who shall follow the thread beyond the labyrinth of words

flitting

2008-08-06T17:42:27Z

This journal will cease to be my main front on live journal.
I have another account I will be using at robinsonner

I may continue to post odd youtube things here in order to make the other account less busy.
If you would like to keep up with my posts then friend me at the new place if you like.

Have a listen to some Barry Ryan while you decide.
They are all good but I really like "You Don't Know What You're Doing" and "Love Is On The Way".

In the garden with Gluck

2008-07-29T17:35:51Z

Borage is such a lovely flower for a "weed"!

The way this guy hovers and surveys the potential of my Parsley flowers is a joy to behold!

The neighbours are wondering why I spend so much time taking the scent of my beloved Meadowsweet.

you've been framed

2008-07-25T01:57:11Z

Looks like Harry Hill has mugged the Labour Party in the Glasgow East by-election for the Scottish Nationalist Party. Labour's third safest seat in Scotland falls to a Protestant anti-abortionist. "What are the chances of that happening?"

His grin behind an increasingly hysterical Margaret Curran was something to behold. Curran was a disgrace during the results for the Scottish Parliament election result and her plea to remember the heart of Labour and its fight against inequality is too little too late.
A transfusion of new blood is needed as we remove the dead hand of New Labour from control.

piracy is promotion

2008-07-24T21:22:21Z

David Tennant in his first major TV role plays a young patient in a psychiatric institution who is an eager to become a hospital radio DJ in the ground breaking Bafta-winning drama serial Takin' over the Asylum, written by Donna Franceschild and screened on BBC2 in 1994.

Franceschild talks about the show and the story of its eventual release on DVD by the BBC this year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jun/04/mentalhealth

"On June 20 2006, an enthusiast called Catyuy posted a 10-minute video on YouTube. It was a montage of scenes from the 1994 BBC drama serial Takin' Over the Asylum about an ageing wannabe DJ and double-glazing salesman called Eddie McKenna who, together with a group of patients, revives an antiquated hospital radio station at a fictional mental institution. Within a year and a half, between Catyuy and another enthusiast, called Midcirclenine, the entire six-part serial had been posted on YouTube in 10-minute chunks, in flagrant violation of Section 512(c)(3) of the US Copyright Act.

I was the writer of that serial and had devoted three years of my life to creating it. So you can imagine how I felt when my teenage son brought this gross piracy to my attention. I was delighted.

In 1994, I was a 40-year-old writer with little to show for my 20 years of graft except an inability to take the hint and stop. David Blair had left his dreams of being feted as a "hot young director" behind him, by virtue of him not being young any more. The actor Ken Stott was then almost unknown, David Tennant had yet to be seen in a television role with more than 10 lines in it, and we were about to take on a taboo subject in a media environment that was almost toxic.....

....Thanks to the painstaking efforts of Catyuy and Midcirclenine, Takin' Over the Asylum was seen by a whole new audience on YouTube. Thousands of people, many of whom were small children when it was first aired, sat through the whole serial in 30 10-minute chunks on a screen the size of an index card, and left enthusiastic comments. Fourteen years after the last episode was broadcast, Takin' Over the Asylum was again a cult hit. In response to the surprise re-emergence of the serial on YouTube the BBC has decided to put it out on DVD."

Ahhh. The pirates as good guys.
Or is it the current drawing power of Dr Who and Inspector Rebus?

misheard lyrics

2008-07-23T23:07:14Z

The "word" "pwn" is defined as a simple typo of own and is pronounced "pone".

I see these things every now and then and flit past them assuming I have understood.
Not being thoroughly conversant with "leet" culture, there are gaps in my knowledge and without investigation or "googling", I think I unconsciously treat these terms as signs.
They mean what they look like.

So, "pwn", to me, looks like pawn without the a. This led me to always think someone had been pawned, an interesting variation on owned.

Googling to me is a form of goggling.

I had to bring up the word "heart" with some speakers of American English the other evening. "Heart" as in "I heart NY"
It was explained to me that it was originally a symbol or sign which had infiltrated a sentence of words. The symbol would be sounded as it looked - a heart. At this point "heart" becomes a verb. It may be possible, that to those younger minds than I, the symbol means nothing but an image.

This means there are whole conceptions of text and prose which are informed by the image rather than the dictionary definition.

As I said I flit by these things. Time is tight. I have to get my read on before I flake.

Three pages of a book later, mulling over a spiral of tissue memories unrelated to the text but inspired by part of it, I snap out of my own internal footnote and realise I cannot remember the last three pages I have been looking at.

Was I reading them? If so, in what sense?

I still sing along to favourite songs, out loud and in my head, and repeat misheard lyrics I have formed myself. Those singers with bad enunciation are ripe for total rewritings of their lyrical intent.

So, if you ever tell me I have been pwned, I am going to ask how much you got.

Here's some Heart!

a dream logic

2008-07-21T23:28:01Z

New destinations sometimes necessitate new modes of travel. Or is it that new modes of travel open up visions of new places to go? In Basil Kirchin's case his present position has been reached after many years of travelling along more traditional music routes.

I wondered how to lure you into the world of composer Basil Kirchin.
Heres the opening of The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
Vincent Price leads the clockwork orchestra.

As I compile a Basil Kirchin playlist on Youtube to collect all the movie clips featuring his soundtrack work, I came across one description for the 1974 movie Mutations aka Freakmaker, which sums up where I am at with this Internet thing.

stylish chase scene from Jack Cardiff's THE MUTATIONS. pure dream logic even in context. watch for the signs.

