Tag: Blog

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A tale of two hurricanes

jyoti just blogged about an article referencing the category 5 hurricane (Ivan) that hit Cuba last year, destroying 20,000 homes but killing no-one.

I don’t know anywhere near enough about the situation surrounding hurricane Ivan to comment on it too far, but it makes for pretty amazing reading in the light of the carnage in the US.

The reports from the Southern States keep pouring in – blogs, news, video feeds – painting a picture of almost unimaginable levels of degredation and disaster in what is supposedly the most advanced nation on earth. The heartbreak of it is overwhelming, and almost as overwhelming is the disbelief at how the events of the last week have unfolded; the government response (or lack of), the looting, the way the looting was reported along such seemingly stark racial lines, the tragic delay in security and rescue services arriving. It beggars belief, and the end result whatever the excuses is that thousands of people have been killed, many of them needlessly.

The future for New Orleans as a city looks impossibly bleak – even after the water drains away, it’s going to be many months, maybe years before the rebuilding process can being in earnest.

On a more positive note, my friend Stew has been found, thank God. I don’t know the full story yet, but he’s safe, alive and no doubt has one hell of a story to tell.

Soundtrack – The The, ’45 RPM – the best of’; juliet Turner, ‘Season Of The Hurricane’.

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Boris Pontificates on Booze

Boris Johnson holds a rather unique place in my heart, largely just by being a Tory MP that doesn’t make me physically sick. He seems like a sweet soul, though I’m certain that he’s way more together than his bungling public persona would suggest – he’s an MP and a magazine editor and I doubt he could function too well as either if he were as scatter brained as he makes out… well, at least not as a magazine editor (it seems like there are several MPs with quite severe learning difficulties, if their policy decisions are anything to go by).

Anyway, Boris has a blog – sadly, it’s not updated as often as it would need to be to be truly interesting and marvellous, but there is this great article about the changes in licencing laws – he has a lovely turn of phrase.

Soundtrack – Finley Quaye, ‘Maverick A Strike’.

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Those groovy Scandinavians do it again…

In an idea nicked from a library in Sweden, Almelo library in Holland has set up a ‘living library’ – yes, you can actually book time with “gay men and women, “non-criminal” drug addicts, disabled people, asylum seekers or Gypsies.”

The idea is to allow conversations with people that are often misunderstood, victimised or marginalised, to spead understanding and tolerance.

What a fantastic idea! I love it. However, the best bits are a couple of the quotes in the article –

“We want to help people learn about all sorts of minority groups,” Mr Krol said. “We even have a politician people can borrow.”

The most popular request the library is currently receiving receives at the moment is for a gay Turkish man, but Mr Krol emphatically denies running a covert dating agency.

But read the whole article is great. The Dutch and the Scandinavians are often branded with the stereotype that they are PC to the point of lunacy, but I think this scheme really is marvellous. I’d love to go and book conversational time with interesting people I don’t understand at my local library. Maybe Mosques in London could just set it up as a way of letting the rest of Londoners understand a little more about muslims. I’m sure it’d be popular (though sadly I’m also sure that security would have to be fairly tight, as it’s the kind of scheme that parts of London’s scumbag populus would like to disrupt).

Anyway, for now I’ll keep hiring myself out for interesting conversations about bass guitar, with demonstrations thrown in, for just £25 an hour, or £40 for a two hour sesh!

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take these broken things…

as Mr Mister would have sung if they’d been round my house now. Washing machine, broked. Car, broked. Just waiting to see what’s next.

Washing machine is going to cost £65 plus parts and labour for lil’ man to come and fix it (despite it only being 18 months old, and therefor it ought not to break with normal use…)

Car is properly knackered. Lots of things wrong with it, the latest is that the coolant system is leaking into the blowers for the heating fans inside the car. End result, engine overheats, and fans blow hot water over the passengers when the heater is switched on. Not good.

The car’s far too old and crap to be worth fixing, sadly, so it’ll be off to the scrappies soon, and we’ll start trying to find a replacement.

Anyone in blog-world selling a car? :o)

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more exclusive sales deals with non-CD shops

So, following on from Garth Brooks discraceful hook-up with WalMart, we’ve now got Bob Dylan following hot on Alanis and Elvis Costello’s heels by having a CD exclusively available in Starbucks.

