Life Less Literary |
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A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Yaaaay! Big excitement! For the first time in ages, I can boast about having something live on the web. Pump'n'Shine, which I worked on with Holler, is finally live. And it raaawks! It's basically a trivial-pursuit type thing, with questions set by the college, but it's a lot funkier than that makes it sound, thanks to some awesome animation and Flash work by the Holler boys. My credits include design and build on the database and all the ASP pages that the Flash is calling behind the scenes. Yeah, everything you can't see, basically. I built that! Add comment | this item Sunday, April 28, 2002
Oooh... forgot to mention that I'd put 2 new life's up... and now I haven't, I've put 3 new life's up. There's our visit from a German Rote Falken group, a trip to Graves Park Rare Breeds Farm with the girls, and visiting Hannah and Jon in the midst of re-decoration in Liverpool. Add comment | this item Friday, April 26, 2002
Print out some of these handy condiment sachets for your local fast food restaurant. Add comment | this item Awww... Scot and Amy's baby makes it's first appearance online. Now that is awesome! 3 comments Add comment | this item Thursday, April 25, 2002
Was wondering what to do with our garden... perhaps we could put a pub in it (we already have a urinal) Add comment | this item Monday, April 22, 2002
Just notice that the Eleksen website, which I did some work on a while back, has been updated... and they have their first mass-market product out, a soft keyboard/case for Palms. Wonder whether it fits Clié's too? I want one badly. Have to ask Holler for a free sample. Add comment | this item Saturday, April 20, 2002
Gill's been shifting book-shelves: the fiction has all moved to her massage room, and there's now a non-fiction one at the bottom of the shelves in our bedroom. Amazing how much more I notice the titles when it's in that position... every time I come down the steps I notice books that I want to read, books that I'd forgotten entirely about like The Third Wave, books I never knew I had like The Complete Plain Words and even books which I've actually got around to reading but really wouldn't mind re-reading like Why Things Bite Back and The Recording Angel. Add comment | this item Thursday, April 18, 2002
You know you've been chatting too much when... your dreams look like real life, but you have to type "/me" before doing anything. Add comment | this item Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Finally made it to the Kurosawa yesterday - Gill allowed me the evening off (funny, I always think of my "free time" as being my London trips, and Gill gets as many evenings as she wants in return, but it made a really nice change going out in Sheffield by myself. We must get a babysitter so we can do it together next time - although Gill can't stand Kurosawa, so it'll have to be something more mainstream). Stayed on for both of the night's showings - firstly Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's adaptation of MacBeth. I'm not too familiar with the original, though have a vague idea of the story, so knew pretty much where it was going. My leg's got a bit twitchy towards the end - I wasn't 100% engrossed - but it was an awesome film nontheless. It's a shame that it was so crackly - about 90% of the film seems to consist of long, meaningful silences, but during these I could hardly hear myself think for the fizzes and pops coming from the screen. Most impressive part was the samurai clobber - I was in the British museum the other day checking this stuff out (could have stayed there for hours, had not my mobile phone rung & I been ejected unceremoniously from the galleries), the lacquered (sp?) armour and other items are incredible - like space-age 70s ornaments, but made centuries before. The various clan symbols - Washizu's centipede and Miki's rabbit, the little designs repeated on their fabrics, the flags strapped to retainers backs, flapping away in the perpetual wind to create a haunting susurrus, I want flags strapped to my back! Throughout the film, the sounds (and lack of them) were one of the strongest parts - although there were so many strongest parts (the darkness of Mount Fuji's volcanic ash, the fog and the wind, the trees' branches tangling across your view... the realisation of MacBeth as a Noh play, and the incredible stylized performances of Toshirô Mifune (as Taketori Washizu - the MacBeth character) and Isuzu Yamada (as Asaji, his Lady MacBeth) are incredible. Check out Michael Coy's review at IMDB for a much better description than I could give. The second film was Yojimbo, which as more of a Western-style action movie (you can easily see the temptation for Leone et al in remaking Kurosawa's films in the West - there is something in the remoteness of the rural villages, the banditry and lawlessness, the ronin figure, which ties up beautifully... but the samurais had better costumes) was easier to sit through for 2 hours without getting twitchy. I had seen half of the film before (yeah, it was a Sunday afternoon... I fell asleep, I'm sorry - nothing to do with the quality of the film) but wanted to see the rest, and wanted to see it on a bigger screen (which reminds me... somthing I've thought about lots lately, and was debating with Gill's mum and sister - where do you sit in the cinema? I never used to think anything of it until I