the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
TSP’s first blog post –
“Have just read your long, detailed and exciting
account of your weekend. So I felt inspired to do mine
as well:
Saturday 4th June
Stayed in. Worked.
Sunday 5th June
Stayed in again. Worked.”
…methinks I’m neglecting my tiny loved-one. Must make sure we both get more time to do fun stuff…
Soundtrack – The Smiths, ‘The Queen Is Dead’; Ethel, ‘Ethel’.
Just been reading a blog entry by the lovely gareth, in which he refers to ‘winning’ an ebay auction. Ebay themselves use the term on the page after the auction – ‘you’ve won!’ it proudly displays.
So, would someone tell me in what sense being willing to pay more than anyone else for a certain item is winning? Surely it’s just shopping? Does anyone do a victory lap round Sainsbury’s after laying out £100 on a week’s groceries? ‘yay, I won some fantastic organic food!!!’
Ebay is chance-inflected-shopping in the same way that the stock market is Ladbrooks for people in suits. ‘Investing’ in the stock market is just like having a flutter on the horses, only you have to buy the FT to follow the form instead of the Racing Post. Either way you’re throwing money at anything based on its ability to make you more money, not out of any kind of support for the enterprise involved, or any sort of sporting allegiance to the jockey or horse…
I was listening to a radio phone in on stock trading on BBC London yesterday, and at no point did anyone raise any kind of moral or ethical questions about the idea of investing in financial success without any concern for what the company actually does. When Chris Martin declared that ‘share holders are the great evil’ last week in the debate about how The new Coldplay album’s delay had dented the EMI share price, it was the first time I’d heard any kind of critique of the system on the news for years. Anyone questioning the rationale of the free market ideologues (FMIs) is painted as a mad commie (rather a commie than a FMI any day), and their critique dismissed as anti-progress or out of step with the times. Does anyone really think that a situation where any PLC is required by law to maximise the investment of it’s shareholders is a good thing?? This means that if a company wants to switch to using all recycled stationary in their offices, which would cost a bit more, they’d have to ballot their share-holders to be able to make the switch, and could be blocked, rather than being able to make ethical decisions in the work place. If they offer out to tender the production of a particular product and a ‘legal’ factory in the far east offers to make the stuff for less with worse workers rights and no unionisation, they are legally bound to go with the lower offer, again unless they ballot the shareholders.
So what can we do? I know various people who have with varying degrees of effectiveness bought stock in order to have a voice at AGMs. Turned up, highlighted particular human rights or environmental abuses and been able to change company policy (Tony Campolo, professor of Sociology at a Uni in Philadelphia, has written about this, but I’m not sure which book it was in…) That’s one way.
Or we can just support co-operatives, small businesses, family run shops, cottage industries, solo bassists… how did that last one creep in there????
If you haven’t done so yet, PLEASE read No Logo by Naomi Klein – a fantastic look at how all this stuff relates to branding in big companies. Beautifully written and very compelling.
How did I end up here, after starting a post to take the piss out of Gareth and his ‘winning’ on Ebay??
One of the forums I visit most regularly online is The Dude Pit – a bass-related forum, hosted by Steve ‘Dude’ Barr. It’s a fun place, with some amazingly knowledgeable bass peoples, some really good friends, and a fair few scary mad people as well. But good scary mad people, I’m sure.
Anyway, the forum is hosted by ezboard – a pay-to-use service that hosts thousands and thousands of boards. They appear to have been hacked on Monday and have lost loads of data, and lots of the money that people had paid in to keep their boards running. All stuff that really ought to be easy enough to restore from their backups, if they had any, which it appears, they don’t.
So, I’m reminded once again to back up everything regularly. All the content on my main website is generated by my PC, so the original copies are all still here. But I do need to remember to make backups of the blog and the forum once in a while…
Soundtrack – Bill Frisell, ‘The Willies’.
