Tag: Blog

Posted on

Campaign for an investigation into the Iraq War

as a rule, I find online petitions a problematic area – are they ever recognised by anyone? Are petitions in general trustworthy enough for them to carry any clout?

In this instance, the issues at stake are too great for any faffing over such triflings – the Stop The War Coalition, in a campaign fronted by the wonderful Tony Benn, are calling for an investigation into breaches of The Nuremberg Charter and Geneva and Hague Conventions during the Iraq War and occupation.

read about it over on Jyoti’s lovely blog of cleverness.

The legal smokescreen assembled around the Iraq affair is despicable – I understand the argument that when troops are committed we need to rally behind them. Yes, I understand, I just think it doesn’t hold any water when there’s a distinct possibility/probability/certainty that those very same troops are being shot and blown up on a false pretext, or conversely those troops are implicated in the convention breaches. The endless stream of news stories and first hand accounts of the fucked-up-ness of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, civilians and those labeled as ‘enemy combatants’ (you’ve got to love the ability of the US government to invent euphemisms to undermine the critique of their behaviour) is damning in the extreme, but thus far none of the legal challenges have come to fruition. there’s a cross party campaign by MPs to have Blair tried for his part in instigating the illegal attack, which so far hasn’t come to anything. Hopefully this application to the UN for a proper investigation will get taken seriously.

Posted on

Kid's typing course

just found this via a friend’s blog – A free touch typing course on the BBC website – it’s designed for kids, so the graphics and stuff are as you’d expect for kids, but if you are really to tight to fork out for mavis beacon’s typing course, then it’s a great place to start, or to refresh your skills if you’ve got lazy. Just typing this and thinking about which fingers I’m using, there are a few touch typing rules that I’m breaking, so I think I’ll go back and do the course too…

Posted on

Antiwar march on Saturday

Saturday’s anti-war march was a fab event – met up with Jyoti, which was a delight, always nice to put a face to a blog. The march itself seemed rather upbeat, pretty huge (biggest one I’ve been on since the BIG ONE three years ago – organisers estimated 100,000, the police laughably suggested 10-15,000. Using the patented ma lawson method of doubling the police figure, halving the organisers and splitting the difference brings it to 40,000, but I’d say that was on the low side.)

The issues were a bit simpler than for the last few – people get very tetchy about protesting about military situations where there are British soldiers committed, as though it’s somehow treason to complain once they are there. Not much thought given to how little they want to be there, and the legality of them being there in the first place… This one was easier because of the dual themes – troops out of Iraq, and don’t attack Iran. The threat of a military strike on Iran is just nuts. Sure, the Iranian president is a crack-pot, but if anything is likely to bring together the myriad disparate factions in Iranian politics, it’s an attack by the US/UK Team America-stylee crack commando team. A damn fool thing to do, for sure.

So, I got to protest the lunacy of our jumped up nobhead of a prime minister, and hang out with lovely peoples all day.

And now I’m breaking my own rule and am using TSP’s laptop to access the net, as my desktop has bizarrely decided not to connect to the web. It’ll access email, chat, ftp, just nothing with an http in front of it. There are no proxies set up, and I can’t find any changes to the firewall settings (and switching it off doesn’t seem to change anything either) – any suggestions, lovely blogling geeks?

Here’s me on the march, from Jyoti’s photos –

Posted on

Theatrical debut

Had a v. fun gig last night.

If you remember back as far as last year’s Edinburgh Festival, you may remember that on before me in the venue I was in was a fab theatre company called Subverse – a lovely collection of leftie eco-monkey anti-war political actors and playwrights doing a collection of short sketches that were alternately moving, hilarious and downright confusing.

Three of the pieces they performed – the three that most strongly resonated with me at the time – were three monologues in verse by a writer called Adrian Page, and it was these that I was called in to soundtrack last night.

The gig was at Theatre 503, at the Latchmere pub in Battersea, and our bit was the second half of the show. I missed the first half due to a lovely trip to eastborne for my nan’s 87th birthday party.

The three pieces each had a very distinct flavour – the first, ‘Peace Police’ we did as a beatnik/tom waits kind of vibe, with the genius that is Andy Williamson on sax, the second was ‘There Is No Left Left’ – dark despondent piece that I took in a twisted abstract direction, manipulating and processing Lara’s voice to further the sense of dislocation. And the last of the three, ‘the Clever People’, was a bubbling drum ‘n’ bass track, which the performer, Penny, hadn’t rehearsed but performed to a T – I started up building a basic track of percussive stuff, bassline and chords, then played over it and used the pause, restart, double speed/half speed and reverse functions to try and follow the contour of the text.

All in all a huge success – I interspersed the monologues with solo tunes, and finished up with a version of my Erich Roche-tribute tune, which I again got Andy Williamson to come and play on, which he did beautifully.

I’ll hopefully be back there before long, and will get the SubVersives along to do the three monologues at Recycle Collective soon as well…

Posted on

Call off the new year's honour…

OK, the Bus thing on Jez’ blog was a hoax. The evil Jez was clearly just bored and felt like winding people up. It was beautifully written, and given Jez’ very bizarre life thus far, easily believable – if you get the chance, ask him about his part in Mandela’s release… that one isn’t a hoax!

Posted on

Speed III – the one where the cuddly ginger bloke saves the day…

The everso lovely Jez has gone to study music and theology in Vancouver. So far, so Jez.

He’s got a fab blog too, and today’s post is perhaps the most mental thing I’ve ever read on a blog go there and read about it – if you know Jez it’s all the funnier, the thought of the lovely posh bloke saving all the Canadians, and then getting all blustery when they effusively thank him ‘oh it was nothing, really, no please, it’s what anyone would have done…’ etc.

