beacon-carrier of Old Prog, largely gets by because he knows that it's impossible to be accused of pretentiousness when you're unshaved, drunk, abusive and quite funny. No wait, I mean Rick Wakeman....

But, as I see it, in the current age of diminishing possibilities for a serious career in music, some sort of return to the sonic adventurousness of the Prog era seems like quite a liberating proposition. I'm not sure how Prog can ever happenagain, given the prevailing culture of the 69p download, but the answer may be to pay per minute for your 20 minute Progathon masterpiece with a Percent Padding discount for each album, 

For example, this would mean a 75% discount for most Yes albums . However, for Tales from Topographic Oceans, where padding and pretentiousness levels uncannily converge at exactly 100%, Trades Descriptions implications would dictate a free download. 


Imagine a world where young people, exposed to endless free downloads of the worst kinds of preposterous, pompous and difficult music, pick up proper instruments like oboes, lutes and twin-neck guitars and declare they can do better. 

For any Amazon or i-tunes business planning executives who happen to be reading, I'd be happy to set the 'Padding Percentages' - drop me an email with your business plan...

The 'Two Line Review' lives on!

But gets seriously carried away...

127 Hours (the Danny Boyle film)
(~100 minutes. Confusing isn't it?)

Go see this film, it's about as good a mainstream film about the outdoors as I've seen - involving on every level.

It's especially good cinematographically, with some trademark Danny Boyle split-screen storytelling put to very good use, and the Utah Canyonlands scenery - for my money, the most breathtakingly rugged and impressive wilderness on the planet - is stunningly shot.

Some familiar stylistic devices have been appropriated from obvious and not-so-obvious film sources (I won't go into details - they are pretty obvious and fun to spot) but, being used quite appropriately here, they smack of a well-researched project rather than of plagiarism, and generally add to the film's authenticity.
 
Importantly to 'us lot' it is true to the spirit of the outdoors and is technically accurate. It's also very absorbing - given what you happened to have in your rucksack, you ask yourself what you would do if you found yourself in that situation. Seemed to me like he made the right choices. 

To the 'he should have known better' tribe, I'd say this. In the film (I haven't read the book) the guy was competent, doing what he loved, and got himself into a tricky situation then got himself out of it again. He doesn't blame anyone but himself. This is OK by me. Lord knows I've been down many a canyon and soloed many a mountain V Diff without telling anyone where I was going. It's not that I prefer it that way, it just that 'being sensible' doesn't always happen - especially if you're remotely adventurous, and this is an adventure story. If you want to be judgmentalist about that kind of approach then you're going to have to switch off your 'inner adult' to get the most out of this excellent film.

I'm not sure if it will do much for the sales of canyoning guidebooks, but they say any publicity is good publicity...