the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
For those of you who, like me, have less than zero desire to support your national team, why not check out the World Development Movement’s page which assesses each of the country’s for their ethical criteria, and tells you who you should be supporting in each game! click here for the chooser.
I’ll save you the hassle – Ghana and Sweden come out tops. :o)
thanks to Darren for the link.
Last night was the first in a new series called The Convent, in which four women from wildly differing backgrounds check in to a convent for 40 days. Yes, it’s reality TV, and yes, it’s what all reality TV should be like – offering people the relatively un-manipulated chance to experience something new and potentially life changing.
It’s a follow-up series to one called ‘The Monastery’ that was on about a year ago. Fascinating, life-affirming brain-food. And what’s more, you can watch it all online (thanks to Jonny B for the link).
Yay! Just as I was teaching this morning, a TNT delivery lorry pulls up outside and a man with a palette and a hand truck thing arrives at the door, bearing CDs by the shit-load. Loads of copies of ‘Behind Every Word’.
the first load of orders have been posted already (you’ll have received an email if yours has been sent – if it hasn’t it’ll go first thing tomorrow), and because the ‘release date’ is the 20th, it means that if you order the CD now, not only will it go out in the next day’s post, but you’ll still get the free download album. How great is that? Go on, you know you want to… :o)
It’s been a busy couple of days – I’ve been booked to play at Greenbelt at the end of August, and have a gig or two in Italy the second weekend in July. Now the CD’s here, I need to get sending that out to press peoples, along with the press release for the Edinburgh festival gigs… I’m going to be sick of jiffy bags before too long…
Anyway, off you go and order the new CD, fair blogling.
Much has been made of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, with reporters and politicians calling it great news.
Clearly, al-Zarqawi was a mad terrorist, though in body-count terms, he couldn’t hold a candle to the destruction wrought by the US/UK illegal invasion and subsequent killing spree. The twistedness of one set of international warlords crowing over the death of an opportunist who had galvanised support for his mad behaviour out of the perfectly logical opposition of the Iraqi people to the presence of the US/UK troops is hard to watch. It makes a little more sense of what George Galloway said last week. I still think Galloway phrased it in a stupid way (though it depends on how edited the quote was by the GQ writers), but his point about the equivalence of someone killing Blair vs. the blowing up of innocents in Iraq was a point that needs to be made. The point isn’t that killing Blair would be a good thing – of course not – but that ALL the killing is wrong. Bad guys getting killed isn’t a good thing. It’s occasionally understandable if it’s an attempt to prevent further killing (cf. the role of Deitrich Bonhoeffer in the plot to assassinate Hitler), but rejoicing over death is a perilous activity (I’ll reserve final judgement til I see my own reaction to the eventual demise of Margaret Thatcher… the desire for a street-party will definitely be bubbling below the surface, but I do hope she dies peacefully…)
Anyway, none of that was the point of this blog. The point is how the world leaders’ comments on the death of al-Zarqawi reflect their appalling understanding of the nature of anti-western sentiment across the Arab world. They keep referring to a-Z as the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, ignoring the number of correspondents who say that al-Qaeda hardly exists at all as a hierarchical structure, and clearly not getting that the killing of a leader leading to a collapse of the resistance is a distinctly old war way of looking at things. If the plot to kill hitler had succeeded, it’s quite plausible that the second world war would not have happened. He was very strongly the driving force and ideological brains behind the Third Reich.
al-Zarqawi holds no such power. He was a new war leader. He was a fire-brand and a loud mouth, but he didn’t invent anti-western sentiment in Iraq or anywhere else. He didn’t invent suicide bombing or car bombing. His are not the only resistance army at work in Iraq. Much has been made of his Jordanian birth, to try and suggest that the resistance is a foreign thing, not an Iraqi thing. I think the former residents of Falluja might have something to say about that.
And before any of you hawkish readers get on your high horse – no, I’m no fan of al-Zarqawi. I’d have liked to see him tried in a war-crimes court, alongside Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, John Reid, Condoleeza Rice, Saddam Hussein and any other psychotic war-mongering nutter engaged in killing people across the planet. He’s an easy target for a government desperately looking for some ‘good news’ in a worsening situation, but the death of one dude isn’t going to change the state of play in Iraq – it’s more likely to strengthen the resolve of those opposed to the occupation – and it certainly doesn’t provide any kind of counterbalance to horrific atrocities happening in the name of ‘enduring freedom’.