Tell me you get it. The chord changes and plucked bass moves. The occasional horn blare. The rippling vibes and bells. The merging of incidental field sounds with music composition.

Kirchin was a house hero of field recording and found sound fans on Soulseek and elsewhere in the early part of this century. His musical career spanned the 60s and 70s. His name was dropped by arch psychedelic obscurantist, Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound which may have brought him to the fore in the Solar Lodge (a Soulseek Room). Others reviving the textures of soundtrack music and lounge interests for the space age pop thing of the Nineties, like Stereolab referred to him.

Here's a 2003 interview with Kirchin on BBC Radio 3's eclectic Mixing It show. Ahh I remember that night well!

His soundtrack music follows certain formats extending his earlier jazz band training with his father. There are touches of the ITC big band sound of TV series like The Champions.

Later, the electronics and recorded found sound infiltrate the music as in the opening and closing credits of Mutations (1974). This is when he released an album called Worlds Within Worlds, which was a real prize piece of experimentalism to catch hold of during the digital potlatch dream of all night chat and share around 2004.

Eventually this pressure resulted in releases of his rare material by Johnny Trunk of Trunk Records.

The soundtrack music is uncollected at present and - apart from Dr Phibes - is unavailable, except from the new breed of potlatch, who like myself moved from audio to audio/video and the way sound services the image. Finding old obscure films sometimes looks trivial but it does yield some interesting and beguiling gems in the fabric of dream logic!

It's almost like the buzz of what crate digging samples of obscure old vinyl did for Rap and Hip-Hop DJ's.

Of course that whole lounge scene has been and gone and yet did the train ever really arrive in the station of your minds!!

Finally, there's a bit of personal psychogeography to add to this bubbling hypnopomp:

The Kirchin band, co-led and directed by his father Ivor, originated when Basil took their London-based band up to Edinburgh for a residency at the Fountainbridge Palais, beginning there on September 8th, 1952. The band made several broadcasts from Fountainbridge

My parents may have even danced to his early music!

Here's my Kirchin playlist on Youtube. Dig it before it gets nuked!

See Oliver Reed as the island psycho.
Jenny Agutter and the old house.
Vincent Price and his clockwork orchestra.
Northern girls stripping in seedy Soho during the "swingin' sixties".

"If you take the human voice and slow it down five octaves, immediately everything you can hear drops away. Take birdsong, all those harmonics you can't hear are brought down - sounds that human ears have never heard before. Little boulders of sound. In 1964 it was hard to capture. There was only reel to reel tape, and it took eight or nine years of my life. It was long and hard and painful. Now with the new technology you can hear these boulders of sound without changing the pitch, which is miraculous!"
On and off through the Sixties and Seventies, Kirchin stayed in an autistic community at Schurmatt in Switzerland. "These autistic children, the sounds they make when they try to communicate are unbelievable. They jabber away and of course it's gibberish and meaningless. But if you record it and apply the techniques I've mentioned...trust me, you can hear what they're trying to convey."

Interview with Bob Stanley, 2003

spine shifting bass

2008-07-17T14:44:44Z

Genius killer bass!
The First drum machine on a record!
Sly Stone's siblings Little Sister do "Stanga" from 1970.
A vintage year y'all!

Kubrick's Boxes

2008-07-16T19:03:56Z

There was a TV highlight of the year last night.

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes - Tues 15 July 2008 10pm
A biography of a remarkably talented man as seen though the rich collection of material he left behind.

The man's attention to detail is stunning and quite inspiring.

Click to read large size

"Stanley Kubrick's films were landmark events – majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing?

Two years after Kubrick's death, Jon Ronson was invited to the director's estate to explore the hundreds of boxes the legendary film director had collected during his decades at Childwick Manor in Hertfordshire. He's been returning ever since, and the story of Kubrick and the archive, now housed at University of the Arts London, is revealed in this fascinating documentary.

Ronson asks: is it possible to get to understand such a man – and his extraordinary working methods – by looking through the hundreds of boxes he left behind? "

The Hunt For The Clockwork Orange Hat.

Highlights for me were:

- his wife being asked if the house full of boxes ever overwhelmed Kubrick. She replied, "Nothing overwhelmed Stanley."
- Kubrick's own designs for the boxes themselves.
- his joke(?)about starting a stationery memorabilia museum.
- getting his fans in places like Alberquerque whose mail he catalogued away, to be his "agents in the field" and report back viewings of his films in various cinemas with full details of location dimensions and effects on audiences.
- the interview with an author of one of the letters filed away as "crank".
- the hunt for the perfect droog's hat for Clockwork Orange.

Oh it's endless and also just leaves you wanting SO much more.

Let it never be forgotten - Stanley Kubrick was a genius.

read Jon Ronson's Guardian article explaining the story in detail.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1177734,00.html

Pictures by Stephen Gill from the accompanying magazine article are here at kubrickonia.
http://kubrickonia.blogspot.com/2008/03/citizen-kubrick.html

more navel gazing...oooh fluff!