A converasation with The Cheat at the weekend (well, the part of the conversation that wasn’t about the temperature of his flat) reminded me that I hadn’t blogged about Mobius. It’s a software looping application (Windows-only, sadly), that basically emulates 8 Echoplexes at once, is mappable to a MIDI footcontroller (or any other kind of midi controller), and basically rules. And it’s free.
Go and get it now before they realise how great it is and start charging for it.
Thanks to MKS over on the forum for alerting me to its existence (though all I really needed to do was read the discussion about it that had been happening on Loopers Delight).
Soundtrack – Michael McDonald, ‘Blink OF An Eye’ (is Michael McDonald a guilty pleasure? There’s something remarkable about his voice, and the music appeals to the slick Steely Dan/80s-grown-up-pop part of my music taste.I’ve always wondered what he’d sound like without the Karl Marx beard – he sounds like he’s trying to sing through a cat, so maybe he’d develope a really clear voice without it. Keep the beard, Mike)
Two trips to our local recycling centre today, to drop off loads of flattened cardboard boxes, an old vacuum cleaner, about 6 bags of old clothes, some scrap metal and all sorts of other stuff for recycling. But they don’t do anything with polystyrene. There’s doesn’t appear to be anywhere in the area that does. So what the hell are we meant to do with it? There’s shitloads of it round here – just about all electrical products come packed in it, and there are a fair few of those here. It’s grim to think that we’re expected to just put it in with the rubbish that gets landfilled… I’d rather find some way of doing something else with it. If it was even fireproof we could use it as loft insulation.
Anyway, after the trip to the tip, TSP and I called in to see Steve and Lorna for bank holiday lunch and chats. Very nice it was too. Could’ve chatted all evening, if we didn’t have even more crap to sort out for me to take to the recycling centre tomorrow morning.
Reading Vicar Dave’s blog a few days ago, I read about the BushFish –
Yes, that’s right, the Icthus fish, a symbol that derived its name from the Greek word for “fish,” Icthus, which was also an acronym used by early Christians meaning “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, the Savior”, now has the word ‘Bush’ emblazoned across it. So, to believe in Jesus is to believe in Bush is to believe in Jesus and so on. Bollocks. This kind of misappropriation of religious symbolism for political gain is really really twisted, ESPECIALLY given the profoundly un-christian actions of the present US administration, who seem to think that it’s enough to claim to be ‘born again’ and talk weird christianese once in a while, and then people will overlook you crapping on the poor, handing more wealth and power to the already wealthy and powerful, and then head overseas and bomb foreigners in your own little jihad.
Somethings make me profoundly uncomfortable with the label ‘christian’ – I’ve been trying to come up with an alternative for years. Messianic Taoist is as close as I’ve got so far, but there’s still a brand of christianity that I’m more than happy to align myself with. It’s just the wholesale takeover of christian terminology and imagery by the insane right wing in the US that I want to run screaming from. Often when in the states, I feel a greater affinity with the honest and open spiritual search of pagans, hippies, new agers, buddhists, and just about anyone but those who claim to believe the same thing as me.
There’s a particularly antagonistic part of me that wants to see someone stick a Darwin Fish on any car with a Bush Fish –
…there’s a fascinating range of different kinds of fish badge at darwinfish.com – amazing!
Grrrr
Soundtrack – Seven and Seven Is, ‘Fun With Sound’; Michael Roe, ‘Say Your Prayers’; Jeff Buckley, ‘Grace’.
It’s gig time – playing a solo gig tonight at Darbucka (which you REALLY ought to know about already – if not, please sign up for the mailing list). It’s going to be a lots of fun – for starters, I’ll get to play for longer than I have been of late – I’ve done a fair few 30-45 minute sets of late, and tonight I’ll get to play at least an hour or so of solo material plus some improv duets with BJ Cole and Cleveland Watkiss.
I’m really looking forward to it, and am just running over some of the new tunes I’m thinking of playing tonight, trying to work out how they go, what order the various weird noises appear in, and to a lesser degree, what the tunes are – at this stage in the compositional process, the melody is pretty open to interpretation, and I’ll improvise a lot of it to see if I can get something better than the bits I’ve got already.
