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Consecutive Compendium of Culture – Xylophone music, x-rated films, xcetera – xenogamy of xenial xenic xeroxes

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X marks the spot for the 24th extraction and exhibition of excellent exponents of experimental expression for exploration.

Extol anything musical, artistic, cinematic, televisual, literary – all welcomed, no exceptions!

Jean Xceron – Portrait No. 61

First off, some uneasy ambient – Xtal by Aphex Twin

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Comments

  10. The answer as usual is Frank Zappa, and before you move along because you dislike FZ, have a listen to this lovely piece, which starts with gentle acoustic guitars and woodwinds. And then there’s some marimbas and things…

  17. Because We Are So Far Ahead “IN TIME” that’s my above excuse – Now To Get On XTernals Track:


    ———————————
    Xylouris Ensemble a Melbourne Rehearsal

    —————–
    Now For Some “Mayhem” From XBXRX

    Kids should like It?

    • Nice one Jack. I really liked the Xylouris ensemble.

      Here they are with Xerosterniano Nero.

      With so many Greeks in Oz, I’m scarcely surprised that there’s a band singing in Greek.

  26. I can’t thank the Word boys and girls for putting this on one of the freebies…Bell-X1, How Your Heart Is Wired.

    Must have played that 20 times back to back when I first heard it.

  28. Blimey Xalwarpe! I thought this thread was going to die the death before we in Europe had even got out bed this morning. Wrong!

    Here’s very bouncy Brazilian superstar Xuca who’s in the mood for a celebration.

    (Singing for some reason in Spanish).

  29. Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, whose life story prior to becoming a composer is remarkable. He fought for the left wing Greek National Liberation Front in 1944, losing an eye when hit by a tank shell in the face, and then being condemned to death in-absentia by a Greek court. By that time he had moved on to Paris to study architecture under Le Corbusier, eventually designing the Philips Pavillion at Expo 58.

    Anyway, here’s Metastasis:

  30. Poor Shane MacGowan was born on Christmas Day, so he only gets one celebratory drink for every two I have..

    (Saint Etienne/Tim Burgess -I Was Born On Christmas Day from Xmas 93 45)

    • as were Robin Campbell and Annie Lennox.
      (This information has been brought to you by reading the 1984 Smash Hits Sticker Book far too much)
      Born on Christmas Day in the same year – does that make them twins? Maybe they could perform some sort of celebratory duet.
      There Must Be An Angel Playing With My Red Red Wine

  41. From the soundtrack to the Film Doin’ It In The Park and featuring an instrument that I had never heard of before – the Itotele – played by Xavier Rivera.

    • At the moment, we’re on X.
      Then there’ll be Y
      And then Z.

      And then – hurrah! – we can have the three Swedish letters Å, Ä and Ö.
      Or possibly not.

        • Damn right @locust!

          You’ve got the headline sorted. Why don’t you kick it off Lo?

          I’m sure that Xalwarpe, fine chap that he is, will mind us hijacking his concept.

          There’s also a charming Frenchman who lives in Hässelby (whose tag I can never remember) who will doubtless contribute.

          Let’s but those letters on the map!

          • Thanks for your validation, @kaisfatdad – I’m quite aware that the compendium threads divide opinion quite strongly among AWers, so it’s probably good that the alphabet nearly fits into the calendar year with an accents and all and sundry thread for 31 December to round things off. Then there’ll be time for me to reflect on what to do with such a sorting office/junkyard load of data. As you know me and my love of such things, I hope all the generous contributions from commenters through the year won’t go to waste.

    • Used to love that. I just googled it and evidently it was an experiment to see if John Cage’s ‘Chance Music’ could be used in a pop song.

      No. Me neither.

  57. Strangely enough, Salwarpe, I thought it would be fun to do a Spotify playlist for the thread from each letter. Keep me out of mischief for a while in a very Peelian way.

    Interesting comment about how the compendium threads are divisive.

    It’s something that some of us think is a lot of fun, others might not. That’s fine. No one is going to be interested in everything that gets written on the AW.

    Why is it a problem that someone wants to do a thread of any kind that is a minority interest? It doesn’t deprive anybody else of anything.

    “Sighs”

    • The answer is in the posting guidelines, KFD:

      Please be frugal with your blog entries
      Multiple posts from a single author over a short space of time are not welcome
      Be thoughtful. Rather than just post a video without commentary, we’d prefer you to tell us why we should watch it, why it means something to you, why you want to share
      Try not to post in a throwaway fashion. Try to have a point

      I think the intent is to prevent anyone dominating the board and make sure that posts that someone’s put a lot of time and effort into don’t immediately get buried under a big pile of cut’n’pastes. I suspect they are intended to prevent exactly the scenario we have now, where half the most commented posts are long lists of Youtube clips which no one watches. The current structure of the Afterword favours quantity over quality and makes these lists much more prominent than they should be – if you were a new arrival you’d think; “Wow, these guys really like organising things into lists!” but in truth most of us don’t. Look at the view numbers for this thread.

