I heard about this tonight:

An “anonymous British philanthropist” bought what we suppose is Mikhail Gorbachev’s “debut album”, Songs for Raisa, in London this week, bidding $164,940 (about £100,000) at an auction to benefit the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. Nearly 350 luminaries were present at the private event, including Gordon Bown’s wife, Sarah, London mayor Boris Johnson, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, actor Vanessa Redgrave and Russian ambassador Yuri Fedotov, according to the newspaper Pravda.

Gorbachev was there too, and he brought his singing voice. The former Soviet leader warbled a song called Old Letters. “The performance … was greeted with delight and a storm of applause,” said Pavel Palazhchenko, chairman of the Foundation’s press service. You can judge for yourself by listening to Old Letters.

Like the rest of the tracks on Songs for Raisa, Old Letters is an old Russian romantic ballad. Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, died 10 years ago. The foundation established in her name is dedicated to fighting childhood cancer.

“The disc includes seven of Raisa’s favorite romantic songs,” Gorbachev explained in a press conference. “I sang them myself, with Andrei Makarevich playing the background music.” Makarevich is one of Russia’s biggest rock stars, frontman of the band Mashina Vremeni.

Though only one copy of the album is said to exist, Russian fans are counting on the buyer’s “musical” philanthropy – and that the album will be posted to filesharing networks forthwith.

I don’t know why, but I think this is kind’ve cool. It has that air of being one of those strange collectables that will feature in stories, years from now, as odd treasures that burnt out detectives are hired to find, without truly knowing the significance of them.

Or, perhaps, that’s just me.

Link.

I spent a chunk of today listening to old NWA because of a fight in the science fiction community (another one, I hear you say).

There’s really not a whole lot to say about the debate, except, of course, that I thought the Carl Brandon Petition a bit silly, if for nothing that, yes, of course if you want to have a sane and rational conversation with someone you don’t call them the first slur that comes to your mind; secondly, it’s a bit of censorship; and thirdly, what’s going to happen when people ignore it? It’d be cool if some sort of internet racial slur police van showed up at your door, kicked it in, took your keyboard and started hitting you round the head while saying, “You signed the petition! This is what happens when you sign the petition and don’t abide by it! DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND THE PETITION NOW COCKSUCKER!”

I mean, that’d be cool, but a touch unrealistic.

However!

What has come out of this is the shocking number of people who didn’t know who NWA were, a band that even I, young, white and in the Western suburbs of Sydney, listened too for my angry, psuedo social rebellion at a young age. So, in the aim to educate you all, I present ‘Fuck Da Police’:

Just strolling round the net before heading off to teach, and I came across this on the Coolness Index:

It may be too hard to tell whether an artist is cool, but we have all sorts of ways to tell that an artist is definitely not cool. For instance, if lots of listeners really don’t want people to know that they are listening to a particular artist, then that artist is probably not too cool. Luckily, there’s an interesting source for just this kind of data. Recently, the researchers at Last.fm published a list of the ‘most unwanted scrobbles‘. This is a list of tracks that were most frequently deleted by the Last.fm community from their scrobbles in the last month. These are the tracks that Last.fm listeners didn’t want people to know that the listened to. Here’s the first page of the most unwanted scrobbles:

1. Lady GaGa – Poker Face
2. Britney Spears – Womanizer
3. Katy Perry – I Kissed a Girl
4. Lady GaGa – Just Dance
5. Britney Spears – Circus
6. Britney Spears – Piece of Me
7. Rihanna – Disturbia
8. Paramore – Misery Business
9. Lady GaGa – Paparazzi
10. Lady GaGa – LoveGame

Kudos to Last.fm for publishing this data. It’s a great source for the uncool. Collecting all the artists from the pages we can build a list of artists that have frequently had their scrobbles deleted:

Lady GaGa
Britney Spears
Katy Perry
Rihanna
Paramore
Coldplay
Taylor Swift
Beyoncé
Avril Lavigne
Marc Seales, composer. New Stories. Ernie Watts, saxophone
Alexander Rybak
Black Eyed Peas
Kings of Leon
Muse
My Chemical Romance
Linkin Park
Korn
Miley Cyrus
Jason Mraz
Metro Station
Leona Lewis
Green Day
Evanescence
Amy Whinehouse
Oasis
Nelly Furtado

This list rings true as set of ‘uncool’ artists (with the exception Marc Seales, who happens to have a piece of music, called ‘Highway Blues’, that can be found in most ‘Sample Music’ folders on most Windows XP computers, and is likely frequently scrobbled because of this). Ideally this list should be normalized for popularity – naturally artists that have more listeners will be scrobbled more and consequently be deleted more too. but there’s not enough data in this list to normalize properly so we’ll make do with an unnormalize list. I find it interesting how many female acts are on the list. Is it not cool to listen to female artists?