started going with Gill, and she never took her glasses so we always ended up near the front. Now I find it hard to sit anywhere else - it's so great having the action fill your entire view. June and Cath argue that you have to sit near the back, otherwise you can't see everything on the screen, but I don't think that's the point - did the director even intend you to see everything on the screen? The action is usually central, or at least in one place, and by sitting close-up you can truly immerse yourself in it. Sit and the back and you may as well be watching on TV). Enough of that... where was I, oh yeah, the film... well, what can I say except for a bunch of wasted superlatives. The ultimate ronin movie (which is interesting, in light of what we are doing with Bradonpace). Mifune is awesome again as the samurai, surely teaching Clint everything he knew (right down to the chewed matchstick). There's even a thug character in Ushi-Tore's gang who likes just like Richard Kiel as Jaws :-). Some of my favourite scenes are the shots lingering on the samurai's expression, totally confident, chuckling inside at the chaos he is wreaking and the fun he is having. But... every detail of the film is enchanting. Wonderful. Add comment | this item Monday, April 15, 2002
Phil posted me some stuff about his local blues-band, Los Bluesfalos, which made me think back to the bands of my own youth... not because I used to go to lots of blues gigs (although we did from time to time get excited about the incredible string bending of the Papa George band, although I of course got more excited about the fast fingers of George's bassist). No, the reason I got excited is because the one band we would follow to the ends of the earth (or Fulham, whichever was nearest) was Los Bastados (sounds a bit like Los Bluesfalos, no? OK, weak connection, but it got my mind working). We first went to see them when they were Wasteland, and I was about 15. I remember once particular gig at St Mary's Church Hall, Twickenham, (sadly long since demolished to make way for council offices) when I was extremely cider-fuelled in the way that only a 15-year-old can be, and I managed to spray vomit pretty much everywhere around the front of the stage, ended up dancing in it, sitting in it, lying in it, etc. To my eternal shame I also seem to recall pissing in the cutlery draw of the downstairs kitchen. I walked home that night, pissing as I went (most of it ended up on my coat), and remember slumping into bed to watch The Great Rock and Roll Swindle on TV. We originally went to see Nexus, who Rob's brother was playing bass for, but ended up loving Wasteland, despite the antics of the Wasteland Barmy Army (Phil's brother Kentigern and his mates, who would slam dance around like lunatics and grab any unsuspecting souls to use as a launch-platform for their pogoing. Actually, the slamming was great fun, and I lost several pairs of glasses that way). After The Mission released a song called Wasteland, they decided the name was too poncey and changed it to Los Bastados, their sound evolving at around the same time (I think Des learned to sing an octave lower) into something grungier, more Mexican machismo. They also did the best ever version of LA Woman (which we in our naivitë tried to copy). I've a feeling they covered some Wayne/Jayne County and the Electric Chairs too, though I forget which song. So anyway, here I am suffering from mid-80s nostalgia for about the third time in as many days, when I find that Josh, their lead guitarist and probably the least bastard-ish Bastados (I always hated Leo - that wanker stole my bass-EQ pedal and walkman from backstage when we supported them one gig. Charlie and Des were just scary. Josh had very little hair. It's hard to be scared of somebody with very little hair, unless it's Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast), has put up a website devoted to Wasteland/Bastados. So now I can sit back and enjoy the MP3s (no doubt they won't be as good as first time around, but then that's what nostalgia's all about). Josh also engineered our first ever demo tape (we were called Light and Sound Department at the time) on his 4-track. Not the best sound in the world (especially as my copy was recorded at about minus 1000 decibels or something) but I ought to dig it out and MP3 it some time, if only to prove how much my vocals have improved since then. 2 comments Add comment | this item Sunday, April 14, 2002
Finally got my chatbots up and running on Liv4now for a trial run last week. I wrote the program a while ago, using the mIRC scripting language. I'd hoped to be able to adapt a Perl version of Eliza I wrote some 6 years ago, but the mIRC language is... bizarre, unlike nothing else I've ever come across, very little similarities to other scripting languages in existence. So I went out hunting mIRC bots - I was sure there were already bots out there to do this kind of thing (basically listen for keywords and pretend to be engaging in conversation), but there weren't really. So I had to start from scratch. It was pretty painful going, especially at first, but I made it in the end. So we now have 3 bots - vicar (who I wrote the "script" for, as well as writing the script for), sadgit and teeney (both of whom learnt their lines off Ben). I left them in the room for 24 hours, and got some pretty satisfying results for a first try. Their vocabularies need expanding a bit, but the idea's sound. Here's a few of my favourites...
