MCMLXXXVIII

May I begin by saying that, in 2017, USA Today said that a Realtor.com study had about a third of respondents state that they would think about an opportunity to live in a spooky house.  Numerous film and writing have investigated the possibility, and I know a particular case of music investigating the hereafter.  That’s what this post is about, a song about living with a ghost.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/10/25/how-many-people-believe-ghosts-dead-spirits/794215001/

By the way, from time to time, I work for a cemetery, called Maple Lawn Cemetery  http://www.maplelawncemetery.org/24701.html  I’ve been doing it since 2011, ten years.  We care for the grounds of the cemetery, handled inquiries, and maintain a Facebook page for the business.

Maple Lawn Cemetery

It’s not in isolation–on WordPress, author Jim Adams has come up with good blogging prompts, for October.  His style is daily blogging that’s in good fun and shows a good aptitude for writing and a healthy interest in music.

https://jimadamsauthordotcom.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/dress-up-day/#respond

For October 25, 2020, Jim’s prompts include the word, “ghost.”

I’m discussing today, “There’s a Ghost in My House,” a Fall song, a hit for the underground Manchester band.  The Fall recorded a version of a 1967 northern soul song, which is a style of UK dance music.  The northern soul was a variation on the style of the day, in U.S. clubs.

Northern soul

With “There’s a Ghost in my House,” The Fall’s songwriter, Mark E. Smith, took the notoriety of The Fall’s noisy stage act far and wide.  The Fall received some critical acclaim, despite their strange sound, and despite a large number of personnel who were members of the band over the years.

The member who was a constant was singer Mark E. Smith.  “There’s a Ghost in My House” got a second life when The Fall did it for their album called Domesday Pay-Off.

I’m not sure Mark E. Smith took the northern soul scene all that seriously because he didn’t take rock music real serious, but he did work on the band a great deal, putting out a lot of records over the years, with many different directions evident.  Smith drew the name The Fall from an existential novel, by Albert Camus, nothing to do with autumn time, in case that’s a point of confusion.

I assume “There’s a Ghost in My House” was The Fall’s choice to more readily relate to American music.

Brix Smith

“There’s a Ghost in My House” is not characteristic of The Fall’s music, nor did the band, with any line-up, want to play it much.  I bet that The Fall wanted radio and club play by DJs of the day.  The decision created a popularity for The Fall and took them in the direction of pop.

Their earlier record albums, however, showcased few pop elements.

Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, of the famed Motown Records label, wrote, “There’s a Ghost in My House,” together with R. Dean Taylor.  Motown Records had originated in Detroit and moved to NYC.

Without any commercial success, a music single, however ingenious, remains a failure.  However, it speaks to the artist’s intentions, and there are dozens of Fall albums, going back to the beginning of the nineteen-eighties.  Smith’s singing has the odd characteristic of extra syllables he added at the end of words he sang, no joke.

Mark E. Smith’s lyrics could be described as semi-nonsensical.  As an artist, Smith had a lot of power because he had so many ideas by which to explore a unique approach to rock music, and by an apparent willingness to change about.  By that I mean Mark E. Smith and his band always remained The Fall, but tackled different experiments, of noise-making, for their music.

I’ve read Camus, the writer whose novel The Fall inspired the name of Smith’s band, but I don’t know that Camus was an influence on Mark E. Smith’s music.  H. P. Lovecraft, according to Wikipedia, is one such influence, Lovecraft the sci-fi author who died in 1937, leaving a pantheon of stories behind about monster gods ruling Earth.  The difference between Camus and Lovecraft is night and day, Camus thinking very much about man’s solitude in this lifetime, Lovecraft exploring what came before and themes of despair in the face of utter monstrosity.

Despite the decline of The Fall in the late nineties, Smith found a resurgence for The Fall in the last decade of his life.  Smith died when he was sixty, in 2018.

Mark E. Smith

He had remained interested in experimenting with rock music and had a great career throughout his time in The Fall.  Some of his remarks about other rock musicians were harsh in tone, despite his contemporaries’ respect for his music.  A 2011 article in the New Yorker recalled that, despite Sonic Youth having played covers of Fall songs on BBC radio, Smith only returned the favor by declaring that the BBC should revoke Sonic Youth’s “rock license.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/14/plug-and-play

I hope the trying circumstances of the year to date have not been overwhelming for you.

You’re welcome to like this post, to follow the blog, or to leave a comment.