All being well, there should be four new tunes tonight, which only a handful of people have heard (the small person, obviously, the cheat and sue, who finally gets her first mention on a blog – yay for sue!)
Other than that, I need to fill up a box with CDs for sale, decide on what to wear, write out the guestlist, decide whether or not I’m taking any extra lighting with me (Darbucka is pretty dark on stage), then I’ve got two hours teaching to do, then pack up my stuff, load the car (not fun given that I’ve got a trapped nerve or something in my back from sleeping funny a couple of nights ago).
So that’s me today, and tomorrow it all happens again for the gig in Petersfield. What fun.
See you later.
Soundtrack – right now, recordings of the new things for tonight. Before that, Lewis Taylor, ‘Lewis Taylor’; Sophia, ‘People Are Like Seasons’; Kaki King, ‘Legs To Make Us Longer’; Todd Johnson/Kristin Korb, ‘Get Happy’ (I rolled the wheel of my office chair over my copy of this last week, and immediately ordered a new one, which arrived a couple of days ago)
here’s the latest crop of weird things people have been looking for when stumbling into this ‘ere blog –
armstrong
steve on jerry springer show
danny baker resignation
do nothing til you hear from me
dude etymology
feline concussion
ism jbk download
janek gwizdala
racist hall of shame
strongbad good
%22whale rider%22
albano italian singer photos
andy gangadeen drum rack
avashai cohen and the international vamp band
bbc news lion midget
belouis some imagination lyrics download
bill frisell wild thang
brian houston petersfield
britian’s piano man
can’t get motivated
Blimey there are some weird surfers out there in net-world!
Ah, blog’s back online – was blogless for a long time, thanks to a crash on Sarda’s new server, but it’s all back now. Phew!
Right, onto blog-things –
Went to a gig last night – M83 (be warned, the website plays loud unwanted music at you) were the headline attraction, who I’d heard of via The Cheat’s scrobbler list, and actually heard thanks to the lovely Lizzy at their record label, who sent me CDs to hear. Their sound is kind of big ambient meets punked-up rock beats. Quite an overwhelming sound, on the new album especially, relentless huge synths and wall of noise guitars, but in an anthemic soundscape kind of way. Most enjoyable, if a little oppressive. The live experience was pretty much what you’d expect – the same thing only louder and noisier. They played lots of stuff from both albums (I prefer the first one – ‘Dead Cities, Read Seas and Lost Ghosts’).
The support act was Pure Reason Revolution – whose bassist Chloe is an occasional student of mine, and who I have a few mutual friends with, so it was great to get to see them play at last. Their sound is VERY mid-70s psychedelic prog-rock – think Hawkwind, early Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, with a touch of Rhiannon-era Fleetwood Mac. They even look like the product of a fight between The Bay City Rollers and Flock Of Seagulls – rarely have more mullets been seen on stage since the mid-80s. Still, their set was great, and if they’d been around when I was 16, they’d have been my favourite band in the world ever. I’ll hopefully catch a headline set of theirs soon.
So inevitably, after a gig like that last night, I’ve been recording big proggy soundscapes today – I’ve done two, following a similar theme on each, we’ll see whether either ends up being releaseable… Might have to do a download-only soundscapes album soon.
Soundtrack – M83, ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts’; Kings X, ‘Live All Over The Place.
Found this linked from Barky’s Blog – it’s Bright Eyes on Jay Leno singing ‘When The President Talks To God’ – dunno about you, but it sent shivers down my spine. A fabulous, angry, old school protest song, railing against the ills of the world, and somehow he got to do it on Leno.
I know very little about Bright Eyes, but will check him out a little more after this!
Soundtrack – Tommy Sims, ‘Peace And Love’; Seth Horan, ‘Conduit’ and ‘Notwithstanding’; Jeff Kaiser/Andrew Pask, ‘The Choir Boys’.