Add comment | this item Friday, April 12, 2002
This is so cool (well, kept me amused anyway. And actually, our house is slightly further down the road, on the top of the Commonside/Spring Hill/Spring Hill Road triangle... but for some reason the map won't recentre there) 2 comments Add comment | this item Lola discovered Rowan's Zolo today - possibly the greatest toy ever invented (even if it is a bugger to stop it from falling apart sometimes) Add comment | this item Thursday, April 11, 2002
Priceless! It may not be April 1st, but for a moment there, I had Gill believing that there was no "Q" on a PC keyboard (she couldn't find it), but that if you typed "KW" instead then it would automatically convert it. :-D Add comment | this item Oh dear, sometimes these work-avoidance-days are so hard on my blog-reading public... things do deteriorate somewhat. But screw that, I've been having fun with the Babelizer: Original English Text: what's double dutch for chinese whispers?
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Add comment | this item Oh shit, why the fuck not make it three. Running a Babelfish on this page provided me with the best read of the day... One describes the music of the Cardiacs from England best in such a way: A grey old man (Punkrock) and a grey and gruengesichtiger old man (70's-progressive skirt) meet easily angetrunken on the way home of an informal meeting.... (etc etc etc)I love Babelfish (and, even better, the Babelizer). Mind you, I always thought it was the 60s when skirts went progressive ;-) Add comment | this item Oh, and speaking of the Cardiacs (twice in one day, better be careful), glad to note that the Lyrics Organ now has the words to The Whole World Window, which was the whole reason why I went online looking for Cardiacs stuff in the first place. Was just listening to it and... gloriously sad and happy all at once, possibly the best rip-off of Bach's Air on a G-String in the world, and gorgeously snuffly. Was moved enough to think "I hope somebody thinks to play this at my funeral, and arranges a big confetti bomb to cover the congregation at the appropriate point. Maybe some pyros too, or is that a bit over the top?" Ah well, while to go yet, I hope. Add comment | this item Hahahahaha: hol·landThank you Merriam Webster! Not only is it a country, it's the frickin' Dutch name for a country :-) Add comment | this item Just found the perfect introduction to the Cardiacs - much better than anything on the official site, almost perfect except for the author's little rant about how there's "no such country as Holland"... oh yeah, schmarte-arsje, in that case, how come this non-existant country has a tourist board with a website at visitholland.com. Anyway, I digress in order to be deliberately annoying. Oh, the other thing that's not perfect about this introduction is where it says "they still played with a backing tape, which spoiled the spontanity of the event a bit for me". Well, OK, that's a subjective statement so I'll allow it through, but still the Cardiacs come across as the most spontaneous live band, with or without backing tapes. Actually, although their live performances will never for me quite match the brilliance of the mid-80s ones, mainly because there's far less people on stage (except at the last gig), far more in the audience, no bunches of flowers and confetti bombs at the end (except at the last gig... which was, yeah, almost a return to 1985, line-up and all), they're far more sensibly dressed now, and Tim has become older, portlier and slightly less crazed and maniacal (although the new old portly Tim is also pretty much fun to watch & listen to) they have really turned the backing tape into an extra instrument, and they use it better than any other band I've seen. Anyway, I thought I should mention it because almost every time I've strolled out lately, I've had the Cardiacs blasting on my MP3 player. And little blog-esque thoughts go through my head accompanying every track, so much so that I probably have a whole paperback's worth of Cardiacs ramblings stored up in my head, but felt that it might be too cruel to unleash them on the world at large. Besides, I've read so many blow-by-blow descriptions of Cardiacs albums, and none of them could ever possibly make sense to anybody who wasn't a Cardiacs fan. Oh yeah, the site also reminded me that I really must get hold of A Little Man and a House... on CD soon... strangely enough, it was the first Cardiacs CD I ever owned, back in 1990. Not only that, but unbeknownst to me I had the rarer-than-hens-teeth-and-more-valuable-than-dragons' Dutch (err, I mean Netherlandish, err, Hollandian... Neanderthal?) version, with about 10 bonus tracks, stuff like Eating in Bed which I only had on single. Anyway, I gave it to Arthur years ago, because he begged me and begged me, and in return he gave me the LP version (without all the bonus tracks) and promised me a tape of my CD later... and still later (once he had the technology) he promised me a CD of my CD... and I still don't have it :-( gonna go out and buy the thing (again) eventually... Ah well, please enjoy... the best band in the world. 2 comments Add comment | this item Good news! The Kurosawa season (which I totally missed at the NFT, despite it running for 2 months) seems to have come to Sheffield. Lots of showings, next week at least, and of Yojimbo, Throne of Blood and Drunken Angel at least, at the Showroom. Must pick up a leaflet. Also must watch the DVD of The Hidden Fortress which I bought the other week to try and assuage my guilt at missing so many great films at the NFT. Add comment | this item Wednesday, April 10, 2002