As founder of the Jez fanclub I’m delighted he’s got a blog. Now the daft bastard just needs to do a solo album, and we’ll be back on track.

Posted on

OneDotZero at the V&A

Last night was a special video installation night at the V & A Museum, curated by OneDotZero Those in the know tell me that they are the bigwigs in the world of video stuffs, though I’d not heard of them before I read about the event on Jonny’s blog.

Anyway, I went along to check it out, and there were some mildly diverting and fun things going on, but it was all a little hollow, if y’all ask me. There were screens set up all over the museum, in different galleries, and people were wandering from one to the next, chatting and watching a few seconds of each one before moving on. Nothing demanded your attention, or if it did, the physical situation didn’t allow you to engage with it for long. Each piece would have made for a nice installation on its own, or as a feature in an event happening in one place, but the overall effect was of peering through the shop window at Dixons at a dozen TVs showing cool screen-savers.

A few of the installations took a stab at interactivity, but even they ended up being very expensive hi-tech versions of either a lava lamp or an oil-wheel lamp. Perhaps I’m just not post-modern enough. ;o)

Anyway, it was enjoyable wandering around with Jonny and Joel, and meeting up with lots of other lovely friends, from Grace and Moot, and going for a drink afterwards. Much fun with good peoples.

Posted on

Blog categories…

I’m just in the process of introducing categories on the blog (you can’t see them yet, as I haven’t found or added the code to have them listed on my pages, but will do as soon as Sarda gets online and helps me out).

Now, the quandary is, do I got for big general categories (music, life, politics, cats etc) or do I go for v. specific ones (gigs, tech-talk, food, cat health, cat photos, uk politics, world politics, spirituality etc)? Not sure which way to go… I guess I should start with general ones, and then add categories as they become necessary.

Soundtrack – D’Angelo, ‘Voodoo’.

Posted on

Small but perfectly formed.

Cambridge gig with Theo last night, at CB2. It’s a lovely venue – very rustic in that it’s just the cellar of the restaurant with a load of chairs and some lights in it, but it’s free, quiet and the food upstairs is marvellous (recommended for dinner even when there’s no gig on!).

I had a feeling before the gig that it was going to be really full – not sure why, but in any event it turned out to be bollocks. It was a pretty small crowd, but a lovely group of people – like a handpicked audience of really nice listening lovelies.

Because Theo and I recording the gigs on this tour for a possible live album, we panicked a bit when we realised we’d left the minidisk at home. No problem though, as a quick call to Dweez meant that the able and equipped Tony arrived with tiny laptop (like the Rev. G’s Psion, only a proper computer), soundcard and cables to record it straight off the desk.

The gig itself went really well – doing the improv stuff with Theo is up there with playing with Michael Manring in the ‘best fun two people can have on stage’ stakes. The range of sounds and ideas that he conjures up is remarkable. And the recording seems to have come out beautifully, on first listen. Will transfer it to computer, boost the level and see how clean it is later on, but it sounds like it could form a major chunk of the live CD!

And today, Cleveland is coming round to make lovely noises and play Looperlative games.

And finally, congrats to the Rev. G on his new job in computer-geek world rather than bible-geek world – much deserved, but certainly the church’s loss.

Posted on

Juliet Turner and Pierce Pettis, Bush Hall, 17/2/06

As y’all know, I do make a habit of going to gigs by people I know. Well, I know lots of lovely talented marvellous people, and I like to support live music as much as I can anyway, so being able to combine supporting live music, and seeing lovely friends makes for a doubly marvellous night out.

Thus it was last night. ‘Twas also rather nice to do something special with the lovely Gareth and Jane, and we all toddled off to Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush, a rather lovely venue that was clearly at one point a ball-room, and and is now a rather lovely gig venue for about a 2-300 peoples.

Pierce Pettis was already on when we got there, and sounding marvellous. I hadn’t seen Pierce since the Cheat and I went to stay with him in Alabama, Oct 2004, so it was lovely to see him again, and hear him. The couple of new songs he played were gorgeous – a Narnia one and one where he was joined by Juliet and Brian on BVs called ‘Vera Cruz’ – gorgeous stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bad song by Pierce, even on the three CDRs of unreleased stuff that he gave the Cheat and I when we visited (BTW, I think it’s my turn with the CDs, The Cheat!)

The half time break was almost as much fun as the gig – catching up with many friends that I hadn’t seen for ages. It’s nice with gigs like this, that I can pretty much guarantee that I’m going to know about 20% of the audience.

Then Juliet Turner – most years, I see Juliet play more than just about any other artist that I’m not actually touring with. 4 or 5 times, I guess. And never ever get bored of her songs. She’s a fantastic songwriter, with a unique turn of phrase and way with rhythm. In Ireland she’s a big star, having gone platinum and won reader’s polls in Hot Press (the Irish answer to Q, NME and Mojo all rolled into one) – and she’ll get there over here too, for sure. Cos she’s fab. Apparently she’s got all self-concious about the amount she talks on stage, which is a shame, because her between-song banter was pretty stripped back tonight, and she’s a great story teller. As is Pierce, who was equally subdued. It might just have been one of those venues. I’ve played in those before now, they just don’t lend themselves to getting the kind of feedback from the audience that you need to sustain rambling stories.

Anyway, both Juliet and Pierce, and Juliet’s guitarist Brian Grace, were on top form, a fab night was had by all, and I’m already looking forward to seeing them all again!

As a side note, we got into a discussion last night about the lack of availability of Pierce’s early albums – the ‘big hair’ years. When Pierce was on Windham Hill, he had a hair cut that I also flirted with in the late 80s, the ‘mushroom cloud’, where all your photos look like holiday snaps taken on Bikini Atoll during the h-bomb tests. here’s the best one I could find of Pierce online –

anyone got any others? :o)

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top