W. and I were impatient this year at All Tomorrow’s Parties. Many of the bands were unimpressive. But we were attracted to the charming whimsy of The Naysayer and the facile humour of Neil Hamburger. ‘He’s like us’, I said; W. agreed. We have always thought of ourselves as lacking wit; we rejoiced in a comic whose comedy was based around rude words. Later W. summed up our tragedy: ‘we’re intelligent enough to recognise genius, but we’re not geniuses.’ And then he noted that the ideas of the thinkers we admire are often simple, or can be stated simply.
‘Have you ever had an idea?’ W. asks me. ‘No. Have you?’ – ‘No.’ We’d like one – and what we’d like, too, is that indefatigability which also marks the thinkers in question: it is a matter of making the same point again and again. The same simple point, which can be reformulated in a number of ways. At some point, we talked about Blanchot. W. reminds me that among the extras on the DVD of Requiem for a Dream, Hugh Selby Jr. recalls he began to write after he came close to death. ‘It’s the same for Blanchot’, W. said, ‘you have to die twice.’ Then we spoke of Heidegger on boredom. ‘You can tell Heidegger was never bored’, one of us said.
Watching the bands, W. and I agreed that a number of criteria could be specified as to what constitutes a good performance. The Naysayer aside, we liked anger – angry men. This is why we admired Sean Garrison and the Five Finger Discount. The band were ragged, half-rehearsed, unlike the precise Spoon whose mediocrity horrified us; ‘we don’t play much’, said the stetsoned guitarist when we spoke to him later. Their music could be described as country-rock, I suppose, but Garrison was a shouter, and this was important. He was a middle aged shouter with paint bespattered jeans. He shouted – this was important to us. So, too, was the fact that his band were tattooed. They looked as though they had just come out of prison. They were muscly and menacing but they played sweet country music.
Slint, for some reason, have incorporated jazz and guitar solos into their sound. This was horrible. We were far from the stage and couldn’t see much apart from David Pajo and Todd Brashear’s head nodding up and down. We liked Todd; we saw him playing Staremaster; he looked amiable and wise.
Festivals are not about bands you know, but bands you don’t. W. and I didn’t like many of the bands, we’ve become impatient. We leave if we’re not immediately impressed. I spoke often of The Naysayer. W. said: ‘you’ve become whimsical.’ I agreed, and pointed out that the band were so charming. There was a song about kittens which was particularly lovely. Later I told Anna Padgett the songwriter, how much I enjoyed her music. S., W.’s girlfriend, said that when Anna smiled all of Anna’s face smiled.
Tequila is an excellent festival drink. It’s important, we learnt last year, to bring plenty of nutritious food if we were to avoid stomach upsets. The Guinness is always off – ‘dirty pipes’, said W., and I agreed.
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