On the train down to London on Monday, I sat directly behind a girl - short, black hair, spiked, thickly gelled, hedgehog-straight. I never actually saw her face, or anything other than her hair. And I got to listen to her walkman (repetitive drum track over-and-over for what seemed like hours - leaning in closer behind her I picked up a little latin-style singing and melody - not quite as bad as I thought but... still... for that long??) I hadn't seen (or at least noticed) hair quite like that since the 80s. Hair like that goes with a ra-ra skirt and pixie boots. In fact... my god, she could easily be Liz. She got off at Leicester, and I would have thought no more of the matter. But today, I was on the return train, this time sitting at the end of the carriage instead of the middle. At Leicester a girl with spiky black hair got on the train. She sat down in the same spot as before (this time I was facing rather than staring down her hair-roots), and I thought "is it the same girl". My mind passed on, but a few minutes later I tied the annoying repetitive drum beat that had appeared on the edge of hearing, with her appearance. And I thought about Liz again... god, she was amazing, that was an amazing time. Joel and I both fancied her something chronic - both sent her valentines (my first one I sent, I musta been about 13), and both got valentines back (first on I received... but then I found she cut them out quickly and sent them around in response to ours, so it suddenly didn't feel quite so special). There was no rivalry between Joel & I - we were totally united in trying to win her love for one or other (or both?) of us. Quite a bonding, I guess. Perhaps there was some jealousy, after all, Joel always got attention from girls, but perhaps that was a plus as well, after all, Liz hadn't shown any favouritism towards him. Anyway, when I met up with her again 10 years later, it was very strange. Not like she'd changed or anything, although she had a little. More that I had moved on... continents. And she was there with some bloke, nice enough guy but wouldn't have looked too out of place in a Guy Richie film, tux and muscles, and he had a clone mate with him. And again that was a negative/positive moment - negative: my god, does she really fancy blokes like that, was that her idea of a perfect man all along, etc. positive: that was a close thing. If anything had happened to us, I might have been happy enough and... euurgh, I'd never have progressed beyond the neanderthal. Anyway anyway... there I was, thinking "aaaaah.... Liz, my first love", and then I remembered that of course that's utter bullshit. JB was my first love... had a huge crush on her from the age of 8 or 9 for another 3 or 4 years (even though I never saw her for the last couple of those). I remember one surreal incident... I had seen Half a Sixpence, starring Tommy Steele, on TV (or at least part of it). Something about the idea behind it, this sixpence representing the couple, splitting it, half each, it touched me... in a way that stuff like that probably would touch a 10 year old. Only I didn't have any sixpences. And if I did, I wouldn't have been able to split one. So I split something else, some electrical component, think it was an IC, not of the big blocky chip variety, but the kind of pre-whatevered-variety that was fairly thin and integrated into the PCB (coming over like an electronics geek now... I did try, really I did, I got all the breadboard books out of the library, went to Breadboard '81, but I blew my 555 when I tried to build a basic synthesizer... short-circuited one of the connections and effectively turned it into a 554, or somesuch... anyway, I was never that au fait with electronics, but I moved in certain circles). So anyway, I somehow split this chip in two, got on my bike, cycled down Jessie's road, and slowed down towards her house and tossed the half-chip on the ground near her front gate. A week or two later and I was tortured with thoughts of her... would the magic have worked, erm, I dunno... whatever. So I headed over there again, was cycling down the street, just slowing down and scoping out her house when I notice (remember I was short-sighted and glasses-less at the time) those two girls in the street, one of them's Jessie! Shit, what should I do, fuck, so embarrasing. Feet flew, pedals round faster faster faster, and I sped out of there, one of the girls calling something to me as I passed (it was probably Jessie saying "hey, Daniel, it's me, Jessica", but fuck it... I was far too embarrased to hang around and find out). So I got away. And saw very little of her after that. I bumped into her once or twice between the years of about 16-20, which was quite torturing, she was incredibly trendy and studying