Which is side one, and which side two, of Power, Corruption and Lies? I thought about making that a Freaky Trigger thread but it would have been a bit too specialized and would not have aided thread congestion. And for that matter why is 'Age of Consent' so called? And what *is* the type that you need to be told to tell you about the birds and the bees? And stuff. I have only just discovered that the Velvets' 'Who Loves The Sun' (shouldn't it have a question mark? If so, it can have the one from my henceforth redundant question) sounds, lyrically, like some kind of model for 'I Don't Believe In The Sun'. This raises the meta-question of Merritt's relation to the Velvets. My feeling is that he shouldn't like them too much, thanks to their amateurish formlessness. I hope someone writes in and says, - !hey, dirtsucker! the velvets wernt formle.s. or amaturish. I don't always agree with my editor, but watching Bacharach last night made me think that his ** very long-standing** argument that songwriters shouldn't sing their own material was, if not 'correct', then at least wise. In a sense I've thought this for a while - have I ever told him? - and this was just further confirmation. All of that is NOT a way of saying that Burt Bacharach is a bad singer who shouldn't be allowed to sing. He's a lot better than lots of other singers. I would LIKE to have 'Burt Bacharach Sings Burt Bacharach'. (In a sense perhaps it would sound like a covers LP.) No, it's just the creativity of distance - the extra level of complexity and play that you introduce by getting somebody else to sing your song - that I think is valuable here. I should have been able to assent to this long ago. I think it was my editor's declaration that 'The Beatles ruined everything' that spoiled it for me. Despite her sometimes dodgy views, I think the gal 'Julie' gives good mail. At least she responded in detail to 'Sugar World', citing paragraphs and stuff. Plus, she's feisty and fights her coin, I mean, her corner. But 1. What did she mean about 'embrace and filter'? These are very different things: virtually antithetical, one might say, in some contexts. 2. Looking at the cover of a magazine doesn't tell you what a band sounds like. (Unless the cover is written by Simon Reynolds.) I don't know what Destiny's Child look or sound like. I don't think they have much of a reputation or profile in my country. We have this silly band 'Sugababes' instead, see. 3. We don't have MTV where I come from. 4. To talk about Salman Rushdie was a nice touch - but have SR's pop-cultural admissions done him much good? I think my editor would disagree. He never liked SR that much in the first place, but what respect he had paled and palled once SR started expounding about very well-known Van Morrison records and the like. 5. Still, I like the near-synasthesia of 'knowledge is golden', green, etc. Julie is the Milly Bloom of ice cream studies. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+