There’s a Ghost in My House

There’s a ghost in my house

The ghost of your memory

The ghost of the love that was took from me

Our love used to be

Only shadows in the past I see

Times can’t seem to’ve erased

The vision of your smiling face

Dead flowers I sent thee

I can’t get over ye

There’s a ghost in my house

I can’t hide (ghost in my house)

For the ghost of your love is inside (ghost in my house)

Keeps on haunting me (ghost in my house)

Just keeps on becalling me (ghost in my house)

Down in my tea cup

I see your face looking up

Sitting in my easy chair

I feel your fingers running through my hair

Though we’re far apart

Your spectre’s in my heart

There’s a ghost in my house

I can’t hide (ghost in my house)

For the ghost of your love is inside (ghost in my house)

Keeps on haunting me (ghost in my house)

Still just a part of me (ghost in my house)

By the way I hang my head

You can see I’m afraid

Thought my heart knows you’re gone

My mind keeps rolling on

There’s a ghost in my house

I can’t hide

In my house I am helpless

practice superstitious

I hear footsteps on the stairs

I know there’s no-one there

Keeps on haunting me

Keeps on haunting me

There’s a ghost in my house

A ghost of your memory

A ghost of the love that was took from me

Ghost in my house…

MCMLXXXIX

I liked to read when I was a young kid.

In the early 2000s, the Internet, a frontier, the first blog I wrote was on MySpace. A girl I’d met in school said it was a brilliant site. It was a real long time ago.

These days, all these years later, I was looking at the post-https://jimadamsauthordotcom.wordpress.com/2020/10/03/no-rules/ -when I got an idea. Jim suggested that fans teach specific insights into the songs they enjoyed.

For the eleventh of October, Jim suggested a few prompts, such as the word Hold, which reminded me of Hold On, on the Lou Reed album “New York,” a good album. The idea of the prompt is to identify a song with a specific word in the title, or the lyrics.

The late Lou Reed was a singer and guitarist whose album “The Velvet Underground & Nico” made a name for himself. Over twenty years later, the song Hold On, on the record New York, was more of Reed’s art-rock, ostensibly intellectually-minded rock music, if you consult a definition of art-rock. Art rock features elements of a classical style, as in, with Hold On, the stand-up bass instrumentation by Rob Wasserman, who played the bass parts throughout the album.

1989

Now Rhino has presented three entire records to expand upon the original album. They’ve presented the same songs as on the 1989 album, now also in live recordings of the songs, and also alternate versions characteristically called rough mixes. The new edition further includes a DVD edition of the concert film for the New York record.

The song Hold On speaks, it’s clear, to life in New York City. The lyrics seem to recall news stories about the city, as in, for example, the first verse of the song recalling the twentieth of December 1986. That’s when a racially charged beating by the police, of two African-Americans, in Howard Beach, contributed to tensions throughout the city.

I think Reed was guardedly optimistic that the problem of racism in NYC would change, as black people continued to be less compromised by race and social class.

I also think Reed could have been thinking of the impact Warhol made on the art world, with lyrics for Hold On like, “Something’s happening here.” I think beyond singing about the flavour of life in the city, and it’s a powerful song, there’s a theme how Warhol’s art had reverberated mightily, so the idea that something’s “happening,” a word tied to Reed’s shows with the Velvet Underground, and the dynamic of the art-rock he wrote while managed by Warhol must speak to that, I take it. A “happening” was the style of Velvet Underground shows under Warhol’s direction, including projections of Warhol’s films, strange light, and the loud noise of the band.

Photo by Dmitri Popov from StockSnap

There is evident power in Reed’s voice, in the song. The Tompkins Square Park revolt happened on August 6–7, 1988, the year before, in Tompkins Square Park, situated in the East Village and Alphabet City neighbourhoods of Manhattan.

The Big Apple

I think, without art, people don’t have the same legacy they have had, ever since cavemen drew pictures. I also think the creative components of social media draw in many artistic people. Look, here are the lyrics to Hold On.

Thanks to Jim Adams for the prompt “Hold.” He does not agree with my point of view, but I see he has a good command of writing prompts.

Hold On

There’s blacks with knives and whites with clubs
Fighting in Howard Beach
There’s no such thing as human rights
When you walk the N.Y.streets

A cop was shot in the head by a 10 years old kid
Named Buddah in Central Park last week
The fathers and daughters are lined up by the coffins
By the Statue of Bigotry, hey

You better hold on
Something’s happening here
You better hold on
Well, I meet you in Tompkins Square

The dopers sent a message to the cops last weekend
They shot him in the car where he sat
And Eleanor Bumpers and Michael Stewart
Must have appreciated that

There’s a rampaging rage rising up like a plague
Of bloody vials washing up on the beach
It’ll take more than the Angels or Iron Mike Tyson
To heal this bloody breach, hey, hey