dance and seemed to be hanging around with all these equallly trendy skinhead-type guys (my hair about 3 feet long at the time), a kinda clockwork-orange theme (surely not real skinheads, her being half-Indian and all that... or is she rebelling against that part of her, or... I dunno? bullshit!) And then again, recently, about a year or two again, and finally it got to reach the point that it did with Liz... my god, she's not gone forwards... she's gone backwards if she's gone anywhere. I still glad to be who I am where I am with who I'm with. Add comment | this item I was first alerted to Eugene Mirman, the creepy singing child, by Popbitch about a year ago. Glad that Jeff just jogged my memory - Eugene has a whole bunch of new songs! Add comment | this item Reading Neil Gaiman's journal, he mentions people ripping off plots from his stories, and the fact the he won an essay competition copying a Marv Wolfman comic plot. Reminds me of when I was writing essays at secondary school - I don't think there was a single one that didn't come either from a book I'd read or from the plot of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure I'd played previously. I remember I had a book of Sci-fi/Fantasy short stories, think thing by one of those American authors with a slightly odd name, like Ashby de la Zouch or something, and I lived off that book for years, including my English Language O-Level, where I got a grade A (unlike English Literature, where I failed with a D - I was obviously better at regurgitating this stuff than taking any of it in). The stories were based around such simple kernels of ideas, a bit like Ray Bradbury, that it was easy to recast the story in whatever mode you wanted to. An essay title like "The unexpected gift" led me straight onto the story about the dinosaur egg which arrived on the doorstep, and the events leading up to its hatching. A question about time-travel was an absolute gift, Mr de la Zouche having written my favourite time-travel-paradox story, which I altered a little, featuring a man who goes back in time a second time, to kill the person who'd humiliated him the first time, and ended up ceasing to exist (because time or nature or whatever just couldn't handle him existing twice in the same instant). Time travel came into play again in the story about the guy who travelled back on a pre-history tour, but accidentally stepped on a butterfly on the levitated path, and in doing so wiped out the entire human race. 1 comment Add comment | this item Whoah, I must've got caught in a parallel dimension, alternate universe or something. Y'see, I didn't realise that Bill Gates is dead. And while we're on the subject, via that site I found this wonderful cut out model of Bill Gates's house. Add comment | this item Heh heh, got an interesting little email-journal from David - sounds like things are getting interesting over on Hornby Island:
Add comment | this item Sunday, April 07, 2002
More cocktail experimentation - another lemon drop-esque attempt: juice of 1-and-a-half lemons (coz that's what I had lying around), 1 measure Absolut citron vodka, 1 measure Cointreau, 1/3rd measure pepper vodka - gives it a nice sort of ginger beer sting. What to call it? Chilli sherbet? Yellow peril? Lemon spike? 2 comments Add comment | this item Thursday, April 04, 2002
Yeah, that dream, right. I kept on being late for band practices - feelings of guilt, Arthur's gonna be so pissed off - it was me who wanted to get things moving again, and here I am (checks watch) shit - almost an hour late already. Thing is, I had to keep popping into the music shop to check out this amazing guitar effects unit. In the end (about my third visit) I bought it. Except I don't have a guitar, only a bass (well, I do have a guitar - £50 Les Paul copy - but I ripped the humbuckers out when I attended a guitar workshop run by Keith Rowe - it was already falling apart somewhat, and I found that moving the pickups around the strings and, in particular, playing with the magnets inside them made a much more pleasing sound than just plain old strumming). So I decided to buy a guitar at the same time - a pink Japanese poncey-heavy-metal-style one (for the life of me I don't know why). And I needed some leads and stuff to go with them as well (oh, and a little practise amp). Shit, more guilt... I really can't afford all of this. Oh well, learn to live with it. I travelled to the practice by trolley bus... in Birmingham... while watching a TV shock-horror documentary on how many kids are dying trying to bunk fares on Birmingham's trolley buses. Y'see, in Birmingham they put the wires lower than anywhere else in the country (something to do with saving money), and the buses have a trapdoor on the roof, and the kids jump off bridges and other vantage points to get into the bus's trapdoor and avoid paying the driver on the way in. And in doing so, a large number of them touch the wires and get electrocuted. I was shocked by this (pardon the pun) - why couldn't the council just pay that bit extra and suspend the wires higher - if it's good enough for everyone else in the country. As I was pondering this, I watched a family bunk their way into the bus via the