2008-07-13T21:53:53Z

Below are the results according to Regressive Imagery Analysis of what I have written in my LiveJournal over the last 4 years. RIA is a plug-in for LJ-archive which analyses the frequency of word usage and the implied psychological interpretation

Now, let's think about this. It's not just me who writes my LiveJournal! Cut and Paste my dears! There are links to other people's text and also statements or expressions written on the Internet by people trained to promote websites. There is also the internet language itself.
Having looked at some other "people" 's personal results posted online, there IS a varying degree of difference. This could defeat any idea I had that I was being misinterpreted as some coalescence of Internet expression.

Bottom 3 Categories
Regressive Imagery Analysis for niddrie_edge's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Moral Imperative		13.5%
Positive Affect		19.0%
Anxiety		33.4%

What does this mean?

Moral Imperative is secondary thinking. Positive affect and Anxiety are Emotions.

Top 3 Categories
Regressive Imagery Analysis for niddrie_edge's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Unknown		95.0%
Depth		93.6%
Glory		96.6%

What does this mean?

"Unknown" is Regressive Cognition in Primary thinking. "Depth" is Icarian Imagery in Primary thinking. "Glory" is Emotional thinking.

Root Categories
Regressive Imagery Analysis for niddrie_edge's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Primary		94.7%
Secondary		41.5%
Emotions		59.7%

What does this mean?

Primary Process
Regressive Imagery Analysis for niddrie_edge's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Drive		50.3%
Sensation		94.5%
Defensive Symbolization		84.7%
Regressive Cognition		70.4%
Icarian Imagery		99.6%

What does this mean?

Primary process thinking
- Primordial thought - the type of thinking found in fantasy and reverie - described by Freud as the "id". This kind of thought is associative, free-form, and takes little account of reality.

Secondary Process
Regressive Imagery Analysis for niddrie_edge's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Abstraction		46.8%
Social Behavior		63.5%
Instrumental Behavior		39.4%
Restraint		52.9%
Order		88.5%
Temporal References		42.1%
Moral Imperative		13.5%

What does this mean?

Secondary process thinking
Conceptual thought - abstract, logical, reality oriented, and aimed at problem solving. In Freudian terms, this is the domain of the "ego".

Emotions
Regressive Imagery Analysis for niddrie_edge's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Positive Affect		19.0%
Anxiety		33.4%
Sadness		34.4%
Affection		48.6%
Aggression		70.9%
Expressive Behavior		81.9%
Glory		96.6%

What does this mean?

I think we all know what this one is about. Or do we?

I think what it is telling me is that I have an interest in heroic ordering of social expression through getting deep down beneath the secret, strange and unknown. As my secondary (conceptual, constructive) thinking is below average, I am either not very practical about it or I prefer not to talk about it.

As I said to a friend, I like to jump into a scene, stir it up subtly and watch the action. Sometimes even a non-contributing presence can induce this. I am then very likely to go home and positively bitch about it. The pearl is an irritation of the oyster.

augenblick

2008-07-12T02:13:32Z

PCL Links again.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/superbomba/sets/72157604075648458/show/

Superbomba over at flickr.
This woman has the eye.
There is a strange magic going on here.
I felt so many emotions gazing at them but mostly I felt awe.
Awe at the mystery which brings them before us.

kids today

2008-07-11T19:26:36Z

Here's a slideshow of glamstomp/protopunk/garbage single covers which explain my continuing LOL at the genre. They are from that inestimable album
"va - glam stomp punkerz - 26 bubble blowin' gum drop pop flops 1969 - 1980"

http://flickr.com/photos/83238087@N00/sets/482451/show/

Also, here's Alicia Bridges doing "I Love The Nightlife" which is a song I find myself singing when the neighbour's 18 year old daughter stumbles out of taxis at 4 in the morning.

While having a few Guinness recently with the Spanish Krew I dropped the disco word. I was reminded that these days people refer to it as a Club!

An Australian and a Canadian discuss the crisis in "America"'s working class

2008-07-09T23:20:42Z

Reading about Joe Bageant's book Deer Hunting With Jesus"

"When I published this chart a couple of years ago, it never occurred to me, in my liberal affluent comfort, that many or most of those living on the Edge are not at all able to see the centre for what it is, or to have any inkling that they need to pull further away from it, not aspire to become part of it."

You have to balk at this sensational piece of analysis:

"Joe is concerned about the propensity of many Americans (which he later ascribes in part to their belligerent Scots-Irish heritage) to carry their enthusiasm for guns to a degree that makes them "devotees to lethality".... He analyzes the low-level perpetrators of Abu Ghraib like Lynddie England and finds their behaviour completely consistent with the pent-up anger, ignorance and willingness to follow orders that those of Scots-Irish ancestry, or influenced by that culture, exhibit around the world and especially in working-class US communities."

"This book is about the horrific mess that is America in the 21st century, but there is nothing here for those of us living in other countries to be smug about. American culture is being embraced everywhere in the world (and not, for the most part, forced down anyone's throats). And our cultures already exhibit many of the same qualities and propensities that are so magnified in the US and portrayed in such terrifying light by Joe Bageant."

"At least 60% of Americans are "working class", i.e. they do not have power over their work -- when they work, how much they get paid or whether they'll be "cut loose from their job [or self-employed labour dependent on big corporations] at the first shiver of Wall Street"."

"The critical aspects of the "terrible and silent crisis" destroying working-class Americans are: (a) the working class' own passivity, antipathy to intellect, and belligerence towards the outside world, (b) an economic, corporatist system that benefits from keeping them uneducated, fearful and debt-ridden (and hence holders of low-wage, nonunion, disposable, part-time, noninsured jobs), (c) a health-care system that is especially dysfunctional in working-class areas and whose few quality services are unaffordable to the working class, (d) their dreadful, fat-laden diet (which is all that they can afford) and the toll it takes on their health, and (e) religious (read also media) and political leaders who prey on their ignorance and exploit their fears."