The mad thing about all of this is that I wish they were right – I wish the killing would stop, it’s a shame that taking out a-Z isn’t going to be the end of journalists being kidnapped and beheaded. But it’s an even bigger shame that the western troops are still there, still provoking, still giving footholds to murdering loons looking for an excuse to kill more westerners. All the presence of the army does is prove them right. All the killing of a-Z does is provide reason to ‘avenge his death’.
As the magical Franti says, ‘you can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace’. When will they stop trying?
Spent a bit of time this morning updating and redesigning pillowmountainrecords.co.uk – it looks lovely, until you change the font size in your browser away from the default. Then it goes all weird. Must find out how to do scaleable boxes in CSS… the Lovely Rev. G gave me some tips, so will check them out.
Anyway, I like the look of the site, and it’s up to date. Will finish it at some point, I’m sure. :o)
Had a rather nice lunch today with BJ Cole, catching up on news, planning for the gig on Thursday at the Half Moon, and then finally letting him hear his own fine work on ‘Scott Peck’ from the new album. What a lovely way to spend the afternoon.
Sales update – the new CD is selling really well, thanks so much to all those of you who’ve already ordered it. The sooner you do, the greater my peace of mind over the cost of releasing it in the first place! :o) I hope y’all are enjoying ‘Lessons Learned From The Fairly Aged Felines’ (if you’ve had any trouble with the download process, let me know and we’ll sort something out…)
TSP bought the DVD of Love Actually on Ebay last week. I’d seen it before, but watched it again. I quite like Richard Curtis, despite thinking Four Weddings was largely nonsense, and Notting Hill suffered from the much-publicised lack of black people in a very heavily black part of London. I like the fact that he wrote Blackadder – that’s a good thing. And I like his commitment to the Make Poverty History campaign.
Anyway, this isn’t meant as a review of the film (though it must be said, the scene where Hugh Grant disses the American president is a blinder… sad that he had to be inspired to do it by the pres. hitting on his tea-lady, rather than just out of some kind of moral response to the evil horse-shit that American presidents are so often involved with, but viewers can’t be choosers, and it’s a sweet moment, nonetheless). the interesting bit of the film is in the extras.
Richard Curtis does a little talking head slot about each of the featured songs in the film, and makes the comment that he’s spent his life learning about emotions and being instructed in human relationships by female singer/songwriters. And it was a point that struck home. Particularly because two of those he picked were Joni Mitchell and Mary Chapin Carpenter – two of my favourite singer/songwriters, and also lyricists that I’ve learnt loads from.
So I’ve just been listening to ‘Come On Come On’ by MCC, which features the first song I ever heard by her, ‘He Thinks He’ll Keep Her’, which I bought on single when I was 18 or 19, and played to death. I think the album was one of the first CD albums I ever bought, and I’ve been collecting her stuff ever since. But I was struck by the lyrics, about bored housewives in loveless marriages finally having enough and leaving, and the husbands being all surprised at the end of the relationship. And it made me think, made me aware to some degree of how things are. As did so many other songs by her, and a whole host of other great female songwriters – Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, the Indigo Girls, Jonatha Brooke. Some times the lessons were political, like ‘War’ by Jonatha Brooke. Sometimes just about feeling alive, like Gallileo or Watershed by the Indigo Girls. But all of them vital lessons.
And then it got me thinking about what happens when that isn’t there. Where instead of strong, intelligent female figures, you’ve got faux-feisty soft-porn-alikes, telling us that a man ain’t no man if he ain’t buying me bling, or coming out with imbecilic horse shit like the Pussycat Dolls. ‘Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me?’ – no, you moronic, corporatised, tragic shell of a human being, I don’t wish my girlfriend was anything like you at all.
Lads are growing up with this as their lessons from women. was it much better in the 80s? Who were the equivalents of these totems of fuckwittage that parade across top of the pops? Mel And Kim, the Bangles, Janet Jackson before she apparently went on the game, Salt And Pepper, Kylie, Bananarama… a mixed bag, for sure, but not half as bad as the genetic detritus that passes for celebrity today. Who is there to save the day? KT Tunstall, at least. She’s fab.
So if you’ve got kids, get them into singer/songwriters. Buy them some Joni CDs, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, James Taylor and Paul Simon, Carly Simon, Bruce Cockburn, KT Tunstall, Suzanne Vega, Jonatha Brooke, Kelly Joe Phelps – story tellers not clothes horses, observers of the human condition not shills for the corporate dollar.
In a world where the bardic tradition is all but lost, we need surrogate poets and story-tellers, mythic historians and reflectors of who we are, who we want to be and who we can be if we get it together. And it’s not even about them being amazing people – John Martyn’s a disaster as a human being, but a great weaver of poetic magic. James Taylor was a violent smack-head when he wrote ‘Shower The People You Love With Love’. We just need story tellers to show us the way.