trapdoor: single mum, boy of 12-ish and his toddler sister. Mutters of disapproval from around the bus, but who am I to condemn? From the window we see a stately looking pub being knocked down. "Oh look" the mum says to her son "they're knocking down Mother Redcap's", and blow me if it isn't Mother Redcap's in Dublin. Well, the name plate says something different, something more generically pubbish, but I recognise it instantly as Mother Redcap's - look, there's Trinity College opposite. Well blow me, surely that place is a bit of a landmark, why would they knock it down? Oh well, can't say that my memories from there are entirely happy - I'm about to start showing off to the other passengers on the bus, gabbing about the time we got heckled repeatedly from the stage by Frances Black ("Will youse shut up at the back there. This is a listeners gig. Talkers go downstairs pllllease"), but I can't work out a way of doing it without seeming like a prick. In fact, I don't think there is a way of doing it without seeming like a prick. It was at around about this point that the postman came (except it wasn't the postman, it was Cath, and I needn't have impaled my hand rushing to answer the door. Oh well). Add comment | this item Something odd seems to be happening with my hands at the moment - maybe it's another change of season thing (heh heh - Change of Season - another Dutch jazz classic, the Herbie Nichols composition as played by Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink et al... also another search where Google links prominently to my CD list). I keep injuring them - last week, helping Cath & Ian to move house, I rammed my knuckles hard against the corner of a wall, propelled by a box loaded with about 50 videos (very heavy) - the resultant scab on the middle finger of my left hand now covers a swelling of monstrous proportions. Then this morning, as I enjoyed my second sleep (shit... must write down that dream) post-Lolly's 6am milk, the doorbell rang, Gill yelled "Postman" and I jumped out of bed and down the steps still 90% sleeping. There's a screw sticking out of the wall (god knows why) and as my left hand brushed across it I put two deep tears into the surface of the palm. Later in the day I drove the German girls into town to say our final farewells. Parked up too far back - scratched my hands on the spiky car-park hedge getting the boot open. And then, as I got their 3 bags from the boot, with each one I scraped my hand across the remains of the aerial (yeah, foolishly drove the car into a carwash forgetting that my aerial, non-existent for 12 months, was now back in its natural place - so the new aerial only lasted about a month) - 3 more scrapes on my left hand. More minor scratches (god knows how) getting the washing off the line and putting more stuff into the washing machine. Why does it hurt when I type? Add comment | this item (Sorry... more musical meanderings)... currently on the tape recorder, a very poor recording (think the record player picked up an inordinate amount of dust halfway through, and I never noticed until I got the record back to the library) of the Harry Miller Quintet's Down South. I can find precious little about Miller online, just a brief biog, this little discography and a mention of him among Han Bennink's work. And, oh, wow... he founded Ogun Records (what's Spike Milligan doing there? Nice one! Interesting reading too). The music is a gorgeous melange of Dutch/South African busy-busy jazz, gorgeous nursery-rhyme double bass playing. I want to hear more (or at least hear this at better quality). Wow ... there's a boxed set available. Another one for the wish list! Whoah, here it is again - (OK, I take it back, there is a fair bit of Miller online). Now I think about it, I have Bracknell Breakdown on vinyl - another second-hand bargain. Time to dig it out... Add comment | this item Finally managed to solve my video problems - yay! Feel like ripping all my mini-DVs to MPEG now (hmmm... maybe once I've ripped all my tapes to MP3 :-)) In the meantime, I managed to come up with something quite respectable for Zaid. Add comment | this item Finally made it up to the loft to sniff out some tapes - didn't find the dEUS but... my god, what a gold mine. I think I could go on buying & burning CDs for the rest of my life and never come up with anything as wonderful and varied as my tape collection. From the list I posted yesterday, I forgot to mention the dozens of tapes of old jam sessions (proper bands I played in and impromptu groupings of friends musical and non-musical), bootlegs of gigs I was at (Ozric Tentacles to Nik Turner at the Treworgey Tree Fair, a whole bunch of LMC festivals and other events, Yusef Lateef at the Union Chapel, ....), dozens of Zappa albums (but still only a small fraction of his output - and far too many of them - think my musical tastes may have matured enough to enjoy the Guitar albums more now), and, along with the official Ozrics tapes, other festy bands including the Ullulators (hmm... not so sure what I saw in them at the time) and, oh my god, how could I have forgotten about them, one of the most underrated bands of all times - The Oroonies (totally disagree with just