"Rich Republicans still meet the working-class and small business class on their own turf, at community activities important to these people. Progressives don't even visit, so no other voice is ever heard in the 'red' communities, and as a result "the left understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people...letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit"."

"These people, living right in our midst but whom we never reach out to, simply don't have the wherewithal to improve their own lot -- "they are too uneducated, too conditioned to the idea that being a consumer is the same thing as being a citizen."

Joe laments the fact that both affluent and poor are now being brought up with neither the capacity nor the need for self-recognition -- for discovering who they are as individuals. Instead, they are given a 'menu' of lifestyles to choose from, each with its own defining brand names and ensembles."

""You never know you are in prison until you try the door". And America's working class in particular has been so systematically dumbed down that they can't even see the door."

The comments are good.

I am very tempted to mail this link to Mute magazine to see what the British Left make of it.

edu lobo - viola fora de moda

2008-07-05T23:49:43Z

One of my very favourite pieces of music has returned to Youtube after an absence.
Hello old friend, spread your wings and reach the world.

Member zoodden has some fine stuff in his crates.
Particularly like this Helio Matheus track!
Totally why I love Brazilian musics.
Shit man..a clavinet, moog, tubular bell sounding keyboard combination!

made you look for tattie soup

2008-07-01T16:27:15Z

What happens to all the essays a child hands into a school?
Are they returned or are they kept for a few moments in anticipation of the shredder or a trip to the recycle centre?

I recall my English teacher telling me that Stream of Consciousness was all very well but I had to direct it in a disciplined format. That's why I was attending class I said, plus the Library should not have the Kerouac and Joyce within such easy reach for a lazy git like me. Eventually she got a themed narrative from me with character and dialogue about Bonfire Night. It was highly praised even if it did have a real person going on the fire instead of a dummy.

Later, when I had a radical fill-in teacher for a few weeks, my tale of a schizophrenic who loved to sit on a rock as the sea came in was read out to the whole class. I spent the whole reading just watching the other pupils for signs.

The point is - what happened to all that stuff? Did I get it back and it was eventually thrown out with my prize Marvel and DC comic collections by a mother fearful of the invasion of rodents?

I am looking for creative writing options in my local area and the options are shocking. The libraries have nothing and the local Arts Centre is fighting for survival so it is stumbling about with the pop type events. The posh library up the road in stockbroker's belt has reading groups, which I believe are sort of book clubs. Perhaps one could insinuate oneself in there in the hope of meeting fellow scribblers, casually admiring each other's choice of stockings during those scintillating lulls?

The opening question of this entry comes from contemplating my response to all the difficult tasks the more traditional writing classes may suggest. Write character, write dialogue.

Okay:

R. had no sense of character, in himself or others. He felt it was judgmental. His clothes betrayed a deep adherence to this philosophy. Ultimately, for one who despised competing, he was the most competitive of all.

Or:

"So, what are you saying?" came a voice from a vapid crowd which had not formed any distinguishing features.

R. shifted uneasily as if interfered with and wrenched out a response. "Spells."

"What do you mean by "spells"?" came a voice from the head of this fog-bound entity R. found himself addressing, so instantaneous was its reply he considered it had read his mind.

"A sense of confusion arising from not giving the given, in a rhythmic statement...." babbled R..

The slowly materialising people conferred with each other silently, exhibiting strange facial expressions as if unified in some temporary community against this nonsense. Comfortable in their shared experience of having no drawers in which to place this answer, they gave up language and collectively exhaled a primal response.

"Oh."

Pantherman

2008-06-30T00:18:19Z

Wow! I bloody love this.
Dutch Glam Rock one man band Pantherman!

This one has it all!
Listen to those post Glitter Band drums! The out of sync double track percussion secret is out!
This one beats The Sweet and gets the heavy metal pretensions onto an A side.
Those bass riffs are made by DROPPING the bass. Surely.
How he rhymes paws with claws leaves a lot to the imagination and any potential mishearing.

Ooh its from a compilation I didn't know about:
Glam Stomp Punkerz - 26 Bubble Blowin' Gum Drop Pop Flops!

ain't nobody here..but good people

2008-06-29T16:17:29Z

I love The Killer!
A WILD performance of "Breathless" from 1958.

I have been watching a lot of his stuff over the weekend chasing up the the 1974 "Southern Roots" album for my Swamp Rock trawl. One of that album's tracks "Meat Man" performed in 1986 is quite spectacular.

This trawl has me in possession of Creedence Clearwater Revival's CD Box set, thrilling to the Festival Express DVD of The Band, The Dead and Janis Joplin on tour through Canada on a train and watching tons of old film of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, one of my all time favourite groups. It diverges out into Dave Mason of Traffic, Eric Clapton, George Harrison and later Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour with Leon Russell. Here's Russell doing George Harrison's "Beware Of Darkness". Really, 1969/1970 is my musical home.

It's well documented that a disillusioned Eric Clapton got the word from George Harrison about D and B and booked them as support for Blind Faith. He was so impressed he feared following them onstage and ended up playing with them. In some of the clips he is pretty smacked out but also retreating into the calm of the musical stew, listening to Delaney's sounds and band and ultimately taking them.