OK, let’s get one thing clear, Dylan hasn’t been the counter-cultural icon he’s perceived as since about 1965. His view of the world is actually rather conservative (his comment at the original Live Aid that ‘it’d be nice to see some of this money going to American Farmers’ was pretty much par for the course), and he certainly hasn’t set out to lead any kind of counter-cultural revolution.

However, any musician who signs a deal with a shop that has NO interest whatsoever in nurturing new talent, in providing knowledgeable staff, broad selection, and a place for lesser known artists to be stocked alongside the biggies, is selling out their own roots in the industry.

Everybody needs a break. Starbucks, Walmart, Tescos, Sainsburys and any other shitty shop that only stocks a limited selection of music (top 40 at most, plus a bunch of low-priced compilations of 70s hits) are not going to do that, and those of us that care about the future of music, about seeing new talent emmerge, about seeing the back of low-rent karaoke bollocks getting into the charts should refuse to buy any CDs in any of those places.

It’s not often that I’ll speak up for chainstores, but you’re much better off shopping at HMV or Tower than you are at Starbucks or a supermarket. Better still, little indie shops, specialist shops, or online from the artist’s website, or CD Baby. Tower online even stock all the CD Baby catalogue!

So, boycott the new Dylan, Costello and Morrisette records, and lets see an end to Starbucks as CD-shop.

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For those of you who just can't get enough of background hiss…

The lovely and wonderful Rev. G of the parish of St Tourettes, Edinburgh blogged about the PlusDeck – a cassette adaptor for your PC.

Now, apart from the general uselessness of creating high res MP3s that sound like dial-up optimised real audio files from the mid 90s, the page is particularly hilarious given that right at the top, where they are selling the unit’s most remarkable features, it says,

“PlusDeck 2 offers you high quality sound using cutting-edge audio technology and a Full Logic Mechanism Deck. The deck plays and records with Auto Reverse. You can easily play or record on sides A and B of the tape without ejecting it.

Now, I don’t know about you, but ‘auto reverse’ on a cassette deck is a bit of a late 80s innovation – hardly the stuff of computer-geekery. Surely that’s a given? In these days of iPods that will play 30,000 songs on continuous random play, having a 90 minute cassette, that sounds like it was recorded under a duvet, turn over in the middle is hardly world beating?!?

If you pay a bit extra you might even get the one with the buttons that make it go faster in both directions so you can find the songs you want just that little bit quicker than listening to the whole thing.

(having said all that, it would be a cool gadget to have, given that I have got a few things on tape that I’ll never be able to replace on CD… shhh, don’t tell Gareth)

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Back to political blogging….

So, with all that Edinburgh festival stuff, I seriously curtailed my newsfeed reading, and thus blogged v. little about stuff that’s going on in the world. So to get us back in the swing of things, dear bloglings, here’s one that made me rethink my position on one of the upcoming pressing decisions of British politics – the next Conservative party leader.

George Monbiot points out in this article that most lefties would be hoping that, if the worst were to happen and we were to end up with a Tory leader at the next election, at least it could be someone who seems a bit more moderate, like Ken Clarke.

But he points out that as deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, Ken has presided over all kinds of hideously inethical decisions, pressing for tobacco importing and advertising regulations to be softened in order to make the shareholders of BAT richer, and the people of some of the world’s poorer countries more likely to get addicted to ciggies. All this while he’s in charge of their frankly risible ‘corporate social responsibility group'(here’s a tip, BAT, how about not making cigarettes at all, if you care about social responsibility? oh sorry, you don’t, it’s a whitewash. Well done.)

The tobacco industry is one of the great evils on the planet. The crop itself destroys the ground it grows on, the workers end up with all kinds of illnesses thanks to the pesticides that are put on it, and the end product, according to the World Heath Organisation, is responsible for the deaths of half the people who smoke – currently, that’s 650,000,000 people.

Here’s a quote from the WHO website –

“Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the world today. With 4.9 million tobacco-related deaths per year, no other consumer product is as dangerous, or kills as many people, as tobacco.”

In contrast, have a look at the Social Report page on the BAT website – the most ridiculous load of psuedo-concerned horseshit I’ve read for quite a while. What a great industry to invest in!

Any of you green-lefties who smoke but want to make the world a better place, the single biggest step that you can make to start that process is to give up smoking, and start encouraging your friends to do the same. There’s no such thing as a fair trade cigarette, and as the ban is hopefully going to come into effect soon, it’ll become even more of a social blight to be the smoker in the group. So go on, give up now, tell everyone it’s for ethical reasons, store up some social capital and feel smug about yourself!