So, a comment thread – favourite songs for telling how it is, should be or could be? at least one from each of you, dear bloglings, thankyou. ;o)
Sorry for big absence from blog-world – two big things have been going on. Firstly, and most tragically, the ginger fairly aged feline has been very unwell. You know about the cancer, which at the moment isn’t showing up the way it was, but he’s now got very serious kidney failure, (creatin level of over 800, which is off the chart), and there’s pretty much nothing they can do. We’ve been trying to get his blood levels settled, but he’s not enjoying the renal food and isn’t really improving anyway, so we’re now pretty much resigned to giving him whatever he wants to eat so he can enjoy his last week or two on earth. It’s a horrible horrible moment to reach – it feels like condemning someone to death, even though there’s no way he’s going to suddenly get better. The will is there to keep fighting for him, but he’s got nothing left to fight with. It’s a dark time in Stevie-Towers.
The second hugely time consuming thing of late is moving my website over to a new server. Copying the stuff over was no problem at all – the Captain took care of that in his usual uber-geek cleverness way – but once there, it became clear that OSCommerce wasn’t going to run on a server running the latest versions of PHP and MySQL (like I know what I’m talking about). So, ’twas time to find a new shopping cart – this time I’ve gone with Zen Cart – it looks quite similar to OSC, but I’m assured by geeks who know that it’s more secure, and much tidier code-wise. I’m almost there, almost completely up to date with the shop – it’ll hopefully go live over the weekend, with advanced order on ‘Behind Every Word’ available, which will include the free download album ‘Lessons Learned From The Fairly Aged Felines (Lessons Learned Pt III)’ – I just need to finish mixing that, zip it up into a zip file with some artwork, and maybe a couple of tracks from ‘Behind Every Word’, and it’ll all be on sale then. I’ll then over the next week or so get Lessons Learned Pt I, Conversations, Open Spaces and It’s Not Gonna Happen up for sale, and hopefully replenish the Street Team Stash with all manner of goodies. Busy time for a bassist cum web designer. :o)
Also, just in, I’ve been booked for an open-air gig in Portsmouth (at least, I’m assuming it’s open air, as it’s for a boat race of some kind, and they generally don’t happen in doors) – I’ll posted the deets as soon as I can.
For the last few days, the car has been overheating randomly. On Friday, lots of freaky brown sludge came out of the water reservoir when I took the cap off. My first hunch – not knowing much more about cars than a four year old with some toy ones – was that some had at some point used Rad-Weld or something like that on it, and it had just bubbled up to the top. A call the the lovely G disproved that – he’d owned the car from new, so he should know (though he’s not a vicar anymore, so might be practicing telling really big lies now that he’s allowed to).
Anyway, this morning I took it to those trusty peoples at T&H Motors in Barnet (great mechanics and nice blokes), and they told me that the head gasket is leaking oil into the coolant. Apparently it’s a regular problem with Rovers (I remember my brother mentioning something similar when I first got the car). So, the upshot is that we’re without a car for a week, then without several hundred pounds to fix the car. 🙁
With means I’m going to have to rent a car for the RC gig on Thursday…
About two minutes after posting that last blog, I checked today’s mail and found the Master CDR of the album, back from Denis – I’m not sure exactly what kind of alchemical scariness goes on at the mastering stage, but it’s remarkable the ‘sheen’ that it gives to a recording. It’s often a layer of polish that you can’t even predict being there hearing the original, but when you A/B the two, the change is amazing. It’s very similar to seeing before and after photos that Steve Brown has been tweaking – he takes great pictures anyway, then drops them into photoshop and, even on the ones where he’s not changing the background, does these magical tweaks that make everything look shiny and lovely and perfect.
So for the next 70 minutes I’ll be sat here listening through the CD, making sure it all does what I want it to do, and finishing off the artwork so that it can all be sent to those lovelies at ICC to be turned into proper CDs. How exciting!!
Oh, for those of you that care, the cheque finally arrived for the tour with Theo in February… Yay, money! Theo and I can feed our huge families now…
From Wadders’ blog –
According to research carried out on behalf of the BBC recently:
40% of the population are not online
27% of households have terrestrial TV only
27% of the population aren’t aware of Digital Radio
15% of the population aren’t aware of Freeview
Only 2% of UK internet users publish a blog
30% of UK internet users haven’t even heard of blogs.
So, go tell a friend about blogging! Feel free to use this as an example. haha!