Jerry Lee also turns up in Cross TV's fantastic "They Sold Their Souls For Rock and Roll". I will never listen to Rock music ever again, you devil-worshipper's!
The whole story begins with Robert Johnson at the crossroads down in Clarksdale. Delaney and Bonnie sing Poor Elijah with Clapton in tribute to Robert Johnson.

I was dreaming last night that some Glastonbury headlining rap star and his krew were going to waste me for having man-titties. This was while they gangbanged Richard Gere who was singing some Hollywood musical numbers. Christ, I got out of that dream in a hurry!

As I played a few of the 69/70 tracks to The Librarian, he surprised me by throwing a rare pre-Queen track from 1969 into the mix. It's "Earth" by Smile, effectively Queen with Tim Staffel on vocals.

The verses really make me think of Radiohead for some reason. Some tasty early Yes influenced Hammond/Mellotron combinations. The Librarian's dad, who was in a few bands during this period, brought L. up to only ever listen to two Yes albums. The first two.

To be honest I was more likely singing this back then.

niddrie_edge @ 2008-06-27T02:28:00

2008-06-27T01:28:43Z

What the hell happened to Swamp Rock?

Tony Joe White - Polk Salad Annie

A Beach Boy's playlist

2008-06-24T18:03:12Z

Avoiding the hits and the much lauded "classics", here's a selection of BB tracks which have meant something to me over the years and still do!

Brian Wilson This Whole World from Sunflower 1970 01:57
- just a great song in the Spector tradition

The Beach Boys - Wind Chimes - Smiley Smile 1967 02:39
- a leftover from Brian's "classic" days

The Beach Boys - Feel Flows from Surf's Up 1971 04:45
- Carl and that cocaine - "Unfolding enveloping missiles of soul" indeed!

The Beach Boys - Sail on Sailor from Holland 1973 03:23
- heard on Radio Luxembourg one night at age of ten - went out next day and bought it

The Beach Boys - Funky Pretty from Holland 1973 04:14
- very soulful tribute to the band's astrologer

Beach Boys-I Went To Sleep - 20/20 1969 01:38
- God, Brian loved that waltz!

The Beach Boys - Busy Doin' Nothin'- Friends 1968 03:06
- Brian goes bossa! He even gets the directions to his house into the lyrics!

Beach Boys - Time To Get Alone - 20/20 1969 02:38
- one of my very favourites - the "Deep and wide" section is essential Beach Boy, still gives me shivers - part of Brian's waltz time obsession

Beach Boys - The Trader from Holland 1973 05:08
- what's this about? Global economics? A true gem with beautiful changes. There will never again be a voice like Carl Wilson.

The Beach Boys - Long Promised Road - Surf's Up 1971 03:34
- more Carl cocaine mysticism

The Beach Boys - All This is That in STEREO - Carl and The Passions 1971 04:57
- a TM anthem

The Beach Boys - Friends - 1968 02:34
- more Brian waltztime

Baby Blue - Dennis Wilson - L.A album 1979 03:39
- the latest track and a moody piece from Brother Dennis

The Beach Boys - You Need a Mess of Help - Carl and The Passions 1971 03:24
- nice sleazy rocker

The Night Was So Young Beach Boys Cover from Love You album 1975
02:22
- a cover version by a talented guy!

Cool, Cool Water (live) - Sunflower 1970
- a few versions of this Brian experiment from Smile time floating around - this one sort of captures the essence - Bruce Johnston on lovely syncopated piano raindrops and tanktops at the end!

psychogeography?

2008-06-22T00:30:01Z

"The sensibility of the street rules the world. Rules the world, trust me."
Quincy Jones

I fancy this site greatly: Dreaming De Quincey

In Our Time

2008-06-21T00:00:08Z

You know how peeps go on about how Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds abbreviated is LSD?
Did they ever look at the abbreviated form of All You Need Is Love? AYNIL.

I have been watching Tony Palmer's documentary series of the same name and I am impressed all over again. Released in 1975 I believe and serialised on British TV, I remember watching it as a child of 12. I remember also my drunk father letting me stay up late to watch Hendrix set fire to his guitar at Monterey and Syd sing Astronomie Dominie, asking,

"Do you really like that? It's bloody terrible. A racket." Ah dad , that was a moment.

The world threw stuff like that at me when I was a kid. The tabloid Sun newspaper came into our house because I saw an ad campaign on TV serialising the "inside story" of The Beatles drug taking and sex orgies. I snuck a copy in with my copy of Sparkey comic at 7 am one Friday morning as I brought home the milk and fresh bread rolls for breakfast. Dad liked the crossword and the page three girls and it became an errr..fixture. Also, somehow I got a copy of The Little Red Schoolbook and took it to school. It amused some of my more bohemian schoolteachers. These things were thrown away by hippies and ended up cheap in second hand bookshops I visited. Dad read it and said,

"Why are you reading all this stuff about drugs? Plus some of this is filth."
Me: "What the sex education?"
Dad: "Aye"
Me: "What, is it wrong or something?"
Dad: "That's not the point"
Me; "Don't worry, I just want to find out if I can start a Union and go on strike"

Some clips:

Get down with the Segun Bugna Troupe!

Here's a great clip they showed in the Intro. Judy Garland DELIVERING "Come Rain Or Come Shine" in a fabulous dress!.