about everything the reviewer on that website says - the early, rough as hell stuff is easily the best, the later ambient stuff is, well, a bit... ambient. Good ambient, mind you, but doesn't grab me like the punk-folk-Saturnalia stuff. I gotta dig deeper into the tapes and find my copy of The Woods Are Alive With The Smell Of His Coming - the track Cloven Foot [their wierd mutant psychoid double-drunken version of Devo's Mongoloid] is one of the rawest things I heard in my life. Wow - seems like I have all the tapes they ever made. That's cool, but a bit of a disappointment too - nothing else left for me to track down. Gotta convert them to MP3 some day). I remember vaguely seeing them at festivals, stalking around the stage with pinocchio-style plastic noses, everyone else (the Ozrics fans) seemed to hate them, which made it even better. So I grabbed a handful of stuff at random from the first pile I came across - The Oroonies, Albert Ayler, The Pop Group, Ron Carter, Vienna Art Orchestra, Zappa, Harry Miller... heh heh heh. Fun times ahead... Add comment | this item Wednesday, April 03, 2002
Gill's got a new job - setting up an ISSP scheme to work with the 50 words young offenders in Sheffield, or something like that. She says it's a bit like being a prison officer. Crikey! Add comment | this item Still on the Legendary Stardust Cowboy trip... found this site. I love his autobiography - strange and beautiful. Add comment | this item Been out in the garden with Rowan today. I find our garden kinda depressing. For a start, there's no soil. It's an old playground, concreted over with half of it built up with decking, so any flora has to live in pots (and has to be watered religiously throughout the hot months). And also, it's kinda small - well, I guess pretty average as gardens go, but nothing to compare to our previous one, and a bit of an odd shape, and... all very low down shady - hard for the sun to reach it. When I think about it, as we have progressed through ever nicer houses, I have liked our gardens less. That seems kinda strange, given that our last garden was gi-normous, much bigger than the previous one, about 18 metres square (if you took away the garage), and it had a stream at the bottom of it with a lovely flower bed alongside it. But we never really made it very much our own (although Gill's pond was a huge step in the right direction - god how I miss the tadpoles now that it's spring again), and being alongside a park, with another unfenced-off garden across the stream, it always felt a bit public, again never quite our own. Yes, when I think back, my favourite garden was definitely the one in Forest Gate. Not too big (although big enough - about 10m x 4m), when we moved in there it was a jungle - over a metre-high throughout with brambles, bindweed, nettles and all other varieties of hard-to-remove weeds. We moved there in July, and I spent our first autumn and winter there clearing it - pulling up weeds, digging it over and over again, hunting down microscopic pieces of bindweet root, salvaging tulip and crocus bulbs, trashing the rotten shed, levelling the whole thing off to a field of fresh earth. And then Gill started work re-landscaping - bricks salvaged from skips formed the wiggly borders, the tulips and rosebushes that we'd rescued paraded along oneside, a small lawn behind the house, path alongside it to the back of the house made of (again salvaged) concrete slabs floating in gravel. And at the back, a new shed, shady garden alongside with compost-factory, and a little vegetable patch which was my pride and joy. I propagated the veg inside - a few corn on the cobs, butternut squash and pumpkin (seeds salvaged from our dinner), carrots, blackcurrant bushes - and planted them out when the time came. Throughout the summer I would lie on the lawn throughout the dusk and early night, smoking and reading by torchlight, breathing in the plant-rich air, filling the watering can from the bath and giving the plants a soaking almost every night (we never had a hosepipe, and I used to tut at the wastefulness of our neighbours sprinkler, sprinkling away for hours). It was all so perfect. And old Sid and Missie (never did work out her name) next door were so happy that their proud garden had an equal alongside it - they were very unhappy about the previous owner's neglect. And we made it all, from scratch. I often wonder what it looks like today, whether it's survived. Add comment | this item Been meaning to dig out a few of my old tapes from the loft, ever since Annick emailed me about dEUS the other day. But somehow, that trip up the step-ladder (followed by worming between boxes and then digging through 800-odd cassettes looking for "just the one") keeps putting me off. So I'm doing the next best thing instead, plundering my record collection. It's funny the differing characteristics of my various music collections. Tape is the one... a history of my musical education. From a few early pre-recorded jobbies when I bought my first Walkman (Thomas Dolby, David Bowie) through taped copies of my early vinyl, for use on the Walkman (mainly The Cramps) mushrooming out to cover copies of friends LPs (Hendrix and other late-60s/early-70s