(no subject)

Occasionally someone will mention to me that Germans appreciate board games much more than Americans do, which from my position of ignorance does seem to be true. The French respect comic books more than we do, the Japanese consider video games important, the British seem to have made interesting pop music part of the mainsteam longer than we have.

Is there some popular medium that Americans take more seriously than the rest of the world does, and I just don't see it because I live here?

I'm not saying that French comics are all great; if anything, having a wider mainstream in a particular medium probably means a higher percentage of total garbage, but that's the price you pay for having more great stuff, in absolute terms, out there to be found.

Maybe movies? An American with a favorite video game designer is probably a geek, or at least a member of the hardcore gaming subculture. An American who knows their favorite director is Quentin Tarantino, or even Woody Allen, is not necessarily geeky at all.

[mp3] Yo ho ho.

Colin Newman - "The Grace You Know" (mp3)

After Wire went on hiatus in 1980, Colin Newman's first few solo albums sounded like reworked Wire songs, in many cases because they were. This is from around the end of that period, though it didn't appear until pressed into service as a bonus track on a CD reissue in 1988.

Even though the next musical break, when it came, was definitive (he stopped recording for a few years and then reappeared with an entire chamber orchestra backing him), the end of that early period did find Newman developing his own distinctive oddness. Aside from the line "I speak when spoken to", I have trouble imagining Wire playing this. The covert menace that fueled so much of Wire's music has gone even further underground, to the point where you can't tell whether it's whimsical or creepy. Since ambiguity enhances both whimsy and creepiness, this is a pretty good deal.