There's a few things that have struck me about the "history". Its Western obviously and strictly popular music. I don't think it dwells on the financial side of the whole phenomenon, like the Capitol investment in The Beatles. That's covered more in books like Mansion On The Hill. One phrase I liked was from Hoagy Carmichael. The good musicians learned about the "anticipated beat".

The footage shot from inside The Osmonds fan-sieged limo is something else. It appears every now and then to symbolise madness with some unnerving music over its silence.

Upon the urging of pal John Lennon in the mid-70s, Palmer set out to document the progress and significance of popular music to date. The result was 17 episodes of "Very Serious Discussion," told by not only learned scholars of the day, but many of the artists who made 20th century what it was.

Hardly a minor relic meant to capitalize on the popular music of the day (rock ’n’ roll doesn’t even come up until Episode 13), Palmer chased down many leads in drawing this massive family tree.
If you can ignore the fact that all the subjects of the contemporary footage are at least 30 years out of fashion and shot on lo-fi 16mm film (the TV docu standard at the time), there is a whole lot of heft to behold.

From its African origins to Tin Pan Alley to the musical play to country to glitter rock, Palmer followed every root and shoot. Sometimes, he uncovered footage that was believed not to exist, like the rare clip of folk legend Woody Guthrie, and on occasion, got the last interview ever with some of his subjects, like Bing Crosby. The narration is dry but erudite, and the production values are simple -- a talking head with a simple caption cut together with pertinent visuals.
--- Robert Newton, EDGE

Miraculously, the series doesn't feature a narrator; the story unravels via a shrewd shuffling of archive and contemporary film, plus interviews with artists and their makers, bosses, critics, fans.

Unlike today's typical TV music doc - frustratingly short clips, cliche-ridden voiceovers and self-advertisements - these films kick back and groove on their subjects, letting whole songs play out, interviewees ramble and digress. The camera lingers to register significant places and atmospheres: the Manhattan asylum where Scott Joplin died insane; the Ealing blues club where Alexis Korner found The Rolling Stones rehearsing; the massed potential energy of a stadium rock crowd minutes before showtime.

Even the interviews and contemporary material are gorgeously rendered in bronzed, hazy film stock, appropriate given that it was filmed just as pop music's high summer was about to turn to autumn. As Palmer approaches his own present time, the story gets inevitably fragmented. Punk rock is waiting to be born, but Palmer's final image is unwittingly prophetic: Mike Oldfield alone in his private studio composing ‘Ommadawn’, the precursor of a thousand bedroom producers of the future.
--- Rob Young, UNCUT

They said before Ken Burns there was Tony Palmer. He has a wonderful documentary film about Ralph Vaughn Williams I am hunting down.

Funnily enough, today's Sun has an article about the reissue of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue on CD! They also have an editorial on how "brainstorming" has been banned as a phrase by a local council. The preferred usage is now "thought showers"!
I remember being told about this three years ago in a training seminar for Support Workers. Trust the Sun to be right up to date!
It's like when Melvyn Bragg, host of BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time" programme was asked why they never cover contemporary issues. He stated that "we don't do "the present"".

Oddly enough The Little Red Schoolbook was discussed on BBC Radio Four's "In Living memory" this week!

Even more spooky... If... is out on DVD from Criterion on the 19th June.

lennon does ann margret!

2008-06-19T00:46:46Z

and another thing.... the jazz hauntology

2008-06-17T22:46:25Z

'Some of these rambles led me to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen.' De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, available online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/q/quincey/thomas/opium/chapter3.html

I think the whole tradition goes back to De Quincey and one particular phrase that he uses: the ‘north-west passage’ [see chapter 3, Confessions of an English Opium Eater -ed][2]. He describes, in the English Opium Eater, finding himself within the labyrinth of the mind, within the labyrinth of London. There is a concept called the ‘north-west passage' -- which is like the thread in the maze, like Ariadne's thread -- which could lead you out of London if you contact it. And he makes reference to Frobisher's voyages, the idea of actually navigating a passage through the ice to find a way out, to find a way between the Atlantic and the Pacific. And of course people attempting this disappear, they fall prey to cannibalism or scurvy or whatever. - Iain Sinclair on the origins of Psychogeography

For the sake of readers who may balk at me cramming all of the ether transmissions in one entry, I refer back to the previous entry as I write this.

There were a few statements in that entry which lead on to contemplations of the stuff which came up after reading the Iain Sinclair contribution to the Psychogeography Summit with Will Self in London this year, linked to by ballardian.com

Both links are well worth an investment of your time.

"So it was 1955, and he (Orson Welles) goes into a Paris bookshop and here are those psychogeographers and Lettrists [Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the 1940s by Isidore Isou, inspired by dada and surrealism –ed. ] and they are reciting incantatory poems, and it is just extraordinary that the date is '55 -- and from Welles moves into a nightclub where the American actor Eddie Constantine, who later emerges in Godard's Alphaville, is sitting with a hat on, looking sinister and grinning and then there is Jean-Paul Sartre. So there’s a weird cultural stew that appropriates this term psychogeography, which is a way of thinking and dealing with how the city emerges. It didn’t mean a lot to me then, and looking back I find, in documentaries that I was involved with at that time, the term used with more frequency was psychopolitics. I’m not sure what it meant, but people like R. D. Laing and Ginsberg and Paul Goodman and Gregory Bateson were all using this term constantly ..."