Above is the cover of Justine Larbalestier’s new novel, Liar, which features a black protagonist. You’ll note that the girl on the cover is white, which has been done, in part because the publisher has had a lot of success with similar ‘face’ books, and in part because of the perception that black people do not sell.

Their perception: that publishers think books won’t sell as well with blacks on the front. “I kept wondering if the publisher thinks books only sell if they’ve got white people on the cover. It bothered me,” wrote Dianne Salerni, author of the upcoming novel We Hear the Dead, in an Amazon.com review.

Even Larbalestier is upset. “I love my publisher,” she said. “[But] I never wanted this cover. I made it clear I didn’t want a white girl’s face. Having this cover on the front is undermining the book that I wrote.”

And yet, some readers—and Liar’s editor—are defending the cover, noting that Micah, the unreliable narrator, could have fibbed about her own appearance. “The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar,” said Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers, who worked on Liar. “Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?”

Unlike Larbalestier’s light and upbeat How to Ditch Your Fairy, which came out last year, Liar is a psychological thriller, with a mentally unstable main character who may (or may not) have committed multiple murders. Bloomsbury is printing 100,000 copies.

The publisher believes that there’s a silver lining to the firestorm. “I do think it’s going to raise awareness of race in teen literature to new levels,” said Cecka. “Clearly, our striving for ambiguity with this cover, and for it to be interpreted as a ‘lie’ itself didn’t work for everyone. But again, if this jacket proves a catalyst for a bigger discussion about how the industry is dealing with its books on race, that’s a very large good to come of this current whirlwind.”

Well, isn’t it interesting to see this cover being spun as a positive thing. A lot of good isn’t going to come from this discussion, unless it is to force the publisher to change it. Otherwise, what is more likely to happen is that a lot of people won’t buy Larbalestier’s new novel because of the racism that has given birth to the white girl face staring at them.

Yes, I said racism.

Because racism has many forms, and this is one of them.

Turns out that the fuse I replaced yesterday has a larger issue, much like the video card last week. With a sigh, I called electricians today.

I don’t know if I’m just lucky, or if the pool of electricians with a hint of human kindness in their bones is shrinking, but if it wasn’t the people who wanted my name and full address before they’d even asked what my issue was (you know, like those people who rock up your door to sell you a phone company you’ve never heard of before) or the people who said the entire place I’m living in is an illegal death trap of old wiring, then it was the ones that sounded like they knew less about wiring that I do (no easy trick).

I found one, though. He may arrive tomorrow and try to murder me with an axe, or charge me millions of dollars for a simple wire he cut from a long line of wire, but god dammit, I will have the ability to turn my bathroom light and washing machine on by the end of the week.

Or, you know, I’ll begin writing with my faeces.

Last week, the video card on my computer shat itself out. A cripple came and replaced it, according to the warranty.

A few days later, the dryer stopped working. In the morning, I discovered the lights and the telephone had also done so, which meant a blown fuse. I fixed it, only to have it blow again, and so I had to replace it–which was an annoying, since not a lot of people carry those, or so I soon found out.

On Sunday, at a set of lights, I heard a guy call out.

I turned, gazed at the giant silver side of an SUV, then lifted my gaze to the window, where a guy in his late forties, the wires of his dental work showing as he spoke. “Mate, do you know that you don’t have one brake light on your car?”

“Really?”

“Mate, if someone runs up the back of you, you’ll know why.”

I don’t usually do this, but is there anyone out there with a good understanding–or at least who has read all–of Octavia Butler’s work who’d like to act as a reader for me?

Mostly, I don’t ask for test readers, because it’s not a concern, but I’ve written a piece in which one of the underlying aims is to form a conversation of Butler’s body of work. It does this by forming its narrative from the collected work, themes, and concerns that Butler expressed within her novels–think of it as fictocriticism, if you’re so inclined. I’m not quite sure it works that way, mind you, since I’ve slanted to be a piece of fiction, and to function as both a story and an exploration of her work. The story itself is sitting at ninety percent complete–one more run through to tidy up things, sharpen prose, and make connective tissue a little stronger here and there, as its required. It runs roughly at eighteen thousand words.

It’s something different for me, and I’m not sure if it has come out right, wrong, or something entirely different, so if you’re familiar with the work, and have a bit of time to spare, I’d be grateful. Drop me a note at benpeek at livejournal dot com, and I’ll send you a file.

One of the students today told me about Eunoia, by Christian Bok.

