The Last of the Chinesium
It's Not Eternal
Mark Rushton’s Interpolation in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
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This week’s topics:
The Last of the Chinesium
Roger Ebert is Dead
Stereolab - “Wow and Flutter”
The Last of the Chinesium
It was stupid to buy something from Amazon.
I wanted to make some new recordings with my lap steel guitar into my effects boxes, but I guess I got rid of too many cables. There was going to be a blizzard mid-week, so I ordered a cable from Mr Bezos and it arrived the next day.
After plugging it in, there was no doubt this cable was the biggest piece of junk I’ve ever bought. Made of pure Chinesium using the enshittification process. Impossibly noisy, and that’s saying something for me. Touching the allegedly shielded cable made it worse!
No problem. Easy returns at Kohl’s. I drove there at 7pm, when it was light rain, a few hours before everything changed to snow.
Not a single shopper in Kohl’s. I walked the entire store with that $10 off a $25 purchase coupon, received at the return window, knowing full well I wasn’t going to buy anything.
Drove over to Guitar Center, which is still on life support. Found the right cable. It took the guy about 10 minutes to get the register working but that didn’t bother me because I was enjoying browsing all the used gear behind glass. Took the cable home, and it worked perfectly.
And that’s it for my guitar cable review.
Roger Ebert is Dead
Speaking of reviews, I asked Copilot who won the Oscars. It said some movie I’ve never heard of won Best Picture. I quit watching new movies a long time ago and only watch the old ones now.
I asked Copilot what the reviews were for the movie that won Best Picture, and Copilot said Roger Ebert gave the film four stars. I replied to Copilot that Roger Ebert is dead. Copilot apologized and agreed that Roger Ebert has been dead since 2013.
You know, I’ve long felt that Roger Ebert destroyed independent movie reviews.
Newspapers, because they’re run by cheap bastards, gave up local reviewers in favor of Roger Ebert’s syndicated content.
To be fair, I sometimes agreed with Roger Ebert’s reviews, but there was something else I noticed over the years. I called it the Roger Ebert Theory. It wasn’t perfect, but it happened often enough. The theory is: if a lousy movie featured a woman with big breasts, Ebert would give it an extra star.
Of course, Ebert co-wrote a movie script with Russ Meyer in 1970, so that theory really makes sense. If you don’t know what a Russ Meyer film is about, do a Google Image search of “Russ Meyer”.
I said: Google IMAGE search…
Stereolab - “Wow and Flutter”
One band I never saw live in the 90s was Stereolab. I was into them not long after they started, but I lived in Kansas City and they wouldn’t have sold out a bar there. I think the closest they got was Chicago.
Fun memory: In 1993, when I was working for the mutual fund company, everybody on my team agreed to buy a Christmas gift for somebody else, as long as it didn’t go over $10.
We worked in downtown KC on the 34th floor of what was then known as the “AT&T Town Pavilion”. The building had shops and a food court near the ground level. It wasn’t quite a mall, but it did have a record store. And I knew they had a cassette of Stereolab’s album “Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements”. Because I’m always trouble, I threw my hat in the ring for that.
The gal that got my name was mid 20s like me, but she was a “Van Hagar” fan. Without talking to me first, she went down to the record store, asked about the cassette she’d never heard of, and they sold it to her! She got quite a kick out of finding it so easily.
“What does that band sound like?”, she asked.
“Ahhh, they’re kind of noise pop,” I said. “Sometimes they sing in French.”
Stereolab seemed to lose their way after backup vocalist and guitarist/keyboardist Mary Ramsey died in a bicycle accident in 2002, and their music veered into a more “almost jazz” direction. Band leaders Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier ended their relationship and, eventually, the band went on hiatus for a decade.
Recently, I saw that Stereolab was going to play the 725-seat Englert in Iowa City on October 12, 2025. And for only $35. I’d love to see them, but not there. I would go if they were playing Kansas City.
“Wow and Flutter” is from their 1995 album, Mars Audiac Quintet. They were moving away from their noisier, early music. By Stereolab standards, this should have been their “hit single”.
The terms “Wow” and “Flutter” are used in audio engineering, usually related to tape or vinyl turntable playback. “Wow” is a kind of wobbling of the sound “a bit slower” and “Flutter” is the same thing except “a little faster”.
Nowhere in this song is the title used in the lyrics, or the audio effect, but that last line: “Look at the symbols, they are alive. They move, evolve, and then they die.” is perfect.
I like Stereolabs sound, had not heard of them.