What I like about this is the moment in time. Recently, there have been anniversary projects around the 50 years from 1957. The halflife of rock and roll. I am currently reading George Melly's book "Revolt Into Style" which refers to the Tommy Steele phenomenon of 1950s cafe bar kids being backed by out of work jazzers who used to play upstairs in the same street. Melly, a surrealist jazz lover, is associating in Soho, that psychogeographic nexus, with Francis Bacon and an assortment of other progenitors of the counterculture. Another character in play at the time was Colin MacInnes, who Melly agrees saw the moment for what it was worth and wrote about it in "Absolute Beginners".

Mix into this, Michael Moorcock, the future house writer for Hawkwind and the late 60s London underground, who states that he first saw LSD in London in the mid 50s! from Moorcock's multiverse forum:

Hi Mike,
Could you recall the earliest year you were aware LSD was available at John Bell & Croydens?
Andy

It would have been 1956, I think. Sitting in Sam Widge's coffee bar, as I recall, scarcely a stone's throw away from JB&C, in Berwick Street (JB&.C were in Wigmore St). Or maybe The Partisan...?

Over in that Paris of 1955 that Sinclair makes mention of, there is Boris Vian and the St Germain jazz scene. Perhaps even a new Count of St Germain! Vian had been aware of the USA and its culture and he could sniff what was coming . He served as a liaison for the incoming US jazz exiles. He carved a controversial NICHE, writing as if a Black Negro writer, in violent, gory crime novels like "I Spit On Your Grave". He was friends with Sartre and Juliette Greco and a Pataphysician, singing and writing great songs, including in '55 the first French rock and roll songs

I have read Greil Marcus' "Listick Traces" and I know of the lineage from Dadaism, and even further back from Ranters or whatever. Absurdism is nothing new. As Sebastian Horsley states in a recent interview, his failures are very often his successes and to "dandify" is to release the true self. An "act" is very often the most potent revolutionary message.

Also, in the Will Self/Iain Sinclair piece mention is made of J.G Ballard's "personal horizon" reflecting my thoughts on foraging and its re-energising of one's interrelationships in my previous entry:

Will Self: It’s interesting what you were saying Iain, about in Jim Ballard’s memoir, about this weird period where he would only walk for what he reckoned was his personal horizon …

Iain Sinclair: His personal horizon … for his own height and I don’t know how he calculated that. But in Shepperton you are on the flat I suppose. He’d seemed to work out that three-quarters of a mile would do him. So he went three quarters of a mile in every direction and he got to know the area intimately.

Will Self: Because he was on a driving ban.

Iain Sinclair: Yeah, for a year. But he said it completely changed his life, because he decided he just wasn’t going to use public transport, it was horrendous. To get into Notting Hill or Hampstead where he wanted to see people was just such a hassle, he wouldn’t do it. So he then became a recluse in some ways. The upside of it was that he wrote more and better — and presumably he was coming towards the period of writing Crash. And, secondly, I think because he now had to walk rather than just leaping into the car, he actually released different kind of energies and it was a wonderful thing. This notion of horizon, a personal horizon, is obviously very important. And the whole culture, the mainstream culture, has followed him into acknowledging the significance of the airport fringe. Ballard says that London is a suburb of Heathrow rather than the other way around, everything you need is out there

I believe Sinclair is one of those powerful writers who through combinations of words and turns of thought can unleash energies in the reader. Not for nothing did he say that Psychogeography in the eighties had to become an occult enterprise in order to challenge the Thatcher Project.

Yes, alright, I was going to go down another route, but the mention of shamanism in Will’s piece, is pertinent. I never really felt myself to be in any way a psychogeographer up to the point of Lights Out For The Territory. I thought I was enlisted in a sub-branch of secular shamanism.

I think my sense is that it was in the Thatcherite era when there was ... a kind of occulted state in politics, demonic energies, and things so impacted and grim. And everything was being wiped out, old values, so it became necessary to provoke the human imagination. There were ways of resurrecting tools of resistance and one of them, certainly, was the notion of psychogeography

the society of free gardeners

2008-06-17T15:56:18Z

Some things came up in recent discussions about Moroccan cooking. They interweave with other happenstance.

When I left home in my late teens for my first shared flat, there was a wild cultural shift taking place. It was 1982 and my social life at my parents had grown too big. Britain was in a recession and benefits and deposits for the unemployed to hole up in shared flats were booming. The dole would give you a months rent in advance and a deposit to get a flat! The price we paid was the form filling aspect at the Bureau. It was truly mental and could last hours in the company of all manner of desperate psychopaths. I met George there one day who was bedecked in Palestinian scarf reading War and Peace to get through the scene.

We shared a flat and many interests. We would cook Arabic cuisine, listening to Music In The World of Islam, smoking Moroccan and Lebanese hash. We would pour sweet tea from a height. None of it was really a pose, it just seemed to be a preferred variation in the vegetarian resistance which manifested from our youthful politics. Others I knew practiced a simpler lifestyle, exploring wild food and rural exploration in a gypsy lifestyle, probably identifying more with a lost indigenous culture.

One strange night our besuited Bengali landlord arrived for the rent as our chickpea pressure cooker exploded, a half bottle of whiskey in his pocket, stinking of aftershave. He sniffed the air, as he did, sensing opportunity. He asked how good we were as cooks. It was like he and us were appropriating other cultures.

