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REVIEW THE REVIEWER

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It takes this reviewer 674 words to tell us that Aimee Mann has been in the business for more than 25 years, has released six solo albums in that time (actually, the number is eight, if we include a live album and if we ignore the special edition of Lost in Space), that her music was the inspiration for the film Magnolia, has started her own music label, won a grammy in 2005 and has interests in producing an autobiographic graphic novel.There. Done: 72 words, if we include the information in brackets that was not to be found in the review. And, how did I come by that information? Why, I did some research on the net and found Aimee’s home page. In other words, I did something about my state of “unknowing”; something that had the reviewer done, would have helped the rather inept piece reflect a trifle more truly on a career that, after all, spans a quarter of a century.

One reason for the paucity of information in the review is that 398 words are taken up with chatter with Aimee herself - but that’s ok; the purpose being to show that Aimee’s something of a universal renaissance gal. And some of Aimee’s comments about the world of music companies and meddling in artistic integrity might have rendered some interesting further insights had the reviewer persisted; but she didn’t and there are none.
In particular, the comment from Aimee, “I don't know that record companies can actually achieve that much any more; everybody’s inundated with music”, is left poignantly hanging like a ripe fruit left to rot on the branch. “Everybody’s inundated with music.” Just what is Aimee Mann’s take on that? It might chime with my own thoughts on the matter. But we’ll never know; the conversation was not joined; the opportunity lost. Besides which, we are left with a mere 282 words to learn about the music and the tour. They are taken up with telling us that Aimee will be playing acoustic shows, with just two pianists, and that she will be doing songs for her fans from albums already released (she’s not working on a new album, we are warned).

The music gets an even shorter mention: “thoughtful” and “melancholic”. Two words. Hmm… Ok. Ok. I know; it’s just an ad really, but if only I could make this review disappear in the same magical manner that made my interest disappear.

Read the original review, if you can find it, at: www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/music/flying-high/2009/08/27/1251001979048.html

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The Combi Descending 

by Ralphie Von Wilhelm

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Vance, meanwhile, continued to look in irritation at his hands, by which he was handcuffed to the leg of the dining table in his Port Campbell apartment. These were the hands of the premier alto flute player in Australian jazz and they had been surgically attached to his wrists only two months before as part of a sober scientific investigation into whether musical memory resided in the hands or the soul of the possessor.

“Will I be able to play the flute after this, doc?” Splinter had asked.
“Well, that’s what we’re hoping to find out. But one thing is certain; you won’t be able to play the violin.”
“Oh. Then the cat will have to be content with doing that.”
The cat had looked up for a moment with soulful eyes and returned to its exquisite rendering of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending.
“He’s rather good, isn’t he!” the surgeon had remarked. And, advancing on the tempered beast, scalpel in hand: “I wonder if I could identify and isolate that muscle memory…”

Now, with a tear glistening in his eye for the late great puss (Doc Holloway had indeed isolated puss from his memory), Splinter raised himself into a crouch and heaved with his shoulder against the table top, managing simultaneously to raise the table leg from the floor just enough to slip the handcuffs through the gap and to loosen the Frankensteinian stitches around his right wrist.

“Holy mangelworts!” he exclaimed. “Talk about isolation! But, at least I’m free of the handcuffs.”

Holding the severed right hand of Australia’s foremost jazz alto flute player in the still-attached left hand of Australia’s foremost jazz alto flute player, Splinter, inspired by his television hero MacGyver — in particular the episode in which MacGyver built a lunar command module using just the contents of just a knitting basket, a hassock, a potato and a hapless pooch that happened by — looked around the room until his eyes alighted on a gauze bandage, a piano and a whaling harpoon. In next to no time, he had reattached the digitally splayed terminus and wriggled his fingers (er, the fingers of Australia’s foremost jazz alto flute player; let’s just call them his fingers, his hand from now on, shall we; the joke’s getting stale, at least for me – EDITOR). “Good as a bought one,” he smiled, and shot out of the apartment like an elderly person out of a fundraiser for the local branch of Euthanasias R Us.

In the dead of winter, Port Campbell is a rather forlorn, windblown hole, let’s be honest. Walking down the middle of the main street in the middle of July you are more likely to be flattened by an unfortunate fairy penguin inauspiciously scooped up by a howling sou’wester as it dipped and dove through the waves of Bass Strait and given a quick, if unbidden lesson, in how to describe a paralytic parabola, up over the cliff face; followed by an even briefer lesson in how to fall belly first onto the head of the main street’s sole occupant; than you are to meet even the most venturesome local.

The fairy penguin… Ahem. The fairy penguin is the smallest variety of penguin. Its scientific name is Eudyptula Minor. They enjoy fishing and krilling; in fact, they are the Southern Ocean’s most efficient krillers. They weigh about 1 kilogram. When falling in a parabolic arc from a height of 200 metres, they achieve a terminal velocity of 320 km/h and can hurt like buggery on impact.

For this reason Splinter kept just inside his front door a cast-iron umbrella stand that held his cast-iron umbrella with the metre-long spike emerging from its tip. In penguin season, which lasts from the beginning of July until the first week of August, the average stroller down the main street will collect four penguins on his spike and seven more will slide off the umbrella’s curtain.

This day, however, being relatively penguin free, the wind having unseasonably dropped below 90 km/h, Splinter returned his umbrella to its stand and charged out into the middle of the street to stand there in consternation. Having fulfilled that daily ritual (he came from a family of pious consternators), he took off at a steady jog towards the local milkbar for a pie (hunger, as the Bard wrote, surmounts all hindrances) revolving in his mind the events that had led him up to this strange if mundane pass.

TO BE CONTINUED

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