You better hold on
Something’s happening here
You better hold on
I’m gonna meet you in Tompkins Square

A junkie ran down a lady a pregnant dancer
She’ll never dance but the baby was saved
He shot up some China White and nodded out at the wheel
And he doesn’t remember a thing
They shot that old lady ’cause they thought she was a witness to
A crime she didn’t even see
Whose home is the home of the brave
By the Statue of Bigotry, hey

You better hold on
Something’s happening here
You better hold on
Meet you in Tompkins Square

You got a black .38 and a gravity knife
You still have to ride the train
There’s the smelly essence of N.Y. down there
But you ain’t no Bernard Goetz, ah
There’s no Mafia lawyer to fight in your corner
For that 15 minutes of fame
The have and the have nots are bleeding in the tub
That’s New York’s future not mine, oh

You better hold on
Something’s happening here
You better hold on
You better, something’s happening here
Hold on, ooohhh, babe

Hold On

What the World Would Be Like If Fringe Opinions Didn’t Exist

These days papers like the Washington Post say things like how confusing deepfakes are. As Twitter became X, what was a notable social media turf suddenly was revealed to be populated by bots as much as people, speaking generally, and it felt very much more, at least in my case, to be of a fringe opinion, not the same user I was. Like a Phish concert but with more grievance, this is what it’s like at a Trump rally

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/23/1240154160/trump-rally-2024-election

Trump administration appeals yet another TikTok ruling —

The issue made of TikTok‘s conduct is that TikTok is a doorway for China to collect unwarranted data on TikTok users.

The perspective on the deal moving TikTok from China to the U.S. was rounded out by someordinarygamers, who did videos about it. The emcee at someordinarygamers:

www.youtube.com/user/SomeOrdinaryGamers

What people say on the Internet, so many people communicate on the Internet about fringe. Mutahar, called someordinarygamers on YouTube, is into things like PC gaming, but he also looks at Internet issues. Mutahar has a sense of humour, whether perhaps navigating Minecraft gravel or a cringe X thread.

You can see the difference between an ambitious young TikTokker aiming for fame and a fringe TikTokker just kind of shouting out to whoever. It isn’t a subtle distinction.

Related…

Epic Star Wars Concept Art Shows Rey Taking On A Ton Of Stormtroopers

Do you enjoy Star Wars? The first film I watched with Disney+ was The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars, the highest-grossing film of 1977, can be quoted with, “It was as if a million voices cried out in pain/And were suddenly silenced.”

Obi-Wan laments this to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker aboard the Millennium Falcon, as they search for Princess Leia. The Imperial Sith Lord Darth Vader has already kidnapped her. At that moment, the Death Star, under Vader’s and Grand Moff Tarkin’s command, has just destroyed her home planet, and Obiwan feels it, thanks to The Force.

“oh no!”

That’s how it would have been if the Trump administration had succeeded in banning TikTok. One issue is that the Chinese government is trading off U.S. security issues. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, in China.

In Silicon Valley, Facebook was like the best idea in the world in 2004, something that had an impact on people’s behaviour all over the world.

David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network is masterful. Fincher’s film may not contain an account of the devastation of the planet of Alderaan, but with The Social Network, you get an appreciation of how Facebook has the capacity among people, around the planet, to be for them an addictive experience.

When a gallant Jedi Knight, Darth Vader was tempted, turned into a Sith Lord, and drove the Empire’s annihilation of the Jedi Order

Orwellian means normal for the works of George Orwell, particularly regarding a future extremist state. An algorithm is a mathematical formula, and when used in the context of social media, the term refers to a method of delivering content to targeted audiences.   

Whenever a voice seeks to communicate itself, it appears to be reliant on that. Without autonomy, it would be, in my opinion, a boring billboard.

There is a surplus of goods consigned and the ordinary. Should news info be professionally packaged, light on ads, accurate and not misleading, and properly researched and based in reality?

Every individual who likes YouTube encounters this hiccup. Trying to make a living as a YouTuber…: when creators on YouTube aren’t getting through, the views on their videos slow down.

The most valuable currency on the Internet is data. Nonetheless, stipends should be provided to a periphery that is entitled to speak equally freely with the dominant media.  

“oh no!”

We all should practice diligence using social media.

“oh no!”

the substance should be: consistent, helpful, appropriate, extraordinary, excellent, new, educative, client- and organization-driven, captivating, intriguing, to change, not difficult to scrutinize and share

If you are interested, you can “like,” “follow,” or comment. Good luck if you blog.

oops

A typical spelling of the outcry is “Oh no!”

Oops! I tYpOed again!!! lololololo

“oh no!”