stuff, Soft Machine, Gong, 30 [30!] Hawkwind albums, Yes) and then even further to anything I could borrow from a record library (experimenting with stuff I probably wouldn't normally buy - the fringes of jazz, ambient and the avant-garde, lots of Eno and Jon Hassell) and of course the few pre-vinyl Ozric Tentacles tapes that didn't get lent out never-to-be-returned. Vinyl is a much more mixed bag - starting off before the tapes (sure I must have the Adam and the Ants LP somewhere) and continuing right through, the bulk of it is stuff I picked up at charity shops, old classical and jazz LPs, again stuff I wouldn't have splashed out full price on, but don't mind wasting 50p for. So most of my LP collection is stuff I'm not too attatched too, but is nice listening to once every blue moon. Oh, and there's also just about everything released by Bill Laswell in there somewhere, from the time in the late 80s/early 90s when I used to treat myself to an LP from Revolver Records in Bristol every week if I finished my college work (or, usually, if I didn't too). I must have enough Celluloid record inserts to wallpaper a room. And then CDs... my first was Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Pink Floyd, and then (a birthday present) New Tijuana Moods by Charles Mingus - my first ever Jazz LP and probably still my favourite. Of course, pretty much everything I buy now is on CD - and for that reason it represents my more recent musical tastes, also perhaps (hmmm... then again...) more carefully planned purchases than the other stuff, CDs being so damned expensive. But also lots of it is... I dunno, I seem to have lost musical direction a bit somewhere along the way. It's all a bit... sanitized. Well, that's not quite right, but it seems to lack some of the rough edges of my tape and, in particular, my record collection. So anyway, going back to those rough edges - today I dug out the absolutely awesome Big Beat compilation Rockabilly Psychosis and the Garage Disease (hmmm... the Amazon CD has a couple of tracks that aren't on the vinyl version... should I upgrade....?). Something made me think of it lately - I forget what - perhaps I saw it in a shop window in Antwerp, something like that. Anyway, glad I rediscovered it. It has a few dodgy tracks on it (mainly the 80s psychobilly ones), but the rest... wow! All those 60s originals, superior versions of stuff later covered by the Cramps, like Surfing Bird, The Crusher and Love Me. The Sonics singing Psycho... wow! Has there ever been another band in existence as good as the Sonics? The original Seattle sound. They fucking ROCK. And The Legendary Stardust Cowboy - fucking mental. I gotta get some more of this stuff. In fact, time to update my Amazon Wish List. OK, more vinyl... on to Bill Laswell's Baselines (did I really write that review?) Add comment | this item Monday, April 01, 2002
Went to the Earth Centre today with Woodcraft & the Germans. Saw some wonderful stuff there - and found another potential wedding venue. In the afternoon we spent some of our tokens on the climbing tower - I was keen to do the zip-slide, also quite keen on abseiling, not so keen on climbing but thought I might just as well do the whole package. Glad I did. I've never climbed before (missed out on various opportunitites) but think I'm likely to do it again. Got three-quarters of the way up quite quickly, without really thinking, then started thinking (a bad thing) that it would be really easy as long as I didn't look down. Then looked down. I wasn't exactly scared - I knew that somebody had me on a rope and I wasn't going to hurt myself, but it sped the adrenaline around my body, and made it a lot harder choosing hand and foot-holds after that. The last metre, to reach up and touch the top plank, was the hardest part of all. Then I walked and bounced backwards quickly to solid earth again, where the instructor told me I'd done really it well for a beginner and very quickly. I hadn't realised how much I was exerting myself, but as soon as I was standing on the ground I realised my heart was in my mouth, finding it hard to breathe, adrenalin everywhere. It was a wonderful feeling - and I still had the other 2 activities to go. Abseiling was a piece of the proverbial - lost my footing once, but no worries, I still had a little bit of adrenalin left over from the climbing and it felt as easy as going for a Sunday stroll. Zip slide was also not really challenging - but was a lot of fun. By now I had lost all fear (quite unusual - I'm usually terrified of heights) and as soon as I was given the word I hurled myself from the tower and starfished my way back down to earth. It was amazing how different these activities are from standard theme-park fare of rollercoasters etc. Although they didn't involve as much "danger", i.e. not the speed and heights of a theme park ride, and are just as safe, being under control of an instructor, safety-harnesses ahoy, the fact that you perform the activity yourself, choosing a path to climb etc rather than being stuck in a rollercoaster's static path, made them 10 times more exciting and fulfilling. Add comment | this item |
There was a rainbow outside our back window on Friday!