In the meanwhile, read the Monbiot article, and rethink your possible good feelings towards Ken Clarke. He’s sadly as much of a scumbag as the rest of his tory counterparts…

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not one but two Amy Kohn gigs in London

One of the best things about Edinburgh is meeting up with other performers. Sometimes it’s a fleeting yet encouraging chat outside a venue (I met Alan Carr outside the Assembly Rooms where he was performing, and had a lovely chat and swapped encouragement for the fest) and other times it’s people who become top chums and you stay in touch with.

Amy Kohn is a friend of JazzShark‘s, who was playing up at Edinburgh, and who stepped into the role of Echoplex footpedal on Fringe Sunday and jammed along on accordian, on Amo Amatis Amare. She was down in London this weekend playing a couple of gigs so we went along. First up she was at The 12 Bar – an acoustic venue in central London, playing at an accordion night (oh yes, it’s not just bassists who get together for a geek-out once in a while!). Obviously for this gig she was just playing accordion and singing, but was fab. She writes very quirky songs, with lots of really odd harmony in them, and it takes a while to get drawn into Amy-world, but when you catch up with her, it’s beguiling stuff.

Monday’s gig was at Ray’s Jazz in Foyles – just a half hour in-store. But they had a piano, so I went along to see what Amy was like with piano instead of accordion. Damn, she’s a fantastic piano player! Scary stuff indeed. The Accordion is a great live tool, in that it gives her freedom to move around, it’s pretty original for a left-field singer/songwriter and is just makes a nice change, but Amy’s piano playing is on a whole other level. There are nods towards Tori and Kate Bush, but that’s just a tiny part of what Amy does. She’s as much Charles Ives as she is Tori Amos, and her background in musical theatre definitely creeps in there too… I picked up copies of both her albums, and have listened to the brand new so-new-it’s-only-an-advance-copy one, which is marvellous. Really really original and lovely. Top stuff.

Today’s been a day of two halves – the first half was spent shopping in Enfield with my auntie Babs. Well, she’s actually my third cousin Babs, but has always been auntie Babs… (maternal grandmother’s cousin). Anyway, I think I’ve probably blogged about Babs before – she’s 80 (I think), but looks about 20 years younger, has a more active social life than most people half her age, a great sense of humour, and is much fun to go out for lunch with. Today she needed the batteries in her smoke alarms changing, so that was a fine excuse for us to go out for lunch before heroic me shimmying up a ladder to swap said batteries over.

And now I’m listening to and playing through the songs for Duncan’s greenbelt gig. Lucky me – what a charmed life. 🙂

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Goodbye Mo

Mo Mowlam died this morning.

I’m so upset by this – Mo was an amazing woman, one of the few New Labour politicians who never seemed to toe the party line at all. She will forever be remembered as the woman who told Ian Paisley to ‘fuck off’, something a lot of people have been wanting to say to him for a long time.

She spoke at stop the war rallies, she was openly critical of much of the Blairite agenda, and spoke up about the victimisation she faced in parliment – a situation I’m sure many more people have to deal with but never have the balls to go public on.

Her death is a huge loss to British public life, to the personality of British politics, and the surrounding press will be another reminder to Blair that he can’t shape public opinion. Just as Robin Cook will be remembered more for his ethical stance against the war than for his affair, so Mo will be remembered as a woman who didn’t take the shit that New Labour tried to throw at her.

The good ones always die first…

other links – Guardian Newsblog, the Indie, news.bbc

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Audience reviews from Edinburgh

A few more reports coming in from the Edinburgh show –

this one is on BassWorld.co.uk and includes some photos of the night with Guy Pratt, this one is from the Rev G’s blog – he came to four gigs, so was able to compare them a bit, and here are the reviews on edfringe.com. If you were there, please feel free to post reviews either at edfringe.com or preferably in the reviews section on my forum. It’d be lovely to hear what you thought of the show.

Today was spent shopping with Wes for a bass – I love taking people to The Gallery for the first time, as the magicalness of it strikes you the minute you walk through the door – great basses everywhere, amps piled to the ceiling and lovely helpful staff. We managed to pick up a real bargain – an OLP 5 string for £190.

And now I’m listening to the soon-to-be-released Bruce Cockburn album, ‘Speechless’ – it’s a collection of his instrumentals, and is as expected, perfect. Beautiful tunes beautifully played. What’s not to love?

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