Below is the description from Amazon:

“Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib? Isn’t it chic?” Besides being glib and chic, Bok’s new book strikes one with the force of being the most incredible literary curio: each of its chapters is allowed to use only one vowel outgunning even Georges Perec’s famed La Disparition, which simply omits the letter “e.” Apparently seven years in the making, Eunoia, the shortest word in the English language to employ all the vowels (it means “beautiful thinking”), also employs other, more mundane constraints on paragraph length (all are 12 lines long) and what must be mentioned (the act of writing, nautical travel, energetic eating). This hyper-mechanization of the writer’s craft sets the stage for a welter of eccentric, yet universally appealing, tours-de-force, such as Chapter E’s retelling of the Illiad from the viewpoint of Helen: “Whenever Helen seeks these perverse excesses, her regretted deeds depress her; hence, Helen beseeches Ceres (the blessed Demeter): `let sweet Lethe bless me, lest these recent events be rememberd’ then the empress feeds herself fermented hempseed, her preferred nepenthe.” In the “u” chapter, “Dutch smut churns up blushful succubus lusts,” and Ubu and Lulu burp, hump and bump for five delirious pages, exhausting, in the meantime, the entire range of English words that only contain the vowel. Eunoia’s reductorial neurosis as euphonically zestful contrivance turns formidable stunts to imp’s play. That is, this terrific book makes sense on its own terms. (Nov.)Forecast: Bok’s debut Crystallography was well reviewed in Canada (Bok lives and works in Toronto, whence Coach House publishes), and he has invented languages for two Gene Roddenberry TV series, Earth: Final Conflict and Amazon. This book will have to be sought out, but it is beautifully produced, and browsers will be hooked.

And here’s a couple of samples from the publisher:

Hassan Abd al-Hassad, an Agha Khan, basks at an ashram - a Taj Mahal that has grand parks and grass lawns, all as vast as parklands at Alhambra and Valhalla. Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal - a gala ball that has what pagan charm small galas lack. Hassan claps, and (tah-dah) an Arab lass at a swank spa can draw a man’s bath and wash a man’s back, as Arab lads fawn and hang, athwart an altar, amaranth garlands as fragrant as attar - a balm that calms all angst. A dwarf can flap a palm branch that fans a fat maharajah. A naphtha lamp can cast a calm warmth.

Fuck me, but that sounds cool.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I seem to be watching Master Chef.  At least, the end of it.

Well, I lie, I do know how it happened. The final student on a Monday has her lesson in a living room, and her parents sit behind her, watching the TV. It’s a small town house that belongs to the grandmother, since the family lives on the other side of Sydney, and it’s out of my general area; so the girl goes to her grandmother’s for the lesson, and I tune out the TV and teach things. Still, in the corner of my eye I see the show travel past, and I’ve always liked the way food can look (I have a not so secret admiration for good cooking, possibly because I don’t seem to have any ability at it beyond a basic cook this like this). When the video card died earlier this week, I was left with a bit of spare time on my hands, especially since it’s school holidays, and I teach a little less. Combine the two, and here I am, making a post about Master Chef.

Mostly, I have a dislike for reality TV. The only show I ever watched with regularity was Rock Star: Ageing Rockers Suck Your Youth to Make a New Band, and even then I only watched the elimination episode. I was partly aided by that because of a message board that I’d hang round on at the time, and where we’d shoot the breeze making fun at everyone (or talking about some of the people that were okay, and where their non-famous bands were located). I don’t have this this time, and the show is almost over, which is a bit of a shame, because I reckon I could’ve addicted some folk to it.

Today, I went and got a new driver’s license and, when I did, I left with a card in which I looked like a thug. Five years ago, the same thing happened. At least bouncers treat me well.

On Thursday and Friday I am running a workshop again, so likely it will be quiet, though it has been quiet around here a little, mostly because I’ve been spending my spare time trying to get books into the hands of people, trying to write, trying to teach, and trying to deal with various personal issues and all that comes and goes with that. No one particularly wants to read blog posts about that kind of stuff. Fuck it, man, I don’t particularly wish to be living half of it.

But, what you going to do?

The one thing I have been watching a little out of the corner of my eye is the debate over Triple J’s hottest 100 of all time and it’s lack of female representation. Even though the debate strikes my personal pet hate, which is that it’s about the numbers, and not the actual artists (a road we’ve been down before where I’ve tried to express that just having faceless women to fill up a number quota so that you have equality doesn’t actually make for equality)… even though it does that, I wonder if it’s even worth having the fight over this particular list. Since it was a popular vote, a lot of other factors make or break the debate, and without knowing the gender split of the voters, the age groups, the occupations and so forth, there’s not a lot that can be drawn from it except that, hey, there weren’t many women there. And sure, excellent female musicians were ignored–no theredsunband, no Patti Smith, no Linda Perry, no Ani DiFranco, no Beth Orton, Portishead, Skunk Anansie, no Bettye Lavette, and so on and so forth–but without that extra information, what is it that can actually be said?

So, I dunno–it strikes me that there are better places to take the fight for the representation of women: festival line ups, promotion of female vs male artists, and so on and so forth. I suppose you can argue that all those things feed into popular vote lists, which is a valid point, but I just keep finding myself saying, “Well, who were the voters, and how’d they all vote? Was it that there was no women? Was the spread of female artists actually more diverse, and the male artists just more concentrated? Was it that there were no female artists in rural voters? Were all the voters in Queensland? Did no one in Sydney actually vote?”

Questions, questions.