      So a couple of us have suggested a compromise where you still get to make your ‘minority interest’ lists, but they have to compete on a level playing field with all the other types of threads – funny, clever, insightful, moving, informative, argumentative or whatever. We think it would better reflect what the majority like about the Afterword if we got rid of Most Commented and had Most Viewed instead.

      • This is exactly it, @chiz. Nobody’s trying to censor you and your fellow travellers, KFD, but these endless lists do have disproportionate visibility on the site. I’m glad you like them – honestly – but as chiz says, they generally get very little real engagement and yet are put on a sort of spurious pedestal which does actually make it harder to find the other content. Most people, I suspect, find AW content via the right-hand links. The Most Commented gives undue prominence to threads which – may I be honest here? – are often basically about five of you replying to yourselves. A lot.

        There’s nothing actually wrong with that, but most of our users don’t seem to agree with Ver Management that constantly replying to one’s own YouTube video with more YouTube videos is what makes The Afterword what it is.

        So: as I say. Nobody wants you to stop doing your thing. But some of us wouldn’t mind if the thing wasn’t given quite so much prominence, which the numbers seem to tell us isn’t particularly representative of the tastes of the user-base.

        • We’re talking to ourselves, Bob. Which rather proves our point – no one reads list threads. We could be plotting the overthrow of the monarchy down here and no one would ever notice

  58. This was only ever an idle experiment that I hoped would give a general flavour of Afterworders’ tastes. It’ll soon be over, and I doubt I’ll try anything like it again.

    More generally, I’d also be perfectly happy for the Most Commented (last days) to be dumped for Most Viewed this week if it would balance things out in favour of quality.

    One other suggestion would be intelligent folksonomy with the tags – then all list threads, (handily tagged with the word ‘lists’) could be dumped in a separate category, and/or ‘time and effort’ threads could have a handily identifiable tag to locate worthwhile, if not feature-length pieces. I think I’d actually look out for that, rather than the ragbag of oddities there are currently at the bottom of the page.

    But like you both say, @chiz and @disappointmentbob, nobody reads these threads (apart from me and @kaisfatdad, evidently), and I doubt anyone is interested in what I think anyway.

  60. Congratulations salwarpe for yet another successful and more importantly, highly enjoyable thread. Inspiring 25 – 30 different AW’ers to contribute to the seemingly impossible task of coming up with suggestions beginning with X is an impressive achievement.

    I for one would be more than happy if you started again at A when the current series ends.

  61. I would have no problem at all with your suggestion, Chiz.

    Hopefully it won’t be too much work for the Admins. After Xmas perhaps?

    Then Salwarpe, I and those who enjoy this sort of thing can continue listing and other posts won’t get lost.

    I do agree with you about some very fine posts not getting the attention they deserve because they happen to get posted when there’s a lot of other stuff getting posted.

    Changing to most viewed won’t solve that though.

    Another solution would be to have different categories of posts.

    Shorts
    For example

    Here’s a great song i found
    Tickets have just gone on sale for xxx’s spring tour
    I’ve got tickets for a gig tonight
    Don’t miss this programme tonight
    Etc

    Longer pieces

    For example Bisto’s excellent history of psychedelia
    Tigger’s reflections on new releases
    Etc

    The extraordinary Mr Saucecraft, a man who can effortlessly generate 100 comments from one sentence, should have his own category perhaps?

    Why do people keep returning to this site?

    There are probably as many different answers as there are contributors.

    Why do I keep returning?

    Because the people who post here are witty, well-informed, silly, talented, irreverent, informative, obscure, provocative etc

    And because I’ve got to know a little about them and enjoy reading what they have to say and the extraordinary and perverse depths of their knowledge.

    Which probably explains my fondness for lists.

  62. Give yourself a pat on the back, @salwarpe. You’ve provided us with some frivolous Friday fun for the whole of 2015. And got some extraordinary results for some difficult letters.

    One can’t start a thread thinking about who won’t like it, because there’ll always be lots of those. You do it because you’re intrigued or interested yourself and hope there may be one or two other people who may have something to say.

    That was a great comment from Alias. His musical knowledge is mind-bogglingly broad.

    After a comment like that, you should feel like Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven. You’re looking for seven gunslingers and in walks The Man with No Name, lights up a cheroot and says he wants in.

    • I’d like to offer my support as well, sal. I haven’t contributed much to this series of threads but have enjoyed them all. Don’t be disheartened nor discouraged. The blog needs a wide variety of OPs. People will respond or not or view or not. Don’t try and second guess how people will react. Just go for it.

      I can’t wait to see what your theme for 2016 will be.

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