Recently I had a health check as I am over 45 now and it has alerted me to factors I had been putting off. I don't drink alcohol much and I am usually off tobacco. The real struggle has been changing the food indulgences of a Western comfort diet and getting more physical. As I change my meals and eat like I am 19 again it is reminding me of the holistic aspect of some of my teenage experiences into my twenties. A prolonged lifestyle change back then led to the release of various different energies. I realise now I have lost that sharpness, that light, clean feeling. I have been sluggish and dependent and on a rollercoaster of sugar and fat addiction.

There is an opening through diet to more devotional aspects of experience. I know why I respond to the Arabic culture and to an extent the Islamic culture. It is seemingly more devotional toward life than the culture I'm living in. Yet, I live largely in a working class situation, which is frankly now a zombie culture Post Thatcher/Blair. The middle classes do, to a small extent, practise a cleaner, more respectful way of life. Well, so BBC Radio Posh tells me! I sometimes wonder if my desires for the exotic Arabic were to be towards a home based culture, would I listen to choral evensong, become more involved with whatever church we have here, cook traditional British fare whatever that is and buy all my natural fabrics at Marks and Spencers? Well I do tend toward the former and the latter but to me they are equally exotic.

At the weekend I attended Treefest again. As I walked about snapping photos trying not to make anyone too paranoid - then again they all seemed blissfully free - I could not find my forest seed plant guy from last year. I did meet a chap from Reforesting Scotland, who did an effective job of prizing two quid from me for one of his old magazines. He said I would find a lot in it that would interest me and tons of links and leads. He was right. They all seem to know each other at Treefest. It's like some evolved secret society quietly communing with each other in the alternative economy. Their resistance has certainly not weakened over the years. They seem to change business address a lot these chaps and turn up here and there, like some moving target.

As I read this chaps mag, I find myself reinvigorating ideas and sentiments I held when I was that teenage outsider (but outside of what? I always thought I was trying to get more INSIDE). Christ, they are all still at it, I thought! How weak was I, like Buddah, to fall back into the arms of the material world of illusion, grossing out on the easy? As Morrissey once sang to us later in Shetland, " You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby".

One of the things that struck me in the magazine was this from "Wild Food - The Road Back":

"I have also done my time as a supermarket convenience junkie. In the last five years, though, I have been truer to my wild food beginnings... wild food hasn't just fed my belly and paid my rent, it has fed my head as well. The more I do this, the more I think about the wider significance of foraging to our place as a species in the ecosystems of localities. Ecologists speak of NICHES, using as a metaphor the way something finds its way into a particular space, because its a space it fits into. The root of the word ecology is a Greek word, oikos, meaning home, also a metaphor, for the web of interconnectedness that supports living things. These metaphors refer not to a physical place, but a position in a network of processes and relationships. An abundant wild plant has obviously found its niche. I wonder what might happen if we thought about resource production more in terms of working with niches in ecosystems. Foraging is not the whole answer for us but it does give an immediate taste(!) of what resources are there without any direct effort being expended....

...The lifestyle of most people in the West is mediated through markets and machines, with little or no contact with the soil and living processes which produce their food, never mind the rest of what we consume. We talk about food miles, but what about clothes miles, building material miles, furniture miles? Yet as recently as 200 years ago, for many people in Britain MOST OF WHAT THEY NEEDED CAME FROM WITHIN A RADIUS OF JUST A FEW MILES....

Foraging restores people to interrelationship within the living systems surrounding them....Foraging is a step forwards, back in the direction of home. It isn't food for free. It's food for sweat, food for dirt on your hands, thorns in your fingers and blisters on your feet, food for vigilance and attentiveness, for noticing and remembering, for biding your time then coming back later. It's a road back to places where we have been all the time.

Isn't it amusing how the writer of this supplies top-end London restaurants? Talk about niche relationships! To me foraging sits with gleaning and beachcombing. It IS attentiveness to relationships, yet it can also be seen as living off the excess and remainders of others. The "wild" is a rare thing these days and part of the magic is seeing how things take advantage of the incursion of human agency. A new kind of "wild" perhaps.

Finally, in another part of the clean-up, I have discovered that I may have been stealing other's bandwidth by linking in my livejournal to images belonging to others on their sites. From now on I host the images at livejournal, imageshack or flickr. They can pick up the tab!

esbjorn svennson

2008-06-16T23:59:41Z

Jazz pianist Esbjorn Svensson, who died tragically on Saturday in a scuba diving accident, had been on the periphery of my listening tastes from 1995 till today.

I listened to a lot of European jazz back in the days of Audiogalaxy and BBC Radio Three's Late Junction show, a kind of inheritance from the ECM days of the late 70s. There's something about Nordic jazz I cannot describe. It's spacious, lyrical, experimental. It's just certain tones and sentiments that touch me.

Svennson with his trio made an immediate impact for someone who loved a chamber jazz sound. It was like Miles, Horace Silver, acoustic Herbie Hancock and others filtering through Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny with a nod to both Bill and Gil Evans, keeping it tight in an entertaining trio. Their easy, meditational pieces always set one up for surprising emotional states.
When his band played in Edinburgh I sat up and took note but did not attend. I regret that.

There's some pieces over at PCL's short tribute.
http://easydreamer.blogspot.com/2008/06/rip-esbjrn-svensson.html

It's unfair when it takes someone's passing to bring them back to your attention.

greasy palms

2008-06-16T16:43:08Z

What's this?

A state leader consorting with a member of a known terrorist organisation?
What is Martin McGuinness thinking?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7455806.stm